PREFACE – THE KEYMAKER

Timothy Morton

How do you get there from here? Like a relentlessly greedy cater­pi­llar that never metamorphoses into a butterfly, the present mom­ent, illusory and specious in all kinds of ways, psychological, anthro­pological, political, seems to enjoy swallowing the future as fast as new futures are invented. Cynical reason gobbles up this up-gobbling, reproducing the caterpillar in its very attempt to out-caterpillar the gobblers. If I can show you how much more paralyzed you are than you could possibly imagine, I am apparently smarter than you, and more revolutionary than you. I get an extra prize if I can show you how my very way of showing you your extreme and hopeless paralysis is also part of the paralyzing forces, as I reinforce the impossibility of finding an escape route from the present, which very much depends upon sealing off the exits from the very notion of presence that underwrites the present, the notion of going on underneath appearances, the one that unleashed upon Earth the fatal, genocidal sense of the term survive.

Many a critique seems to do a great job of emulating the old man weaving a net around himself in William Blake’s illumination of his poem ‘The Human Abstract’, a series of lies in the form of the truth:

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody Poor;

And Mercy no more could be

If all were as happy as we.

And mutual fear brings peace,

Till the selfish loves increase:

Then Cruelty knits a snare,

And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,

And waters the grounds with tears;

Then Humility takes its root

Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade

Of Mystery over his head;

And the Caterpillar and Fly

Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

Ruddy and sweet to eat;

And the Raven his nest has made

In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea

Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree;

But their search was all in vain:

There grows one in the Human Brain.1

When you put it like that, you begin to see the stakes involved in being a writer who wants to change things.

Perhaps then it would be good, if only for a tactical moment, to ignore the blandishments of cynical reason, and the best way to do so would be to ignore the current, which is to say present, state of play regarding philosophy, the conventional reference points. He who controls the past controls the future, as they say, and they who adjust the past hold open all kinds of different futures, and more significantly, they hold open the very possibility of a (different) future as such: futurality. By adjusting chiropractically the spine of the thoughts that got us here, all kinds of there open up, and you start to feel less oppressed by the weight of the past, because within the nightmare you have found some keys to liberate thought from its relentless, nightmarish intensity. Imagine for example that you could look to Neoplatonic and Arabic philosophies to find some magic keys to open the doors of futurality. It might be much more refreshing than rearranging the coloured squares on the mosaic of contemporary theory, which too often results in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of cynical reason.

Federico Campagna has done such a thing. For every door there is a key, and what a delightful surprise that some very old, rusting, gnarly keys from imperial Rome and Persia turn out to fit snugly all kinds of locks that seem to be made of nano-engineered, almost unbreakably encrypted oppression metals.

Notes

1 W. Blake, The Human Abstract, in The Complete Poems, London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 128–9.