This book is composed like a foldable mirror. The two central chapters are specular to each other, like the two that open and close the volume. While Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the internal architecture of the two opposing cosmogonic forces, Technic and Magic, Chapters 1 and 4 look at the marks that these two forces impress upon the world and on our existential experience within it.
During our discussion of life under Technic’s regime, in Chapter 1, we briefly mentioned Emanuele Severino’s idea that the shape imposed by Technic onto the world transcends specific political doctrines. According to Severino, systems as different as American-style Capitalism and Soviet Communism, are both operative under the same set of constraints (metaphysical and ethical) that constitute the shape of Technic’s cosmology. Indeed, what turns a cosmogonic ‘form’ into a ‘force’ is exactly its imposition of a ‘set of constraints’ onto a world’s possible ethics and metaphysics. A cosmogonic force acts as a frame, as a set of limits to what can possibly exist in the world, what can possibly be done, what good can possibly be pursued, etc. In this sense, each cosmogonic force – Technic, Magic and so on – acts as the ground zero of a certain form that power can take. Going with the definition of power suggested by Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi:
I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities. This selection can be described as gestalt (structuring form), and it acts as a paradigm. It may also be seen as a format, a model that we can implement only by complying with the code.1
Within the framework set by Technic’s power, several different political structures are possible – as long, that is, as they respect the fundamental metaphysical and ethical diktats that are implicit within Technic’s own form. Likewise, Magic’s reality-system allows for a proliferation of different political articulations in the world that it goes to create – as long as they remain within the set of possibilities contained in Magic’s own metaphysical and ethical paradigm. In either system, the impossible is precisely that which escapes the respective cosmological paradigm.
Thus, if we wish to look at the mark that Magic impresses over its world, we shouldn’t start by considering any particular social or political structure. Rather, as we did with Technic, we will be looking at the fundamental framework within which our existential experience can possibly unfold – and consequently, on whose basis further social, political, economic or cultural structures can possibly be developed. However, the similar unfolding of Technic’s and Magic’s cosmogony should not obfuscate the very different conditions under which such unfolding actually takes place. While Technic’s regime enjoys today a near-total hegemonic status on virtually any field of human thought and action, that of Magic is presently confined to a state of utter marginality. While the normative directions that are implicit within Technic’s cosmogonic form are enforced at all institutional levels on a global scale, those of Magic can’t be seen to possibly operate much beyond an individual’s own, private experience of the world. As we begin to look at Magic’s world and at its restructuring of our everyday experience within it, we should keep in mind the particularly narrow angle through which this world and this experience could actually take place today. In the following pages, we shall adopt the perspective of a (human) individual living in today’s world, and we shall look at some of the most crucial ways in which their existential experience would be affected by the adoption of Magic’s reality-system over that of Technic. In particular, we shall consider Magic in terms of its existential strategies of disentanglement from the current world of Technic.
This perspective, privileging the power of an individual to reshape their experience of reality over the power of a socially hegemonic reality-system, echoes a general trend in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age. The philosophies developed by the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Epicureans and the Stoic, and also by the Sceptic academy, concentrated primarily on changing the fundamental framework through which an individual gains an existential experience of reality.2 Only marginally, if at all, they went on to discuss particular aspects of political philosophy – suggesting instead a set of basic metaphysical and ethical axioms which, if adopted, would implicitly set the limits for political and social structures. Hence, for example, it was on the basis of their metaphysics, that the Stoics advocated a cosmopolitan stance in politics – regardless of the particular shape in which such cosmopolitan order would take place. Equally, it was on the basis of their metaphysics that the Epicureans challenged the institution of slavery, the Cyrenaics called for gender equality, the Cynics made a mockery of nationalism and so on.
Yet, the primacy assigned by Hellenistic schools to the task of reshaping the fundamental categories of thought and experience, rather than to merely reforming social institutions, doesn’t contradict their impact on the sociopolitical system of the time. On the contrary, their philosophical tenets quickly gained a supreme cultural status among the Greek-Roman elite and, following their adoption by the then-emerging Christianity, they went on to produce a tremendous transformation in the social discourse of the late-ancient world. Although the task of reshaping the framework of reality – through which a particular world emerges to our experience – might appear at first to be far removed from active social engagement, its long-lasting consequences are more dramatic than any superficial revolution at the level of the immediate political system.
What is more, such restructuring of reality aims to be immediately useful to the living individual, bordering on that form of ‘self-help’ that enjoyed much respect throughout the Hellenistic age.3 In a similar fashion, our present project wishes to reclaim the usefulness of philosophical speculation also in terms of an individual’s ‘self-help’, that is, of what an individual can do, within yet beyond the limitations imposed by their historical context. In other words, we wish to imagine a form of philosophy that works also for those who are hopelessly defeated by history, and who can hope for no revolutionary ‘sun of tomorrow’ to lighten their burden during their lifetime. This is not to downplay the importance of historical variables, such as the political/social/economic/and cultural situation of a specific place and time in which individuals find themselves to live. It is precisely on the basis of acknowledging the dramatic impact that such variables have on an individual’s life, that we wish to reclaim a space beyond them, where a person can find sufficient room and refuge to cultivate their own, autonomous re-setting of reality – in a manner that is also compatible with an active engagement in broader emancipatory projects on a social level. Indeed, if we wish to reignite the process of social imagination, and thus the very possibility of systemic political change in the direction of greater emancipation, we must be able to think of a space that allows such reignition, beyond the smothering waves of the current reality-system.
In the following pages, we shall concentrate on this particular space, and on the way it can function as a breeding ground to restructure reality along the lines of Magic’s cosmogony. This is a space that at once escapes the grid of the contemporary map of reality, while remaining subjected to the limitations imposed by it. An ‘outside within’, that doesn’t merely break the totalizing shape of Technic’s world, but that exceeds it by vanishing. As it is well known, this problematic position has also been widely discussed in political terms by thinkers of the ‘post-operaista’ Italian tradition – such as, for example, Antonio Negri commenting on Sandro Mezzadra’s political theory:
The horizon of the ‘thousand plateaus’ has become real. And where there is no longer an ‘outside’, the ‘inside’ produces ever-more relevant diversities; where the concave is given, the convex establishes itself not as a contrary, but as a fluctuating alternative.4
Yet, this is far from being exclusively a contemporary political problem. The first step of our overview of Magic’s existential impact on individual lives today, begins precisely from a brief genealogy of ancient strategies of secrecy, occultation and vanishing that allow a person to create a space at once within and without their own historical time.
On a bright morning of January 1492, accompanied by a splendidly dressed retinue of a hundred horsemen, Abu `Abdallah Muhammad XII reached a rocky prominence just outside Granada. Until a few hours earlier, he had been the last Muslim ruler of the last Muslim city on the Iberian Peninsula. But everything was lost. Abu `Abdallah Muhammad XII cast a last look back towards the distant silhouette of the walls and towers of the palace of Alhambra. As he raised his hand to order to continue their journey southwards, he finally broke down in tears. Yet, his sorrowful exile paled in comparison with the hardship that was to befall his abandoned subjects. The Muslim inhabitants of Granada were now at the mercy of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castille, and about to join their co-religionists in the courts and torture chambers of the newly established Spanish Inquisition.
Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad XII eventually reached the Moroccan city of Fez, where he established himself and his remaining family under the protection of the local Sultan. The following year, another crucial figure in Islamic history joined him there. Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah moved to Fez from his native Oran in 1493, having been offered a position as professor of law, which soon developed into the prestigious role of ‘Mufti’ jurist. There are no surviving records testifying an encounter between the legal scholar and the deposed king, but certainly the plight of the Moriscos back in Spain did not leave Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah unmoved. In 1504, the Mufti from Oran issued a famous fatwa, in which he declared that Sunni Muslims who lived under the oppressive rule of non-believers (i.e. under the Spanish Crown) were allowed to conceal their faith from their persecutors, and even to publicly declare their apostasy to avoid martyrdom.
If, at the hour of prayer, they force you to prostrate yourself before their idols, or make you attend their prayers, … bow down to whatever idols they are bowing to, but turn your intention towards Allah. Even if the direction is not that of Mecca, that requirement may be disregarded, as it is in the case of prayer when in danger on the battlefield.
If they oblige you to drink wine, you may do so, but let it not be your intention to make use of it.
If they force pork upon you, eat it, but in your heart reject it, and hold firm to the belief that it is forbidden. In the same way, if they force you to do anything which is forbidden.5
With his fatwa, Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah institutionalized in the Sunni world those practices of taqiyya and kitman (dissimulation and concealment, suggestio falsi and suppressio veri), that were already common in the Shia world. Used to centuries of persecution at the hand of the Sunni, Shia Muslims had developed a sophisticated theory around the concealment and dissimulation of what lay in their heart. Resting on Quranic Suras such as 3:286 and 16:106,7 Shia faithfuls had long conceived taqiyya as an integral part of their way of practising their beliefs. Central to their understanding of taqiyya, was the notion that it was done ‘with the tongue only’ (following the lesson of Ibn Abbas), not with the heart. But their understanding of this practice had more far-reaching implications than its tactical conception by the Spanish Sunni. Although the art of concealment and dissimulation had informed Shia daily life first under Sunni rule, then at the time of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, their taqiyya and kitman also stood for a profound understanding of the chasm between exotericism and esotericism. Considered in terms of what Henry Corbin calls ‘the discipline of the arcane’, taqiyya and kitman also served the purpose of safeguarding what is ineffable, from the grasp of descriptive language.8 Only through a complex path of initiation, can the ineffable knowledge be ‘passed on’ to another person, while always refraining from the temptations of linguistic reduction.
The ‘discipline of the arcane’ (taqiyah, kitman) [was] prescribed by the Imams in conformity with the injunction, ‘God commands you to make deposits to those entitled to them’ (4:55). This means: God orders you not to pass on the divine trust of gnosis except to him who is worthy of it, who is an ‘heir’. The whole notion of a knowledge which is a spiritual inheritance, is implicit in this injunction.9
Thus, taqiyya and kitman acquire a double meaning: on the one hand, they are contingent tactics to escape persecution, while on the other, they reflect the chasm between what is ineffable and what can be conveyed through descriptive language. Following Etan Kohlberg’s suggestion:
Looked at from the point of view of motive, there appear in fact to be two main types of taqiyya: one which is based on fear of external enemies and another which is based on the need to conceal secret doctrines from the uninitiated. I will call the first type ‘prudential taqiyya’ and the second, ‘non-prudential taqiyya’. In what follows I attempt … to establish a connection between the two.10
Indeed, ‘prudential’ and ‘non-prudential’ taqiyya, share a common conceptual root. It is only on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the ‘heart’ and the ‘tongue’ (using again Ibn Abbas’s parlance), that is possible to conceive practices of dissimulation and concealment, that don’t compromise what they are meant to protect. Likewise, in the case of Magic’s cosmogony, we have witnessed a real difference running between the coexisting principles of ineffable existence (found in the first hypostasis) and of descriptive essence (found in the fifth and last hypostasis). Even if the ‘tongue’ was to go astray in the realm of the linguistically built world, the ‘heart’ would still be able to remain faithful to its apprehension of the ineffably living layer of existence that lies within yet beyond the world. Fundamentally, a person adopting Magic’s reality-system is well aware that descriptive language can be nothing but a form of concealment and dissimulation, whenever it takes the ineffable as its object.
All these considerations aid us to understand the role played by secrecy, in any attempt to adopt Magic’s reality-system within a world that is ruled by Technic. Certainly, it would be possible to wear Magic on one’s sleeve, and traverse Technic’s world never missing a chance to make clear to all that one has chosen to adopt an alternative metaphysical, ethical and ultimately cosmological approach. It would be possible, but it would be neither useful nor advisable. True to the esoteric spirit that animates it, Magic’s reality-system doesn’t require conquest of social hegemony in order to function, and it doesn’t demand to have its principles spread through the means of cultural propaganda. It’s not that Magic has a minoritarian vocation; rather, whether it enjoys a majoritarian or minoritarian status within society is of little importance to its functioning. Although a universal adoption of its tenets would arguably enhance the cause for emancipation on a massive scale, even when adopted by one person alone it is still capable of contributing to the reactivation of their ability to imagine, act and ultimately exist in the world. Moreover, there is little doubt that an all-too-public display of one’s adoption of a radically alternative reality-system, would encounter the uncompromising hostility of a social world that is built on the exact opposite principles. What would be the use of exposing oneself to gratuitous martyrdom, when such a sacrifice would in no way enhance one’s cause?
We find echoes of a similar debate in a religious controversy internal to the Christian world of early modernity, at the time of the fratricidal war between the Catholic and Protestant factions. Possibly because of their bid to supremacy in Central and Northern Europe, the Protestant camp found it particularly expedient to assert the lack of any legitimate distance between the private and public life of a truly ‘reformed’ believer. Invited to encourage those Protestants who were suffering under Catholic rule, the French theologian Jean Calvin wrote a stern rebuke of any practice of concealment and dissimulation of the beliefs lying in one’s heart. In his 1544 book Excuse à messieurs les Nicodémites,11 Calvin had words of fire for those who hid their Protestant faith for fear of persecution. He disparagingly referred to them as ‘Nicodemites’, that is, followers of Nicodemus, the character from the Gospel who would act as a pious Jew during the day, while secretly sneaking to hear Jesus preach after nightfall.
This accusation of cowardly hypocrisy found an even more explicit reinforcement in the writings of Giulio della Rovere (aka Giulio da Milano), a former Augustinian friar who had converted to Protestantism. In his 1552 pamphlet Exhortation to Martyrdom, Della Rovere left no doubt that death itself was preferable to publicly lying about one’s embrace of the Protestant tenets. For thinkers like Della Rovere, there seemed to be no distance between the realm of descriptive language and that of ineffability, so that anything happening at the level of the former, was supposed to also deeply affect the latter. Translated in temporal terms, anti-Nicodemist positions saw no possibility of escaping the temporality of history, if for history we understand all that can be recorded through the descriptive categories of language. For all its pretences to reach into the innermost abyss of a person’s soul, the Protestant attitude ultimately claimed that one’s truest existence amounted to little more than one’s communicable essence. It might not be mere coincidence, that the cosmogonic force of Technic first established its reign in the northern lands of the Protestant world.
On the opposite front, and not only politically, we find the complex tradition of early modern Catholic thinkers. As recently noted by Italian philosopher Mario Perniola,12 up until the council of Trent, the Catholic attitude had developed into something akin to a ‘feeling’ with spectacular connotations, rather than a discipline of existential orthopaedics. According to Perniola, pre-Tridentine Catholicism was in its daily practice a ‘religion without dogma’, whose kernel consisted in a form of ‘non-participatory participation’, based on escaping one’s narrowly defined subjectivity through the use of rituals. To pursue its double goal of disentangling itself from the constraints of the linguistic world, while at the same time creating a shared cultural platform, Catholicism found an important complement in the generous use of metaphorical aesthetics.
For [American sociologist Andrew] Greeley, ‘Catholics live in an enchanted world’. The rituals, the arts, the music, architecture, prayers, the stories, create an aesthetic climate that is an essential part of Catholic imagination and confer metaphoric character to it. ‘The Catholic imagination loves metaphors; Catholicism is a verdant rainforest of metaphors’. … The protestant imagination distrusts metaphors; it tends to be a desert of metaphors.13
Thanks to this metaphorical attitude, Catholics could see themselves and the world as if ‘from an outside’. Through their embodiment of liturgical ritualism also at a cultural level, they were capable of feeling at the same time foreign and at home in the world – itself perceived at the same time as a familiar and an uncanny object.
For Perniola, this peculiar form of non-dogmatic ‘feeling’ was eventually lost in the course of Catholicism’s struggle against Protestantism – as the Church of Rome strove to set up a monolithic identity of its own, against that of its opponents. But in fact, even in the Baroque era that follows the Tridentine Council, this strategic form of distancing oneself from the linguistic world without fully renouncing it, remained active in certain intellectual milieus of the Catholic world. Particularly among the Jesuits,14 the theory and practice of concealment and dissimulation reached a supreme level of sophistication, as it is epitomized by the work of the Spanish priest and writer Baltasar Gracián.15
In his 1647 book The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence,16 Gracián selected 300 aphorisms that meant to instruct the reader on the ‘art of worldly wisdom’, along a peculiar trajectory that combined the cunning use of worldly hypocrisy with the attainment of sainthood. Despite the blatant immoralism of most of his advice – which gained him the admiration of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who translated it into German – Gracián’s book was read and approved by his superiors in the Society of Jesus, and soon rivalled Machiavelli’s The Prince throughout the courts of Europe. According to Gracián, society was to be considered as nothing but a play, a dangerous game of mirrors and masks, which the individual should traverse with the shrewd and imperceptible metis (Greek for ‘cunning intelligence’) of the wise, rather than the explicit bie (Greek for ‘brute force’) of the fool.
In heaven everything is good, in hell everything bad. In the world, since it lies between the two, you find both. … Our life is arranged like a play, everything will be sorted out in the end. Take care, then, to end it well.17
Stuck in the hostile environment of a society which is always, according to Gracián, a control-society, the ‘wise man’ carefully weaves a web of strategies of deception, removing anything ‘authentic’ from the surface of his public life. The awareness of his inferiority and vulnerability is exactly the source of his strength. This existential strategy resembles that of the Byzantine Emperors Leo VI18 and Maurice,19 or of the Roman military author Frontinus,20 whose main focus – in their Tactica, Strategikon and Stratagematon, respectively – was on how to turn a position of weakness into one of strength, and how to enforce a judo-style relationship with one’s opponent, where brute force would successfully be reflected against itself.
Because of his state of minority, the ‘wise man’ has to be as apt at concealing his ideas and his plans, as he is proficient at reading the web of unspoken narratives by which society tries to entrap him.
Know how to be all things to all people. A discreet Proteus: with the learned, learned, and with the devout, devout. A great art to win everyone over, since similarity creates goodwill. … Go with the current, undergoing a transformation that is politic – and essential for those in position of dependency.21
Know how to appear the fool. … There are times when the greatest knowledge consists in appearing to lack knowledge. You mustn’t be ignorant, just feign ignorance. With fools, being wise counts for little, and similarly with madmen, being sane: you need to talk to everyone in their own language.22
Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone, say politicians. For if everyone is mad, you’ll be different to none, and if good sense stands alone it will be taken as madness. ... You have to live with others, and most are ignorant. To live alone, you must be either like God, or a complete animal.23
His success depends both on his ability to produce a critical reading of society’s ideology, and on his specular performances of tactical conformism and vanishing. Gracián’s wise man does not shy away from a public and conspicuous performance of conformism – even to the point of feigning ignorance, when ignorance is rife – because by doing so he can create for himself the necessary contextual conditions for autonomy, as well as for striking back. Ultimately, Gracián’s advice can perhaps be summed up in one aphorism, which reveals the Jesuit thinker’s profound distrust of the ability of the public realm – resting as it does on descriptive language – to act as the terrain for a full appraisal of that which is ineffable.
Think with the few and speak with the many. … The wise cannot be identified by what they say in public, since they never speak there with their own voice but following common stupidity, however their inner thought contradicts this. The sensible flee being contradicted as much as contradicting: what they’re quick to censure, they’re slow to publicize. Thought is free; it cannot and should not be coerced. It retreats into the sanctuary of silence, and if sometimes breaks this, it only does so among the select and the wise.24
At first glance, Gracián’s book seems to amount to little more than an immoralistic guide on how to stay out of trouble in a dangerous world. Many have read the book in this light, and certainly opportunism plays an important role in the conceptual economy of the volume. Yet, in approaching Gracián’s text we should be careful not to remain on a merely superficial level. When Gracián concludes the book with a 300th aphorism titled ‘In a word, [become] a saint’, he doesn’t wish to offer us a final twist of comedy, but rather the key to read his whole work. How can a liar and a hypocrite ever wish to be a saint? The answer is simple, albeit it is left implicit in the book: sainthood has little to do with what happens at the level of descriptive language. Its horizon is that of the ineffable as life, and values the world only as far it allows for ineffable life to shine through it – anything else, the pomp of societal language and its institutions, is nothing more than a stupid and dangerous game, worthy of contempt and hypocrisy. In this sense, one can only talk to ‘the few’, regardless of who they are: any sociality that is built around a shared experience of the living ineffable is necessarily contained within the limits of friendship, that allow for no limitless expansion along abstract economies of scale. Seen from this perspective, Gracián’s ‘saint’ remains in the human consortium exactly through his/her refusal to leave to societal institutions – and more generally, to the realm of descriptive language – the role of declaring what in the world is worthy of value and protection. To Gracián’s ‘saint’, as to the person who adopts Magic’s reality-system, the extreme solidarity among the living that accompanies a metaphysical ‘unity of existence’ – what is defined as Tawhid in Islamic theology – is always-already given, before and beyond societal rule. It is only by putting societal language back in its place, that it is possible to bend its institutions to the service of the universally shared ineffable, that is, of life as the unspeakable dimension of existence.
One of us must suppose that he was just created at a stroke, fully developed and perfectly formed but with his vision shrouded from perceiving all external objects – created floating in the air or in the space, not buffeted by any perceptible current of the air that supports him, his limbs separated and kept out of contact with one another, so that they do not feel each other. Then let the subject consider whether he would affirm the existence of his self. There is no doubt that he would affirm his own existence, although not affirming the reality of any of his limbs or inner organs, his bowels, or heart or brain or any external thing. Indeed he would affirm the existence of this self of his while not affirming that it had any length, breadth or depth. And if it were possible for him in such a state to imagine a hand or any other organ, he would not imagine it to be a part of himself or a condition of his existence.25
This brief thought experiment, known as the ‘floating man argument’, was composed in the early 1020s by the Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna), one of the brightest philosophical minds to have ever appeared West of the Ganges river. As we shall see, this will also be the starting point for our next step in understanding the existential mark produced by Magic’s reality-syste m.
At the time when he composed his argument, Avicenna was being held captive in the fortress of Fardajan, in the Iranian province of Hamadan – a situation not atypical in his adventurous life. It would be tempting to read romantically the ‘floating man’ as a subtle metaphor for that hope for inner freedom, that most likely accompanied the philosopher during his captivity – much like a condensed equivalent to Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy.26 However, the actual reason behind its development was much more internal to the technicalities of the philosophical debate of the time. By proving that a person would have direct apprehension of their own existence even in the absence of previously acquired information and of sensory perception, Avicenna wished to put forward a case for the soul’s substantiality and for its independence from the body. Anticipating certain aspects of Descartes’s cogito by over six centuries, Avicenna ignited a revolution at the foundations of epistemology. But while Descartes saw a person’s rational thinking as the ground zero of all knowledge, Avicenna’s ‘floating man’ suggested an epistemology based instead on ‘presence’. Avicenna’s argument shows that at the basis of knowledge, before and beyond any other form of reason or of perception, lay that kind of immediate intuition that a person has of their own existence. This is a form of ‘knowledge by presence’ or ‘presential knowledge’, in which ‘knowing’ and ‘being’ stand in an almost indistinguishable proximity.
Avicenna’s epistemological suggestion found fertile ground in later Persian philosophy, where the notion of ‘knowledge by presence’ acted as the cornerstone for a long tradition of mystical thinking. It was in particular the twelfth-century philosopher Suhrawardi, founder of the ‘Illuminationist’ school, who formalized a possible line of development starting from Avicenna’s theory. According to Suhrawardi,27 knowledge by presence is the purest form and the foundation of all other forms of knowledge. This is a kind of non-discursive, non-conceptual, non-propositional type of knowledge, akin to the unmediated perception that one has of one’s own pain.28 To the attentive reader, it will not escape that pain was exactly what we found towards the end of Technic’s cosmogonic chain, as the symptom of life’s irreducible ineffability. Indeed, for Suhrawardi, as for Magic, pain and the ineffable dimension of the existent are epistemologically connected. Both of them are accessible only through a particular type of unmediated knowledge, where one’s ‘knowing’ something and one’s ‘being’ that something, are inextricably intertwined. As if responding to the Indian Vedanta suggestion that one’s true self (atman) and the ultimate reality of the world (brahman) are actually one and the same thing, Suhrawardi claimed that self-knowledge and the knowledge of the divine realm (the ‘Light of Lights’) are of the exact same kind: we can experience both only through direct apprehension. Ultimately, what we witness through presential knowledge is that ‘light’ which enables all other forms of perception, by making their objects ‘visible’ to our cognition. Self-knowledge coincides with knowledge of the ineffable lying at the heart of the world, since both of them are the ‘luminous’ precondition by which any other type of understanding is possible. But unlike the objects that are illuminated, and which we can grasp through descriptive language, ‘light’ itself belongs for Suhrawradi to the field of pure ineffability. As such, it is at once the foundation of descriptive language (which would be impossible in condition of ‘darkness’), while also escaping its grasp.
However, Suhrawardi did not identify this ‘light’ with the principle of pure existence. On the contrary, according to the twelfth-century philosopher we should consider essence, not existence, as the solid bedrock of all that is. It will be seventeenth-century Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra, who will overcome Suhrawradi’s Platonist essentialism29 in the direction of an ‘onto-theology’ that has much in common with Magic’s reality-system. Mulla Sadra, whom we already encountered in the previous chapter, advocated for a kind of ‘existentialist’ philosophy that was alternative to the metaphysical tenets in vogue during his time. According to Mulla Sadra, reality unfolds as the progressive self-manifestation of a principle of pure and utterly ineffable existence – what in the previous chapter we symbolically defined as ‘life’.
Mulla Sadra constructed his philosophy through a masterfully bold combination of different traditions, spanning from ancient Zoroastrianism to Sufism, to the latest Islamic theories of his age. His epistemological vision is no exception, emerging from his reinterpretation of Avicenna’s and Suhrawradi’s notions of presential knowledge, as seen through the lens of late-ancient Greek Neoplatonism. In particular, Mulla Sadra had in mind the epistemological theory of the third-century Lebanese Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who – building on Plotinus – claimed the identity between the intellect (the process of knowing), the intellecting subject (the knower) and its intelligible object (the known). According to the Neoplatonic school, as briefly described at the beginning of Chapter 2, we can conceive the existent as the product of a cosmogonic emanation outpouring from the first principle of the utterly ineffable and all-encompassing ‘One’. The One, a ‘Being-beyond-being’, proceeds (progressio) in its creation of the world, from its initial state – that transcends even the notion of transcendence – all the way to the material world which we experience through our sense. Among the hypostases of the One, we find the Divine Intellect, acting both as the stage in which the One begins to self-perceive, and as the cosmogonic source of all possible types of knowledge. According to Neoplatonism, a person can aspire to authentic knowledge only by ‘moving back’ (regressio) through the chain of emanations, to the point of reuniting with the Divine Intellect.
Likewise, for Mulla Sadra, knowledge is grounded on the principle of ‘unity of existence’, according to which all things ultimately depend for their existence on God’s all-encompassing existence. For Mulla Sadra (as for Magic), the authentic nature of all that exists is ‘unity in multiplicity’ (al-wahda fil-kathra): at an ineffable level, all things are one and the same ‘thing beyond thingness’, while at the level of descriptive language they maintain their respective difference. Such nature, however, can be understood only through direct apprehension, that is, only through a form of unmediated and presential self-knowledge. In other words: it is possible to truly know only what one already is, and it is possible to truly be only what one already knows.
The main tenets of Mulla Sadra’s epistemology are also at the core of Magic’s reality-system, thus informing the experience of an individual who was to adopt Magic’s perspective within their life in the world. Considered through this lens, truly knowing and truly being are one and the same thing. Although we can know the objects of descriptive language through sense-perception, rationality or information, yet such levels disclose to us only a specific layer of reality – and not that which is innermost. According to Magic, if one wished to ground all forms of understanding in the most fundamental type of knowledge, they would have to consider what kind of perception is capable of approaching the ineffable dimension of existence. If ‘life’ is the ineffable at the heart of existence, then the two fundamental questions, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is this?’, can be answered through the same kind of apprehension. In both cases, it is a type of apprehension that is non-discursive, non-conceptual and non-propositional: it is a form of ‘knowledge by presence’, in which the knower, the known and the process of knowing become one and the same thing.
Here, we reach the key to the title of this subchapter, ‘initiation’, and its connection with the previous section on ‘secrecy’. Since truly knowing and truly being are just two different names assigned to the same process, then gaining new knowledge amounts to gaining new existence. If I can truly know only what I am, then my getting to truly know something inevitably means my getting to become that something. I can know the ineffable that is life (thus, also my ‘individual’ life), only by recognizing that fundamentally I am that ineffable. This is not so much an expansion of my knowledge, but an expansion of my existence. Achieving it means symbolically ‘dying’ to one’s old form of existence – in which we coincided completely with the serial units of descriptive language – and ‘being reborn’ to a new form, in which our linguistic dimension is just a level in the self-manifestation of an utterly ineffable kernel that runs uninterrupted throughout the existent. This process of symbolic death and rebirth is precisely what constitutes the process of initiation, as understood since the time of archaic societies, all the way to the still ongoing traditions of mysticism.
Following the lesson of the French school of theology inspired by the work of Mircea Eliade, we can understand the process of initiation to be composed by three main elements:
a) Reference to an archetype. The archetype is a model that is placed at the origin and which is considered to be the initiator of the development of the ritual. … Through the ritual [of initiation] the archetype provides completeness to the life of the person being initiated.
b) A second element is the symbolism of initiation as death. Initiation allows its candidate to exit historical time, while connecting him/her with foundational time, illud tempus. It is death in terms of a previous situation.
c) The symbolism of a new birth. Symbolic death is followed by a new birth, consisting in the candidate acquiring the new existence to which s/he has been introduced by the rituals of initiation. … A role of particular importance is played by myths that induce to replicate the actions of the original creators: thus, initiation is a reproduction of cosmogony as well as second, mystical birth.30
Both when indicating a rite of passage into an age group (e.g. puberty rites), and when referring to a person voluntarily joining a secret confraternity or sorority, the term ‘initiation’ has always denoted a passage to a new type of existence. Rituals of initiation mark the end of an ‘old’ form of presence in space/time, and the beginning of a ‘new’ one. So, for Saint Paul,31 baptismal waters are at once waters of life and of death: a faithful’s descent into them symbolizes Christ’s descent into the underworld, and their emergence out of them resonates with Christ’s resurrection. When a person undergoes initiation, they break away from the socialized space and the historical time to which they used to belong. For the duration of the process of initiation, they literally step into an unknown else-where and else-when, for which they don’t have any criterion of navigation. In many archaic societies, particularly in those that practised shamanism, this was the moment and the place in which a person had visions that went to define the rest of their life. Not too dissimilarly, a person’s initiation to Magic’s reality-system begins with their ‘presential vision’ of a different kind of metaphysics that profoundly affects and transforms them. Adopting Magic’s cosmological hypostases as the frame through which the world emerges to one’s experience, means shaping a particular vision of what exists in the world, and in what way existents relate to each other. This implies a movement outside of Technic’s perfectly mapped space/time, and a step into a world-form in which the ineffable plays a crucial role; a movement that is as much a new way of seeing the world as a new way of being in the world.
An individual’s adoption of Magic’s reality-settings as their own is thus a practice of initiation, which in its process resembles a form of self-directed ‘theurgy’. First theorized in the third century by Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus,32 theurgy is a complex ritualistic art, through which a person might be able to summon the ineffable One, so as to allow it to manifest itself in its purest possible form. Iamblichus warns us that the ineffable can only be invited to manifest itself in its purer forms, not be coerced into doing so. Theurgy is unlike the techno-scientific practice, which constantly attempts to capture its object in order to put it to work – as with electricity being extracted from the movement of water, in order to be fed into industrial production. Conversely, theurgy – and indeed, Magic – wish to make the linguistic world available to host the manifestation of the ineffable, rather than attempting to ambush it. As presented by Iamblichus, theurgy concerns in particular the use of statues as vessels for the self-manifestation of the early hypostases of the One – yet, the process is not necessarily limited to this particular medium. To adopt Magic’s perspective, means to consider one’s own linguistic self (i.e. one’s linguistic identities) as the equivalent of a vessel through which it is possible to allow the ineffable to shine. Initiation, as a theurgic act, amounts to the transformation of one’s existence – achieved through the acquisition of presential knowledge – to make oneself a suitable vessel to host a clear manifestation of the ineffable. Such a manifestation is witnessed first and foremost by the person him/herself, who acquires at the same time the position of theurgist and of theurgic object – much like presential knowledge achieves the unity of the knower and the known.
We have seen how acquiring presential knowledge of one’s own existence – as composed by an ineffable kernel, which one shares with the whole of the existent, combined with a differential layer of descriptive language – is a process of initiation. It involves ‘dying’ to a previous form of reality and being ‘reborn’ to an alternative world as shaped by alternative reality-settings; it relies on the archetypal form of the ‘miracle’33 as the locus of manifestation of the ineffable as life; it is a form of acquisition of knowledge that produces an existential and ontological transformation in those who undergo it; it is necessarily performed in ‘secret’, since it cannot be communicated through means of descriptive language. Nonetheless, even rituals that deal with the ineffable can be somehow communicated, and also initiations allow for a certain passage of knowledge between different people. How can this happen in the context of Magic? How can a person be helped to achieve presential knowledge of the ineffable layer of existence – and thus also of their own existence? How can a person be taught the incommunicable fact that s/he is ineffably alive?
Tackling this question means opposing the notion of education to that of initiation, in the same way that we can oppose the notion of information to that of presential knowledge. Understood in contemporary terms – that is, within Technic’s perspective – education amounts to a process of acquisition of information that allows the acquiring person to master an increasing amount of skills. Education too can bring about a certain transformation in the person being educated, but this has to do exclusively with the expansion of one’s technical abilities, referring to one’s socially defined linguistic structure. Through Technic’s education, one learns to become a better ‘processor’:34 a better engineer, professor, nurse, father, lover, citizen and so on. Education in the age of Technic has to do, predictably, with the acceleration of the pace with which an ‘abstract general entity’ can contribute to the overall expansion of as many productive series as possible. Ultimately, all forms of education in Technic’s world are merely forms of training. Coherently with the limitless stretch of linguistic series of productions, Technic’s education does not produce any radical transformation in those who acquire it: only incremental transformations are possible.
Conversely, the process of initiation is aimed precisely at producing in its subject a radical transformation at the existential and ontological level. After initiation, a person ceases to be merely the sum of their linguistic and productive dimensions, while becoming also a manifestation of the ineffable dimension that constitutes existence in itself. The person initiated to Magic’s reality is at the same time the galaxy of their names and complete silence. As we discussed at the end of the previous chapter, such a person is a paradox – and in this, it resembles precisely the world that Magic produces through its reality-frame. But how can a paradox be talked about? How can it be taught? Certainly, it cannot be described linguistically, other than in its most superficial form. Initiation resembles a koan – the insoluble riddles that the disciple had to solve in order to be admitted to the higher monastic grades of Zen Buddhism – in that its presentation through descriptive language does not seem to allow for a linguistic solution. The paradox of Magic’s initiation consists exactly in affirming that what isn’t linguistically solvable, is nonetheless ineffably inhabitable. Likewise, the way in which initiatic knowledge can be taught, resembles more a person inviting another into a certain space, than the transference of information in Technic’s education. The initiator within Magic is not a provider of knowledge-units. Rather, s/he is somebody who might invite another one into a space that s/he inhabits already, and whose access is through the testimony of one’s living experience of Magic’s reality-system. As in traditional initiatic rituals, this is a passage that happens in secret, however publicly it might be displayed – in that same way that a friendship or a kiss in public lose nothing of their secrecy.
To conclude this section on initiation and to lead to the next one, a brief recapitulation of its main points might be useful. We began where we had left our exposition in the previous section on the ‘secret’. There, we saw how a first step to adopting Magic’s reality-system within the present social constraints, has to do with being able to separate between the public sphere of descriptive language, and the sphere of the ineffable. Secrecy is the precondition to begin one’s work within Magic, since it allows for the opening up of the necessary ‘space’ where Magic’s process can take place. In this section, we proceeded looking at what kind of work that would be. We defined it immediately as a process that is at the same time epistemological and ontological. By defining it as a form of presential knowledge, we wished to make clear how adopting Magic’s reality-system as one’s own, requires a particular form of knowledge that is at the same time a form of existential and ontological transformation. By presentially witnessing the ineffable dimension of one’s own existence and of existence in general, we acquire a different form of existence altogether – that is to say, we modify the fundamental reality-settings through which the ontological discourse takes place. This is a form of initiation, which is starkly opposed to Technic’s education. Indeed, Magic’s initiation is a form of theurgy – but one in which the subject, the object and the process itself all merge into one entity. Yet, initiation is not a process that is completely closed onto itself: as with traditional understanding of this practice, the initiated person is removed from their social and descriptively linguistic context, only so to be able to re-enter it as a new kind of entity. In the following section, titled ‘as if’, we shall see what kind of existential consequences derive from initiation, as we re-enter our social context.
To feel everything in every way,
to live everything from all sides,
to be the same thing in all possible ways and at the same time,
to realise in oneself the whole of humanity from every moment
in one single moment that is diffused, profuse, complete and distant.35
I am nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.36
Patriot? No: just Portuguese.
I was born Portuguese like I was born blond and blue-eyed.
If I was born to speak, I have to speak a language.37
These brief excerpts come from the work of Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caeiro, arguably the two most important Portuguese poets of the twentieth century, and among the greatest poets of modernity. Caeiro was a semi-illiterate, ascetic ‘keeper of sheep’ living with an old aunt in a village near the Tago river, while de Campos was a cosmopolitan and flamboyant naval engineer based in Lisbon. Yet the two were connected by a strong bond of friendship, which for de Campos overflew into unrestrained admiration towards his spiritual and poetic master Caiero. But there is one more thing that united them: neither of them ever had a body, or an official birth certificate. Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and dozens other poets, fiction writers and essayists, were heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, the Protean genius of philosophical poetry. Fernando Pessoa-himself was also one of his own heteronyms, figuring as just another name through which the author inhabited the world. What is more, Fernando Pessoa-himself was one of the lesser heteronyms, and not the most important one. When Alberto Caeiro died, at the age of 26, Fernando Pessoa was one of the few of his friends and disciples missing from his bedside – he couldn’t attend because he was ill, or so we are told. But who is telling us? To whom belongs the voice that the Portuguese register and the bibliographic classifications assign to a certain Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, ‘actually’ born in Lisbon in 1888 and who ‘actually’ died there in the late autumn of 1935? Pessoa-himself would answer: to nobody, to everybody.
To legions of critics, the irony was not lost that in the Portuguese language, Pessoa means ‘person’. And what better way to introduce the practice of being a Magic’s ‘person’ in the world, than looking at the lesson of Pessoa? When we think about Pessoa and his galaxy of heteronyms, the first definition that comes to mind is that of ‘poet’, despite the fact that he was an equally prolific writer of detective novels, philosophical treatises, astral charts and even crossword templates. In fact, Pessoa was a poet not only in literary terms, but also in his very life – as according to his definition of the poet:
The poet is a feigner.
He feigns so completely
That he even feigns that it is pain
The pain that he really feels.38
Delving into Pessoa’s world means entering a labyrinth, where every turn brings you forward and sends you back to the starting point at the same time. Pessoa didn’t use his heteronyms as noms de plume through which he could enrich his publishing portfolio. Rather, there was never any distance between the ‘real’ Pessoa and his ‘fictional’ heteronyms. Pessoa, like a ‘person’ in Magic, was at the same time all of his names, and none of them. He was each and any of them – including Pessoa-himself – as if he had been them. Only Alberto Caeiro, in his embodiment of an ecstatic metaphysical paganism, was capable of inhabiting a world where everything was truly and starkly itself, and where nature had ‘no inside’. All other heteronyms, and Pessoa-himself, clearly perceived their existence in the world as a game of reflections in which they themselves were the reflections; reflections of what? This is impossible to say – literally, it is ineffable. All that can be said is that Pessoa, Caeiro, Campos and all others truly existed only inasmuch as they were instances of ineffable existence itself.39 They truly existed only in their living dimension – which runs unified and uninterrupted through all of them, as it does throughout the existent. But whether such ineffable existence made itself manifest through one or the other name, counted for little or for nothing. Pessoa’s ‘persons’ wore their linguistic clothing as a costume with which they had to identify to a certain degree in order to live in the world – but with which they never identified exclusively. In Pessoa, as in Magic’s world, the ‘as if’ becomes the only possible way in which one’s own ineffable dimension can inhabit its linguistically descriptive dimension.
[Pessoa] lived the life of an office worker as if he was an office worker, he treated himself as if he was another, he wrote his own poems as if they were somebody else’s. … But also the ‘as ifs’ can cause pain, of course. And maybe also pleasure. Like a prosthesis. And they require a certain connection with the sensibility of the terminal to which they refer: thus, they are endowed with the same principle as this, they have the same mechanics, perhaps they are even made of the same material. That Fernando Pessoa who lives his own ‘as if’, is clearly himself also Fernando Pessoa. … Pessoa’s ‘true fiction’, according to his subtle distinction, is an attitude towards reality, not only a literary dimension, and he used it indifferently in his life and in his literature.40
Likewise, a person who has adopted Magic’s reality-system treats the descriptively linguistic structures of the world as if s/he accepted their claim to existence. How could one traverse the world, if one was to fully reject the linguistic labels that distinguish one thing from another, or to the conventions that distinguish between noise and sound? Yet, such a belief is always performed at a distance, always shrouded in the caveat of the as if. ‘If I was born to speak, I have to speak a language’ – but let it be clear that I shall never consider this language as the arbiter of what exists, how it exists, what it is worth and so on. In the world as it is currently structured, I will have to have a passport to be able to traverse borders – but far from me any belief in the fact that this document says anything more than what it states literally. I am ‘as if’ Italian, with the same disbelieving distance with which I am ‘as if’ male. I shall never swear my allegiance to these linguistic divisions, or imperil anybody’s life to safeguard my national identity, my gender identity and so on.41 Equally, I accept the distinction between edible and inedible vegetables only within the specific narrative of alimentation – but this amounts merely to a ‘fictional’ position in metaphysics, in the same way that one would say that Hector and Achilles ‘really’ existed, but only within the specific narrative of the Iliad. According to Magic, one has to take the contingency of the world of descriptive language at face value: it is necessary to inhabit it somehow, but we should never do so with any faith in its ability to convey anything more than a fractionally minute level of existence. It is not a matter of holding a sceptical position towards the world of names – where scepticism, etymologically, stands for an attitude of constant ‘inquiry’. No matter how hard or sharp, no inquiry will ever extract from the realm of descriptive language anything more than what is already in plain sight. The point here is that a person adopting Magic’s reality-setting as their own, will have to maintain a distance from all that can be said in that ‘allegorical’ mode which, as we saw, Goethe starkly opposed to ‘symbolic’ language. If we are ever to use language to learn something more than a list of tautologies, then we should follow the direction towards which it points: allegories don’t point to anything more than themselves; symbols, ever so rare, point towards an ineffable that exceeds them completely. In either case, it is language that ‘has no inside’.
Performing the ‘as if’ at an existential level means fundamentally to identify with that ineffable dimension of existence that, as life, traverses uninterrupted through all that exists – whether material or immaterial. And from that standpoint, to treat language as a legitimately present yet hierarchically subordinate dimension of reality – in the same way that Mulla Sadra claimed the ‘primacy of existence’ over essence. Precisely, the person that adopts Magic’s reality-setting, takes the standpoint of the ineffable dimension of existence (which is equally their own and common to every existent), and from there they treat the objects of descriptive language as their own property. In doing so, they appropriate the lesson of Max Stirner, both in reference to themselves,
To step out beyond it leads into the unspeakable. For me paltry language has no word, and ‘the Word,’ the Logos, is to me a ‘mere word.’ My essence is sought for. If not the Jew, the German, than at any rate it is – the man. ‘Man is my essence.’ … Man is the last evil spirit or spook, the most deceptive or most intimate, the craftiest liar, the father of lies.42
and as a general methodology for their imagination and action in the world:
If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really I have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or ‘the word’ tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepes t reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized ‘freedom of thought’ or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property.43
If we consider this methodology in the context of its originating cosmogony, we can understand its connection to Magic’s relationship between the ineffable and the linguistic dimensions of existence. And if we substitute the terms ‘ineffability’ and ‘descriptive language’ with their respective limit-principles ‘pure existence’ and ‘pure essence’ (as discussed in the intermission between Chapters 2 and 3), we can appreciate how this methodology of life, imagination and action in the world, ultimately constitutes the most apparent form of Magic’s reality. In the intermission, we suggested to understand ‘reality’ as such, as the space that takes place between the poles of pure existence and pure essence: the specific distance and relationship between these poles constitutes the specific shape of one reality-system or another (in this case, of Magic’s reality). Through the existential strategy of the ‘as if’, we recreate once again that distance between existence and essence, ineffability and language, that is a basic requirement of ‘reality’ as such. In doing so, we reconstruct reality – with an opposite and specular movement to that through which Technic had proceeded to the annihilation of reality as such.
The method of the ‘as if’ thus displays in practice the cosmogonic mark that Magic impresses over the world, as filtered through a person’s living experience. In itself, it is just a method of ‘unparticipatory participation’ and ‘distant presence’ within the world, and of ‘metaphorical belief’ in the realm of descriptive language. As a method, its primary justification is in its usefulness rather than its truthfulness. Important insights on this distinction were offered by nineteenth–twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, particularly in his influential 1911 work Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of the As If). Departing from some of Kant’s basic intuitions, Vaihinger developed a vertiginous system of philosophy, based on the notion that our way of dealing with the world is always based on ‘fictions’ rather than ‘facts’ or even ‘hypotheses’. Since the world as it is in itself is hidden to our rational understanding, claims Vaihinger, we cannot then proceed through our life by way of verifiable hypotheses – rather, we must always make up fictional concepts and notions that we employ to navigate the world, while treating them ‘as if’ they were ‘real’. The point of this fictional endeavour – which Vaihinger painstakingly traces in virtually all fields of human activity, from modern science to theology – is that such fictions are useful to us.
This allows us to introduce order and develop some sort of classification, even if it be only a superficial one. … In the second place, communication is thereby rendered possible. … The communication of an event or an impression in an intelligible manner was made possible only through the formation of a limited number of categories. By bringing reality under these categories, communication between individuals became possible in terms of some known analogy, which immediately awakened in the recipient an idea of what the speaker wished to communicate. This is related to our third point, namely that understanding is thereby engendered – from our standpoint an illusion of understanding – reality being thought of under some known analogy. The tremendous pressure of the inrushing sensations is reduced, and the tension of these impressions is removed, in consequence of their being apportioned to different divisions. I would add at once that this was only made possible in extenso by language, … since it was only by this means that the division of existence into categories became possible. Finally, it was only in this way that action could be determined.44
Thus, according to Vaihinger, we should treat our ideas about the world – that is, the notion that I exist as an individual, that this rock and its atoms exist, that freedom exists, etc. – ‘as if’ they were real, because by doing so we are able to enjoy a dignified existence in the world. Indeed, they are never to be considered as representative of anything true in itself – they don’t truthfully depict anything that preexists them – and they should be discarded as soon as their usefulness fades or is supplanted by a better fiction. Likewise – despite some important differences with Vaihinger’s perspective – Magic’s adoption of the ‘as if’ as an existential strategy in the world, is dictated on the grounds of its usefulness rather than of its fundamental truthfulness. On the one hand, accepting the linguistic divisions of the world ‘as if’ they were authentic enables us to take part in social life and enhances our range of activities in the world. On the other hand, by grounding it on the basis of Magic’s cosmology, it also allows us to structure the ‘as ifs’ that concern us most closely – for example, our notion of ourselves – in a symbolic manner, that is in a way that doesn’t smother our awareness of the ineffable dimension of existence, or its ability to manifest itself as such.
Yet, if we consider Magic’s strategy of the ‘as if’ in the context of today’s regime of Technic, we can also read it as a form of rebellion – though a rebellion of a particular kind. For one, it is a rebellion that often happens outside of the public eye, though on occasion it might also take a more publicly visible form. Rather than a direct assault against the social reality of our time and its underlying principles, it is a way to void it from the inside. By already inhabiting a different architecture of reality, Magic’s person creates an immediately effective alternative to Technic’s world-making. Such a course of action doesn’t seek to dialectically overcome the present, but rather to move beyond it. It is a withdrawal that is also an exit – and an exit that is also the foundation of an alternative reality-system. Coherently with the intense ‘biopolitical’ colonization of our lives by Technic, Magic’s first impact on our world takes place exactly at the level of a person’s lived experience of the world. By removing the existential involvement of a person into the very mechanisms of capture that are laid by Technic’s institutions, Magic’s ‘as if’ goes to erode at the core the very material that sustains and makes up the edifice of Technic’s world.
Yet, such ‘political’ aims are not the main reasons behind a person’s adoption of Magic’s reality-setting. Rather, they come as welcome consequences, in the same manner that the adoption of anarchist ‘prefigurative’ practices (i.e. living already as if we had achieved radical emancipation) has public, macro-political consequences only as a symptom, rather than as its primary aim. In fact, the parallels between anarchic practice and an individual’s adoption of Magic’s reality-system in today’s world of Technic are more than superficial. The strategy of disengagement – or of ‘disentanglement’, in Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s parlance – promoted by Magic echoes a particular form of anarchy, which holds together such unlikely champions as the Hellenistic school of the Cyrenaics, the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner and the mature Ernst Jünger.45 It was the latter who suggested a name for the person who relates to the hegemonic reality-form of their age, in the way that Magic suggests: the ‘Anarch’.
Ernst Jünger, whom we briefly encountered in Chapter 1, began his century-long literary career by identifying Technic as the reality-principle of the contemporary age, while proposing to wholeheartedly embrace its reshaping of the world and of our lives within it. Particularly in his 1932 volume Der Arbeiter 46 (The Worker), Jünger both presented Technic’s terrifying ‘total mobilisation’ of life and of the world, and encouraged his readers to enthusiastically follow its cosmogonic imperatives. It was only after the Second World War, at the dawn of the atomic age, that Jünger radically modified the ethical direction of his philosophy. While in his younger days he had believed that embracing Technic would have allowed humans to enter a new heroic age, in his maturity Jünger recognized Technic’s nihilism as pure annihilation of any possibility of life, imagination and action in the world. His radical turn fully materialized in 1951, when in his short book The Forest Passage 47 Jünger suggested that the only possible response to our contemporary world consisted in ‘withdrawing to the forest’ – where such a forest is to be understood as the ineffable wilderness that lies in one’s own heart. Passing to the forest means, for Jünger, reclaiming for ourselves Technic’s banishment of that dimension of existence that is irreducible to serial production. Die Waldganger, the original title of the book, refers to the Icelandic practice of banishing into the forest those who had transgressed the rules of the community; for Jünger, we can follow our own ineffable dimension into the ‘forest’ to which Technic has cast it, and, from there, we can seek a new form of alternative and autonomous life.
A few years later, in 1977, Jünger sent to press the oneiric and dystopian novel Eumeswil,48 which developed the notion of the Waldganger in a more fully fledged and possibly less optimistic dimension. There, Jünger presented for the first time the figure of the ‘anarch’ who is capable of combining the withdrawal into the forest with a form of dissimulation in the context of social life. While the Waldganger can play a role at the triumphal ‘midday’ of Nihilism, the Anarch is best equipped to survive the endless afternoon of its established kingdom. The Anarch, Jünger points out, is only a distant cousin of the anarchist – echoing more closely the secrecy of Magic’s ‘as if’, as it is enacted by an individual living in Technic’s world.
The anarchist is dependent – both on his unclear desires and on the powers that be. He trails the powerful man as his shadow; the ruler is always on his guard against him. … The anarchist is the antagonist of the monarch, whom he dreams of wiping out. He gets the man and consolidates the succession. The -ism suffix has a restrictive meaning; it emphasises the will at the expense of the substance. … The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the Anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the Anarch, only himself.49
The city of Eumeswil, perhaps not dissimilarly from our contemporary world, exists in a state of perennial civil war, in which traditional authority has expanded into all-encompassing biopower, while the emptying of all meaning and possible alternatives complements total-policing in ensuring absolute political stillness. At that stage, any attempt at open resistance would be suicidal, at best futile, and in any case immediately swallowed by its opponent – as it is too often the case in today’s late capitalism. In the perfectly hedo-nihilistic emptiness of Eumeswil, rebels are not those who parade their anarchist garments, but those who are able to disappear completely. Through his/her vanishing, the Anarch reclaims the necessary space – mental, if not physical – to be able to retain the autonomy to access the inner ‘wilderness’ of his own Stirnerian ‘creative nothing’ – as well as to violently strike back at power, whenever opportune.
Every reader who makes it to the last chapter of a book deserves a happy ending. I have always struggled to accept that a film or a book would draw me in for hours, only to conclude my journey with a catastrophe – or even worse, without a resolution. It is as if somebody made me walk for miles to reach their house, only to let the roof collapse once I finally got in. So, in line with the narrative/mythological tone of this book, I too would like to offer a happy ending to my reader. But what can it be, from the perspective of an existential experience of Magic in today’s world? Perhaps, and also to sum up one last time the main differences between the two systems, we should begin by looking at the notion of a ‘happy ending’ according to Technic – so to be able to then compare it more closely with Magic’s equivalent.
‘And they lived happily ever after’ is thus the starting point of this final section. One might be tempted to seek the difference between Technic’s and Magic’s approach, in the first part of the formula, particularly in the word ‘happily’. But in fact, it is on the latter part that we should focus: ‘ever after’. Let us observe how the ‘ever after’ of a happy ending takes a different shape according to Technic’s and to Magic’s reality-systems. In the one case, we shall consider it as the product of ‘safety’, while in the latter as the consequence of ‘salvation’.
If one was to draw a list of the maxima desiderata of our contemporary age, ‘safety’ would certainly make it to the very top. Technic’s world has a morbid fascination with the idea of safety, and its securitarian drive is immediately apparent at every level of our social life. Safety is placed as the ultimate justification for the removal of political and civil rights, for the disintegration of empathy and solidarity, for the total medicalization of our bodies, for a paranoid attitude towards sexuality, for the sacrifice of one’s best years to wage-labour, for the transformation of universities into centres to constantly upgrade one’s employability, for the obsessive encrypting of one’s accounts and communications, and so on and so forth. While from the perspective of Technic as a cosmogonic force, the ‘good’ consists in the endless expansion of serial production, from the existential perspective of ‘abstract general entities’ (such as us humans) this same ‘good’ takes the shape of achieving ‘safety’. In other words: the limitless production of linguistic units constitutes the overall cosmological goal of Technic’s system, while safety acts as its ideological equivalent at the existential level of the individuals inhabiting Technic’s world. As we shall see, these two principles are not in contradiction or even in competition with each other, but they are in fact just different perspectives on the ethics of Technic.
‘Ever after’ means ‘forever’, and ‘forever’ implies the subject in question achieving stability. In the case of Technic, however, such a claim to eternity seems to escape the possibility of anybody inhabiting its world; first, as we said in the first part of this book, because Technic destroys the possibility of anybody being a subject, or an object; and secondly, perhaps more importantly in this context, because Technic’s world relies entirely on an ontology of ‘becoming’. The dichotomy between what is stable and eternal, and what ‘becomes’, is a constant feature in the history of philosophy. At least since the time of Plato, the attributes of stability and eternity have been assigned to the transcendent realm, while the material world that can be perceived through the senses supposedly falls into the realm of becoming. From the perspective of Technic, however, the division doesn’t rely on the traditional difference between materiality/immateriality or rationality/sensuousness, but it is structured in terms of Technic’s own peculiar ontology. What is stable and eternal, and thus immune from becoming, is what escapes the possibility of being inserted into the serial chain of production. Absolute language relies on becoming, since every position in its series takes place exclusively as an instrument for the production of another serial position. As we discussed in the sections dedicated to Technic, its entire cosmology relies on the notion that the only mode of presence in the world is as an instrument – that is, as something which is never ‘for itself’ but always ‘for something else’. Technic’s world is inescapably made of becoming: nothing stable or eternal in itself can ever be allowed in it.
So far so good in terms of what we previously said about Technic. However, as the reader will recall, at the end of Technic’s chain of emanations we found something that stubbornly resisted Technic’s annihilation to mere instrumentality. That something – which also figured in Magic’s system as the origin of its alternative cosmogony – emerged as a scream of pain running through all living forms in Technic’s world. While this something was the lowermost border of Technic’s cosmogony, it is a central (though painfully illegitimate) part of an individual’s existential experience of Technic’s world. This something – which we called ‘life’ – refuses to accept Technic’s absolute embrace of becoming and challenges its rejection of any form of eternity and stability. Life seeks to escape its pulverization into the whirlpool of endless becoming, and its pain resounds also as a request to find a place of stability to call its own. Life, even mortal life, always seeks to partake of eternity. For this reason, Technic’s governance of the world has to take into account this impossible request, which, if accepted, would imperil the entire cosmological structure. But how is Technic going to resolve this seemingly insoluble riddle?
Here, the notion of ‘safety’ comes as the perfect response. Through its securitarian ideology, Technic manages to accommodate – at least in part – the irrepressible request for stability, while not renouncing its instrumental ontology of becoming. Of course, this is achieved at a cost – an important cost that burdens a large part of our experience of the contemporary world. Let us see how this solution unfolds. As we said, becoming cannot be transcended or avoided, since doing so would imply accepting a space outside Technic’s field of serial production. What cannot be avoided or overcome, however, can still be regulated. Safety is the ideological framework that allows Technic’s world to regulate the flow of its own becoming. A becoming made safe, is a becoming that is not denied or transcended, but that is suspended. Securitarian ideology promises to the inhabitants of Technic’s world, a flow of becoming that is made frictionless, as if it was suspended in a vacuum. This promise might sound paradoxical in the context of contemporary hyperactivity and of Technic’s push to accelerate productive activity beyond any limit. Yet, the speed of production and that of becoming should not be confused as one and the same thing. Becoming refers to the existential temporality of the ‘things’ that inhabit Technic’s world (i.e. productive units, or abstract general entities); slowing down becoming to the point of suspending it, means allowing for the virtually endless presence of productive units and abstract general entities in the world. Indeed, endlessly present positions of production in no way contradict Technic’s relentless speed of production – on the contrary.
But how can becoming be suspended? And how could we describe this state of suspension? In other words, what does a ‘safe’ world look like? The existential ‘happy ending’ offered by Technic is not unlike that which we found at the end of its chain of cosmogonic emanations. There, we saw how Technic’s response to life’s unavailability to be reduced to absolute language, consisted in its being presented as a ‘possibility’ for Technic’s expansion. Here, the same move is repeated at an existential and ideological level. A thing made safe, t hat is a becoming that is suspended, is reduced to a state of pure potentiality. If becoming takes place at the level of actuality – where one thing actually turns into another – conversely at the level of potentiality it is at once retained as a principle, and defused as a threat. A becoming turned into its potential to become, is at the same time expanded and intensified (since it is, at least potentially, open to even more directions), while it is also contained in a state of paralysis.
An instrument is always, as such, a form of potentiality rather than of actuality – in that, its status as an instrument consists exactly in its potential to bring into presence other entities. In the case of Technic, however, we noticed how said instrumentality is intensified to the utmost degree. Things exist in Technic’s world only inasmuch as they are instruments, and all the more so, the more they are capable of activating (that is, bringing into presence) an ever-larger number of other productive positions. Only, we should keep in mind that Technic’s notion of an instrument is not merely functional, but also ontological. In its world, abstract general entities (i.e. ‘things’ including human individuals) are at the same time the operators, the material and the instruments of production; ‘things’ take place only as instruments, in the most absolute sense. And since potentiality (rather than actuality) is the mode of presence of an instrument, so their perfect presence in Technic’s world consists in their transformation in the purely potential version of themselves. In this sense, the perfect ‘thing’ becomes the safest ‘thing’, and vice versa: anything that is perfectly safe is reduced to a state of pure potentiality to become anything else.
Our everyday life gives us plenty of opportunities to observe this continuous push to turn ‘things’ into a state of pure potentiality. Letting alone natural resources – already amply described by Heidegger as nothing more than ‘standing-reserves’ – we can feel this process at work in our very own, human lives. From healthcare to education, all forms of activity seem to be geared to expanding one’s own potential: one’s potential employability through the acquisition of new skills, one’s potential life-span through the adoption of a strict diet, one’s potential for social protection through the acquisition of a new citizenship, the potential productivity of an industrial plant through the implementation of efficiency measures, the potential strike-back power of a country through the development of a pre-emptive nuclear arsenal and so on. What truly counts is not what we can do today, but what we could do tomorrow, if only we applied ourselves to our self-improvement. More precisely, what truly counts is not what we are today, but what we could become tomorrow. The way that a ‘thing’ can expand its own potential, is through its activity. Even in macroeconomics, the quantification of a country’s overall activity (GDP) is primarily valued in terms of its potential rather than its actuality – potential to further expand production, to take on new investments, to guarantee dividends on shares from said country, to allow for greater national debt, etc. – likewise, in our own individual lives. Coherently with its overall cosmological structure, Technic presents activity as aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at increasing the instrumental potential of the world and of all its inhabitants. In this sense, activity becomes the regulator of the speed at which becoming takes place in Technic’s world: by managing the expansion of potentiality, it manages the flow of becoming.
Yet, this particular form of action also displays some surprising peculiarities. Let us briefly recapitulate, before discussing it. We saw how Technic’s ontology rejects anything stable, eternal or ‘in itself’, in favour instead of an instrumental ontology of endless becoming. But while this position is uncontroversial in general cosmological terms, it encounters serious difficulties in its existential application in the world. The painful ‘something’ – life – that inhabits Technic’s world, despite Technic’s efforts to eradicate it, still resists its reduction to pure instrumental becoming. As part of its governance of the world, and as a gesture towards the concerns of its living inhabitants, Technic thus develops the ideology of safety. Safety proposes to render bearable such a generalized state of becoming, not by transcending it, but by regulating its flow to the point of suspension. Seemingly paradoxically, this regulation happens through a particular use of activity: the frantic pace of Technic’s production is in fact adopted as a means to slow down the rhythm of becoming that devours the presence of anything in the world. Activity is able to regulate the pace of becoming, by expanding the potentiality of each single thing (i.e. of each single becoming) rather than by focusing on implementing its actuality. In other words, contemporary hyperactivity in virtually all fields of production is ideologically geared towards endlessly expanding the potential of the world and of its inhabitants, rather than to bringing such potential to a state of defined actuality. By doing so, ‘things’ are allowed to indeterminably suspend their actual becoming, while at the same time fostering within themselves an ever-growing range of potential becomings. As shaped by contemporary activity, each ‘thing’ in the world hosts within itself the potential to become any other ‘thing’ (or in Technic’s parlance, each position can become any other position), while never actually being forced to become anything at all. The perfect and ‘safest’ state in Technic’s world is that in which a thing is nothing at all in itself, while remaining available to be rapidly transformed into anything else; this is the state of the perfect instrument, which is at once its own material, instrument and product.
So, what is the peculiarity of this kind of activity? Its peculiarity, perhaps surprisingly, is that such form of activity is entirely ineffectual. Indeed, it focuses on expanding potentiality, not on bringing about any actualized form. It focuses on making it possible, at least in theory, to bring any new linguistic position (i.e. any ‘thing’) into presence, while not actually doing so in practice. The actuality of the world, with its actual degradation and renewal by the hands of the process of becoming, is supplanted by its potential form: it is made ‘safe’. Said in other terms, activity in Technics’ world is metalinguistic rather than linguistic; it produces a massive theoretical expansion of the field of language, while not actually saying anything. The apparent layer of bustling hyperactivity, as on our busy streets and telematic highways, is just the fluorescent coating of a sleeping entity. Technic’s world is a world in which everything can happen, yet nothing does. Nothing is stable, yet nothing becomes. Technic’s world, in its perfection, has fully internalized becoming, which takes places not as a movement between different ‘things’ (or positions), but as a sinking spiral within each ‘thing’ (or position). Technic’s reality is an endless flow that lies still, as if it were congealed; perfectly efficient in its potentiality, yet utterly inefficacious in its actuality.50
Such ineffectuality of action in Technic’s world is the opposite, specular image of the supreme effectiveness of ritual action, as it’s been conceived since the dawn of time. As we saw at the end of Chapter 3, looking at the ritual of libation in the Vedas, ritual action seeks effectiveness over efficiency or scale, regardless of the means at its disposal. Even the minuscule ritual sacrifice of a cup of milk, is capable of re-establishing the order of the whole universe. What is the difference between such ritual action, and the form that activity takes in Technics’ world? Considering this difference means considering the difference between Technic’s idea of ‘safety’ and Magic’s notion of ‘salvation’. The ‘happy ending’ is the perfection and conclusion of the whole chain of actions that have unfolded throughout a narrative – let us observe now how Magic suggests to wrap up its ‘likely story’.
We can start moving towards Magic’s ‘happy ending’ by stepping into a territory that has very little happiness to it. In a 1973 interview, Emile Cioran famously remarked that: ‘What saved me is the idea of suicide. Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself. What allowed me to keep on living, was knowing that I had this option, always in sight.’51 We can find much in Cioran’s quote that is revealing of our reaction to Technic’s world. In a world that is supposed to lie in a state of embryonic coma, its living inhabitants strive for a way out of the desert of its suspended becoming. Sadly, for thousands of people every year, this way out materializes as suicide. Even worse, for millions of others, this same desire to escape paralysis takes the form of political support for environmentally catastrophic policies and for the development of apocalyptic nuclear arsenals. Yet, neither of these darkest desires should be taken entirely at face value. Rather than originating from an authentic wish for the annihilation of one’s own or of other people’s life, both of them reveal a desire for the annihilation of the ‘world’ – where a world is the product of a certain reality-system. Both forms of suicidal tendency actually function as strategies of hope, pointing towards the need to move out of the present reality-system and of the world that it has brought about. Indeed, this is the first lesson that Magic takes from life’s scream of pain, as found at the bottom of Technic’s cosmogony and at the heart of its world. Such lesson says that life doesn’t wish for a suspension of its becoming or for a virtualization of its disintegration, but that it actually seeks an ‘outside’ from the world – precisely, so to be able to inhabit the world. To be able to sustain itself in the world, life needs to keep a foot outside of the world. Here, Magic opposes the ideology of ‘safety’, through its own ideology of ‘salvation’. Like in the case of Technic, salvation acts as the existential equivalent of Magic’s cosmogonic principles, considered from the perspective of their application in the world.
Let us observe a few crucial dissimilarities between safety and salvation. Firstly, safety is a negative concept: one is safe from a threat, not in itself. As we saw, safety refers in particular to protecting the presence of ‘things’ in Technic’s world of becoming, from their rapid degradation by the hand of the very process of becoming. Conversely, salvation is a positive notion in itself. True, one might be saved from a shipwreck, but this doesn’t imply a negative opposition to the shipwreck-event, rather a movement outside of it. Said otherwise, safety has a ‘pathological’ approach in that it constitutes itself in negative opposition to a hostile agent, while salvation operates ‘therapeutically’ in that it is built around a notion of ‘health’. A ‘saved’ entity in Magic’s world, is an entity that is made ‘healthy’ – where a thing’s ‘health’ consists in its assuming the paradoxical form of existing at the same time ineffably and linguistically, eternally and within becoming, actually and potentially. Magic’s therapy consists precisely in helping the inhabitants of its world to exist at once inside and outside of the world, like its cosmogony created a universe that is at once in and out of language. Salvation thus takes place first of all as the opening of the world of becoming to a dimension that transcends its temporality, and equally as the interweaving of unmeasurable temporality and the worldly spectacle of becoming.52
On this basis, salvation aims at actuality, unlike safety’s focus on potentiality. The point of salvation is not to reduce entities in the world to a state of absolute language, in which they can potentially activate each and every linguistic position in any series of production. Rather, salvation refers to the rescue of an entity from its exclusive identification with its linguistic dimension, and to its acceptance also of the living, ineffable dimension of its existence. Indeed, it is from the standpoint of their ineffable life that they can claim to actually exist, while at the same time being able to manage the potential that is implicit in their linguistic dimensions. Regardless of the range of one’s potential to take on various linguistic positions in the world, every existent is always actually there in its ineffable dimension. As such, it is also always stably there, and eternally so. In its living dimension, every single thing in Magic’s world is a manifestation of that stable, eternal, ineffable existence that runs uninterrupted throughout and beyond the world. And from that position, it is capable of enduring the process of becoming, which takes hold of and devours its linguistic dimension. It is only on the basis of one’s eternity, that one is capable of growing old and dying. This is not the traditional distinction between an immort al soul and a perishable body; rather, it is a distinction, within one’s very soul or body, of an eternal dimension and a perishable one. The linguistic dimension of existence always truly becomes, changes and vanishes, while the ineffable kernel of its existence always truly remains stable, eternal and in perfect unity with that of any other existent. In Magic’s world, these two dimensions take place together and at the same time – although according to different temporalities – and they are inseparable in practice. Like in our earlier mention of the notion of hierophany, in which a sacred stone is at once just a stone and the place of epiphany of the ineffably divine, so in Magic’s world every instance of becoming is at once just that, perishable and decaying, while at the same time also partaking of eternity. Borrowing from Mulla Sadra, we could call this, a state of ‘unity in multiplicity’ (al-wahda fil-kathra).
In this sense, Magic’s world doesn’t really require salvation, because everything in it is always-already saved.53 At the very heart of Magic’s cosmogony lies the tenet that the world and all its inhabitants take place as paradoxes of ineffability and language, eternity and becoming. Thus, Magic’s world comes to presence as already ‘healthy’, already saved.54 So, what is Magic’s ‘salvation’ for? Once again, we have to operate a distinction between the cosmological aspect of a world, and the existential experience that its inhabitants have of it. Even though the world, as it emerges through Magic’s reality-frame, is already saved in itself, yet such character might not be immediately apparent to the existential experience of an individual inhabiting it. On the one hand, this is because Magic’s cosmogony requires a process of constant re-creation of its world, as discussed at the end of Chapter 3. And from this angle, salvation consists exactly in the continuous process of structuring the linguistic dimension of the world (and of oneself) in a symbolic form. On the other, the same world acquires different appearances if seen from the angle of its cosmogonic force, or from the perspective of its populations – that is, from the first or from the last hypostasis. What is clear and composed from the viewpoint of the principle of the ineffable as life, might well be confusing and unclear if seen through the eyes of a living paradox as we are. Such a living individual, although already cosmologically ‘saved’ in themselves might require salvation at the level of their perception of life in the world.
This is particularly true, when Magic’s reality-system lies in a state of utter marginality at the level of the social narration of the world, as it is the case in today’s age of Technic. In a world such as that of our contemporary age, a living individual struggles to acknowledge, let alone embrace, their condition as always-already-saved. On the contrary, Technic’s world tends to confine the living experience of the individual in a particular field of psychopathology, which we could define as the ‘impostor syndrome’. In Technic’s world, inasmuch as something is alive, it is always somehow resisting Technic’s attempt to annihilate it to the condition of a pure linguistic position in a series of production. The living dimension of an individual (human or non-human), and of the whole world as such, is thus condemned as illegitimately present. Its resistance to not vanishing entirely into the thin air of productive language amounts to the crime of imposture; as long as something is alive and yet part-takes to the various available positions in Technic’s world, it is an impostor. Yet at the same time, such imposture cannot really be redeemed, since Technic is both unable to remove entirely the ineffable dimension of existence, and unwilling to allow it to exceed into any ‘outside’ to Technic’s world. A living individual is thus stuck in a condition that is at once of captivity and of exclusion, much like a stateless person in the deadlock of border bureaucracy. Indeed, what might sound like an abstract condition relating to cosmology is in fact an increasingly frequent symptom of psychopathological malaise, throughout our contemporary world. In most cases, this malaise takes the apparent form of depression, while in fact being just the symptom – the necessary, unavoidable symptom – of a far deeper, metaphysical condition.
In the face of this painful situation, Magic’s proposes ‘salvation’ as the successful outcome of its therapy – a therapy that aims to cure the malaise at the fundamental level of a person’s reality-system. In this sense, ‘salvation’ is also the symptom of a realized escape from the metaphysical hegemony of Technic’s world-making form. Thus, even though a person wouldn’t really need to be saved at a cosmological level, they still need to be aware of their salvation; in other words, they need to be consoled. Magic’s reality-system aims to console those who adopt it, by rebuilding their experience of themselves and of the world in a way that reveals to them their condition of eternal and preexisting salvation. This aspect of Magic’s entire project might sound reminiscent of gnostic doctrines, in which the acquisition of a certain type of knowledge almost automatically leads to salvation. However, apart from the obvious theological differences between Magic and Gnosticism, the two systems differ also in the power that they attribute to the knowledge of their respective tenets. In Gnosticism, such initiation had effects in absolute terms: the world that it described was supposedly the only real world, and thus the ontological transformation produced by initiation was fully and absolutely ‘real’. Conversely, Magic’s reality-system is only one possible reality-system. Getting to know it produces an ontological transformation that is epistemologically bound in that it depends on the adoption of Magic’s reality-system as one’s own. Within Magic’s cosmology, a person and the world are always-already saved, and thus being initiated to it amounts to little more than a form of consolation. However, outside of Magic’s cosmology – that is in any other possible reality-system – such salvation is not operative and it is often impossible, as it is the case with Technic’s reality-system. Thus, while within Magic salvation doesn’t have any ontological effects, the passage from one reality-system to another – in this case, from that of Technic to that of Magic – has indeed authentic ontological consequences.
In a sense, Magic’s happy ending is always-already inscribed in the very first passages of its cosmogonic narrative. Nothing could be less surprising in a cosmology that has the figure of the paradox as its perfect symbolic form. Yet, before ending this last page of this volume, w e should offer a final image, a final resolution to Magic’s own world-making story. What does salvation look like, in practice? What is the closing frame that fades out, as Magic’s narrative finally sets? The Russian poet Fëdor Ivanovič Tjutčev offers us a beautiful image of Magic’s finale, which he presents in the form of a wish.
My soul would like to be a star,
But not when, like living eyes,
From the midnight sky,
They stare upon our sleepy world.
No, but during daytime when, hidden
By the searing haze of sunlight,
Like ever-brighter deities
They burn unseen in the pure ether.55
Notes
1 F. Berardi, ‘Bifo’, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso, 2017, p. 2.
2 A particularly interested analysis of this aspect can be found in U. Zilioli, The Cyrenaics, Durham: Acumen, 2012.
3 See A. A. Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
4 Antonio Negri’s review of S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Confini e Frontiere, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014, online at http://www.euronomade.info/?p=2814
5 A. ibn Abi Jum’ah, Oran Fatwa, as reported and translated in L. P. Havery, Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 61–2.
6 ‘Let not the believers take the unbelievers for protectors rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves against them, guarding carefully.’
7 ‘He who disbelieves in Allah after his having believed, not he who is compelled while his heart is at rest on account of faith, but he who opens (his) breast to disbelief – on these is the wrath of Allah, and they shall have a grievous chastisement.’
8 In the Sufi tradition, prudential strategies of communication were developed as early as the ninth century by Abu’l Qasim Muhammad al-Junayd – in part as a reaction against the ‘excessive’ openness of martyr Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, who paid with his life for having spoken too plainly in public about that which should remain batin (inner) or at the very least ‘esoteric’. Developing the position of saint Abu Said Ahmad al-Kharraz, Junayd advocated the necessity of speaking in isharat, that is through subtle allusions to the truth, in a language that ‘veils rather than unveil the true meaning’ (see. A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975, p. 59). As it will be discussed in the following pages in greater detail, this attitude has strong resemblances with Baltasar Gracian’s notion of conceptismo.
9 H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 37.
10 E. Kohlberg, Taqiyya in Shi’I Theology and Religion, in H. G. Kippenberg and G. G. Stroumsa (eds), Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995, p. 345.
11 J. Calvin, Deux épitres contre les Nicodémites, Geneve: Librairie Droz, 2004.
12 See M. Perniola, Del Sentire Cattolico, Il Mulino, 2001.
13 M. Perniola, The Cultural Turn of Catholicism, in R. Dottori (ed.), Reason and Reasonabless, Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005, p. 259.
14 For a comprehensive historical overview, see J. Lacouture, Jesuits: A Multibiography, Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995.
15 For an exploration of Gracián’s thought, context and later influence, see N. Spadaccini and J. Talens (eds.), Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracián and the New World Order, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
16 See B. Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, London: Penguin, 2011.
17 B. Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, London: Penguin, 2011, aphorism 211, p. 80.
18 Leo VI the Wise (866–912) was Byzantine emperor from 886 to 912. He was the author of the military treatise Taktika. See Leo VI, The Taktika of Leo VI, translated and commented by G. T. Dennis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
19 Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus (539–602) was Byzantine emperor from 582 to 602. He was the author of the highly influential military treatise Strategikon. See, Maurice, Maurice’s Strategikon, translated by G. E. Dennis, Philadelphia, PE: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
20 Sextus Julius Frontinus (43–103) was a Roman aristocrat and the author of technical and military treatise, such as the Statagematon. See Frontinus, Stratagems and Acqueducts of Rome, translated by C. Bennett, Harvard, MA: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 2003.
21 B. Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, London: Penguin, 2011, aphorism 77, pp. 29–30.
22 Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, aphorism 240, pp. 90–1.
23 Ibid., aphorism 133, pp. 49–50.
24 Ibid., aphorism 43, pp. 17–18.
25 Avicenna, De Anima 1,1 – as reported in L. E. Goodman, Avicenna, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 155.
26 A. Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1999.
27 For a presentation of Suhrawardi’s theory of ‘presential knowledge’, see M. A. Razavi, Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, Oxon: Routledge, 2014, Chapter 4.B. Suhrawardi’s own texts on this notion can be found in the ‘discourses’ collected in Suhrawardi, Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq), translated and commented by J Wallbridge and H. Ziai, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1999.
28 ‘The secret / of this world is an enigma that knowledge alone will never solve.’ Hafez, Divan, in Hafez, Ottanta Canzoni, Torino: Einaudi, 2008, p. 7 – my translation from S. Pello and G. Scarcia’s Italian version of the Persian original.
29 See M. Kamal, From Essence to Being: The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger, London: Icas Press, 2010, pp. 51–67.
30 J. Ries, Rites of Initiation and the Sacred, in J. Ries (ed.), Rites of Initiation; my translation from the Italian edition, J. Ries (ed.), I Riti di Iniziazione, Milano: Jaca Book, 2016, pp. 32–3.
31 Rom. 6.3-4.
32 For a study of the practice of theurgy, as profoundly interwoven with the figure of Iamblichus, see G. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
33 See Chapter 3, hypostasis 1.
34 See Chapter 2, hypostasis 4.
35 Álvaro de Campos/Fernando Pessoa, A Passagem das Horas, Ode Sensacionista, 1–5, my translation from the Portuguese original: ‘Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras, / Viver tudo de todos os lados, / Ser a mesma coisa de todos os modos possíveis ao mesmo tempo, / Realizar em si toda a humanidade de todos os momentos / Num só momento difuso, profuso, completo e longínquo.’ See F. Pessoa, Obra Poetica de Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2016.
36 Álvaro de Campos/Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria, 1–4, my translation from the Portuguese original: ‘Não sou nada. / Nunca serei nada. / Não posso querer ser nada. / À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.’ See F. Pessoa, Obra Poetica de Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2016.
37 Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, Patriota?, my translation from the Portuguese original: ‘Patriota? Não: só português. / Nasci português como nasci louro e de olhos azuis. / Se nasci para falar, tenho que falar-me.’ See F. Pessoa, Obra Poetica de Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2016.
38 Fernando Pessoa-himself, Autopsicografia, 1–4, my translation from the original Portuguese: ‘O poeta é um fingidor. / Finge tão completamente / Que chega a fingir que é dor / A dor que deveras sente.’ See Pessoa, Obra Poetica de Fernando Pessoa.
39 For an examination of Pessoa’s metaphysical thinking, see J. Balso, Pessoa, the Metaphysical Courier, New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011. Pessoa’s (slightly underwhelming) philosophical essays are collected in F. Pessoa, Philosophical Essays, edited by Nuno Ribeiro, New York, NY: Contra Mundum Press, 2012. However, more relevant to the present discussion are Pessoa’s esoteric writings, collected in F. Pessoa, Pagine Esoteriche, Milano: Adelphi, 2007.
40 A. Tabucchi, Un Baule Pieno di Gente: scritti su Fernando Pessoa, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2009, pp. 94–5 and 98. My translation from the Italian original.
41 ‘What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who will unite with me without swearing on my same flag’ (M. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 210.).
42 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, pp. 164–5.
43 Ibid., pp. 305–6.
44 H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of the ‘As if’, translated by C. K. Ogden, London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co., 1935, p. 176.
45 This particular kind of ‘anarchic thought’ could be also classified as a heterodox form of ‘post-anarchism’ – whose main theorist at present is Saul Newman, see the seminal S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, London: Lexington Books, 2001; and his latest systematization in S. Newman, Postanarchism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. There are some important similarities (as well as some strong dissimilarities), for example, with the strand of post-anarchism proposed by Michel Onfray, in M. Onfray, La Sculpture de Soi: La morale esthetique, Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1993).
46 E. Jünger, The Worker, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
47 E. Jünger, The Forest Passage, Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2014.
48 E. Jünger, Eumeswil, New York, NY: Marsilio Publishers, 1994.
49 Jünger, Eumeswil, pp. 42–3.
50 ‘How … could we cope with ineffective death / … which is like a sea, / where everyone is an Icarus, … / and besides, so much happens all around us / and everything is equally unimportant, yes, unimportant / although so difficult, so inhumanly difficult, so painful!’ Aleksander Wat, Before Breughel the Elder, in Selected Poems, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 27.
51 Emile Cioran in conversation with Christian Bussy, 1973, online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhR536ao_cg (last accessed 30 April 2017).
52 ‘A weak and continually foundering Tikkun, but also one that frees both from the brothels of historicism and from the subtle charm of soothsayers … . Not a vision of what is to come, but redemption (‘salvezza’, that is ‘salvation’, in the original Italian edition) of every moment in its capacity to name itself as that instant, that meantime in which the symbolic primacy of the word can represent itself, and do so precisely at the height of the allegorical, amid its ruins. That shadow of eschatological “reserve” projects itself onto every event, strong enough to free us … from every chrono-latry.’ In M. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, translated by M. E. Vatter, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994, p. 53.
53 ‘What is salvation, if there is no threat?’ A. Zagajewski, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p. 156.
54 ‘To understand dogma as … a symbol, is to “unravel” its dogmatism, and that is the meaning of Resurrection, of the other world, or rather, this understanding is already Resurrection.’ Henry Corbin, Alone With the Alone, op. cit., p. 200.
55 F. I. Tjutcev, ‘My soul would like to be a star’, my translation from Tommaso Landolfi’s version, in F. Tjutcev, Poesie, Milano: Adelphi, 2011, p. 52.