The central role played by sacrifice in archaic societies has now been taken over by experiment.
The cruel priests who raised the knife over the altar are now the conspirators.
As a premise to any discourse on experiment, here is a passage that Marx crossed out of The German Ideology: “In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the shaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the shaping of men by men…”
Post-history is inhabited by people who believe in “causes,” in “mankind,” in “society,” in many other hypostases, but it is ruled by a scornful (perhaps even transcendental) being for whom all is material, all is exchangeable, all is exploitable: a perpetual manipulator, who invents forms and throws them away, grows tired of everyday materials and is always looking for new ones, who digs up the Amazon forests and drills pack ice so as to add a flavor, a distant aroma, to the kykeòn served in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The unnamable present.
Marx refers to post-history when he writes about the transition from “history” to “universal history”: an experimental phase of history, in which everything forms a single corpus, in which nothing is external to society, in which everything acts on everything, as in the resonant primordial cosmos. Its empirical background is the world market: a one-way exit from Borniertheit, from provincial narrow-mindedness. The world market reinvents a sort of fate (in the same way that post-history revives all archaic categories, which are now applied to a reality that inverts the reality in which those categories were born).
“The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the primal isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labor between various nations spontaneously [naturwüchsig] brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns whole forms of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact…”
“From this it follows that this transformation of history into universal history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the ‘self-consciousness,’ the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical ghost, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself.” Nothing is more metaphysical than that “quite material, empirically verifiable act” and it can be said that the true fulfillment of metaphysics, almost its return to the state of mystery, where all is acted out in the absence of words, with a silent display of objects, takes place precisely with what Marx describes as a “transformation of history into universal history.”
The societies we study in books, the societies that make up the past, which have left an iridescent pool of detritus or have vanished leaving almost no trace, like bird tracks, all obeyed the need to negotiate, clash and be reconciled with something external to themselves. And from that external thing they drew their finest strength. Or they became chattels of the Despot, who governed them for his own ends—the ends of an individual against those of everyone else. The society into which we are born is the first, in the history of the planet, that seeks to be self-sufficient and answerable only to itself. The names of the Outside exist now only in dictionaries, apart from the word nature: but nature today indicates first and foremost a sequence of social facts or, at most, accidents. This is another reason why we have to find a different name for this kind of society, and calling it post-historical signifies that the whole of history, in comparison, now appears like a panorama of ruins, an inexhaustible contagion.
In 1908, during twelve weeks of visionary experience, the first post-historical city appeared to Alfred Kubin: its name was Pearl.
History: transformations (events described in history books) happen against an order that presents itself as stable. It is an order of substances, of correspondences, of analogies. The invisible, omnipresent, inevitable axis of the world.
Post-history: transformations are implicit in the experimental nature of order, which presents such character as stable.
Today we can recognize the great naïveté of those (and they were many) who in the nineteenth century accused the new age of “materialism.” The hidden and imperative gnosis of the modern age assumes, in fact, that all is spirit and that spirit is the most pliable of materials.
“It’s no more than x plus y”—today this phrase, more than any other, has full right to rank as Commonplace. We hear it repeated in many forms: it is the wisdom of the man in the street, the insight of the psychologist, it goes with the fixed smile of the researcher: “Life? There’s nothing to be surprised about, it’s physics plus chemistry.” And then we hear the second voice, which Bloy has taught us to recognize in Commonplaces. For something to be “nothing more than,” some part of it has to be useless, negligible, voidable. This part is its very appearance, the letter, which has to be replaceable with its components. But as soon as we express this formula, a suspicion arises: that the world before us is one of patent esotericism, that it has rejected the nexus with the exoteric, that the letter is no longer a protective shell but the secret meaning itself.
Capitalism: the economic name for an immense upheaval in the brain, the supremacy achieved by exchange—hence by digitality—over all things; every other principle becomes an island within it, just as there are tribal islands inside the global market. Socialism itself, fraternal enemy of capitalism, depends on capitalism in the same way that a Salvation Army leaflet echoes the verses of Isaiah. In theory, that is. In practice, when socialism is then applied to correct the intrinsic evils of capital, it immediately produces far greater evils, while having no effect on those evils it counters. And this time they are more loathsome evils, since they are more human. In the crudity of capitalism, one element of ordeal remains: money. In socialism, which has the most inept goal—namely to place everything in the hands of man—there is no longer a dark extra-human discriminating factor, such as money. In its place there are new priests: spies.
The park of the Son of Heaven epitomized the whole of nature in miniature, in the middle of society: now the whole of nature is our park, and we don’t know what it epitomizes.
An embarrassment peculiar to post-history:
“When one same impression awakens within us a geometer, a child, a poet, an artist, a philologist—a dozen languages and types of accommodations, and series of distinct acts—it is quite understandable that we should feel embarrassed.”
In Russia, law is an imported item. Like all exotic curiosities, it rouses enthusiasm and creates its devotees. But the background onto which it is applied remains hostile. There are then two possibilities: either the law is banished forthwith, insofar as it attempts to contaminate the genuine prosperity of the land, or it is assimilated, but in such a way as to be held forever in contempt. During his brief months in power, Tsar Peter III, who played games with wooden soldiers and had a mouse court-marshaled and hanged for daring to climb over two cardboard fortresses, decided to introduce in Russia the code of law that Frederick the Great had recently brought into force in Prussia. “But,” as Claude Rulhière noted, “both through the ignorance of the translators and the shortage of words in the Russian language for all the ideas of law, not a single senator could understand the code; and the Russians saw this vain attempt merely as a sign of contempt for their own ways and a foolish attachment to foreign ways.” When it came to the age that sought to explain history step by step, Frederick’s enlightened and military law was replaced by Marx’s law of the phases of development of productive forces. But both of these served above all to perfect the practices of the Bureau of Secret Affairs, set up by Peter the Great to oversee the conduct of the nation through a sophisticated policing system—and which continued operating with zeal and providence under various names, from Ochrana to the KGB, offering among other things the only example in Russia of the undeniable march of progress.
Between the death of Hitler and the death of Stalin, there was a moment of lull in which nations, still dazed, prepared meekly to slot into the new order. Post-history had finished blossoming; it now awaited an Amazonian lushness. During those years there was a proliferation of objects. Anyone practiced in the hermetic arts would have described them as subtle objects—objects that, in comparison with ordinary objects up to that time, were like the subtle body is to the gross body in alchemy. The peculiar mechanisms of the age gradually came into motion. The first moves of the game were indicated by the war in Algeria and the assassination of John Kennedy. And everything soon became wrapped up in it, everyone was involved, with the same naturalness that Coca-Cola cans were used to decorate fetishes, between nails and splintered glass, as though they had always been there for that purpose.
Two parallel histories can be written about what took place between 1945 and today: one by the historians, with all its intricate apparatus of parameters, statistics, masses, political parties, movements, negotiations, production; and the other by the secret services, punctuated by murders, deceptions, betrayals, bombings, cover-ups, arms deals. We know that both histories are inadequate, that each claims to be self-sufficient, that neither could be transposed into the other, that they will continue their parallel lives. But hasn’t it perhaps always been like this—at least since the time when the Old Man of the Mountain let his men loose on the world? Yes, it has long been so, but secrecy at that time really was secret—and evidence of it was arbitrary and restricted, a presence perceptible but elusive—a presence, in fact, that remained secret. Secrecy had not yet been assimilated into the secret services. For this to happen, it was necessary to wait for the years of pure post-history, the expression used here—a poor name, which only indicates our inadequacy in the face of the unnamable present—to describe the age that follows 1945.
The metaphysical significance of the secret services lies in the words that describe them: secret services because they take over secrecy, the whole of secrecy. Their meaning—far more than in their foul and dizzying achievements—lies in the fact that, through violence, they have forced the secret to make itself apparent, to become too visible, as blatant as a poster on a street corner. There is one task that all secret services share, which is far more relevant, far more effective than all their wars: the annihilation of the secret.
Post-history: the numbing epiphany in which hypostases solidify, they become tangible bodies, and thus become less perceivable than ever before. Their contagion casts doubt on the substance of all bodies. When secrecy is put into words, the words dazzle. They are no longer read; they are merely reproduced.
“Hidden power,” “secret organization,” “scheming,” “manipulation,” “conspiracy,” “double-dealing”: words and concepts that had once been those of the Gnostics, who were still illuminated by the oblique light of the Templars, and today mean murder, international blackmail, bribery, corruption. Crime assumes the shape that used to be that of the perennial heresy: of gnosis.
The secret agent is cloaked by a peculiar squalor, which has begun to emerge even in the novel. Yet why should this squalor have such a penetrating effect? Because the secret agent usurps the place of the secret—and Psyche is deeply disappointed when she realizes that the monster is no longer the secret, but the agent who had the task of destroying it.
Praxis, an obvious notion for every Jesuit, might only sound like a bold impiety in the cramped cities of Germany, where “time falls drop by drop, and no sound disturbs the reflections of solitude.” Only in the upstanding, awkward, Nordic province, in its stolid and respectable melancholy, could such exaltation stir the leaves and dust, until its frenzied citizens took up their spades to mix blood with earth. Marx’s word presupposes, as material that demons can infiltrate, a place that is “profoundly tranquil; they sometimes made a noise there about certain ideas, but without ever thinking of applying them. One would have said that thought and action were made to have no reference to each other, and that truth, among Germans, resembled the statue of Hermes, without hands to seize, or feet to advance.” Madame de Staël, thanks to her worldly knowledge, felt all of this straightaway, but it was too early for her to talk it over with Marx, who would have identified philosophy with those missing hands and feet.
Tsar Nicholas I was an intermediary in the long (and now stale) encounter between intelligentsia and praxis. Around 1840, at the start of the “important decade 1838–1848” (as Pavel Annenkov baptized it), the Russian authorities felt it appropriate for those young men wanting to go to the West to be directed toward the German universities rather than to Paris, a place of corruption and revolution. It was thought that Germany still kept some vestige of decency, under the mystical despotism of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. But if the purpose, according to the ominous words of the minister Uvarov, really was to delay Russia’s intellectual development by fifty years, then history had once again taken its cue from a shrewd deceit on the part of the police and the rulers in order to turn it into an absurdity. Certainly, in Berlin, barricades and insurrections were abominated. But nor did the city have the lurid charm of the dissipated life, “la vie moderne,” the edgy chroniques in the newspapers, it lacked the volatile blend of fever and cynicism that Baudelaire breathed each day. It lacked the hidden presence of the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the overt presence of the grisettes. Snobbery had not yet infiltrated its crude substance. Germany lacked something: it hadn’t lived long enough. So much more virulent was the energy associated with ideas, more glamorous and alluring was the exotic vision of an “action,” of a “praxis” into which to transform it. The young Engels, already an excellent chronicler of events, put it like this: “Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and if he has any idea of the power of the mind over the world, he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on the philosophy of revelation.” In that lecture hall a young Russian aristocrat, Mikhail Bakunin, was seen wildly applauding the philosopher. He had arrived in Berlin in 1840 as if to the “New Jerusalem,” with money given by his friend Aleksandr Herzen. In the vast land from which he came, his fellow countrymen were already talking tumultuously about Schelling and Hegel, even in the farthest districts. Signs of this could be seen as early as 1830 in Ivan Kireyevsky’s letters from Berlin, and every post-Hegelian pamphlet was being read by too many. Nothing is more fertile than misunderstanding. What in Germany was the restless urge to move on to “action,” which naturally assumed those professorial, pedantic, aloof features that Marx and Engels would ridicule from The Holy Family onward, became in Russia the natural legacy of the “superfluous men,” impoverished and humiliated aristocrats, consumed by rêverie, geometric loci for subtle psychic dissociation—the Russian disease and, later on, the Russian novel! These, in short, were the most prized materials of the intelligentsia. For these people, hopelessly extraneous to all academic solace, “action” was the only Fata Morgana capable of channeling their immense latent violence in one direction, without it being lost in the whirling abjection of personal life.
The point of contact—central even from a geographical point of view—was a small book entitled Prolegomena zur Historiosophie published in 1838 by a Polish nobleman, August Cieszkowski, a fatal splinter in the Hegelian legacy. In just a few pages, which sectioned history by triads, as his master had taught, Cieszkowski unleashed the djinn of praxis—a word apparently bare and secular, in which the new figure of the Paraclete emerged. It sought above all to follow the consequences of a statement that then sounded plausible: “Now, thought itself has thought itself through.” What then is the next step, the “transition” that opens up? It “lies in the recognition that consciousness is not the supreme end but must itself advance over and outside itself and, even better, out of itself. Transition appears as the demand for a substantial unity of thought and being which is not simply in and for itself but must also generate a substratum out of itself.” Behind its coding, the language of Hegelian descent is very exact: that “substratum” is none other than new material, technical material, which is searching timidly for a name. But, for it to flourish, Will has finally to be transferred from its Napoleonic catechism to places that were so far forbidden: “Now it is the absolute will which should be raised to the heights of speculation which reason has already known … Philosophy leaves its own proper position and rises above itself into a domain which is alien but which nevertheless thoroughly conditions its further development, i.e., into the absolutely practical sphere of the will.” This marked the complete reversal of the relationships between thought and will: “According to Hegel, will is only a particular way of thinking, and this is itself the wrong conception: on the contrary, it is thought that is a constituent moment of will, since will and action are thought that returns to being.” The dream of “reconciliation with reality under every aspect and in every field of life,” which obsessed the very young Hegelian Bakunin (and so many others throughout Europe!), could therefore happen through trust in the magic of this entirely new, elementary word: praxis. The fact that barely concealed behind it was the “will of will” in which Heidegger would establish the emblem of nihilism (and therefore technology) could not have been apparent, primarily because they all had so little experience of technology. And yet it was Cieszkowski once again who formulated the maxim that regulated the new times: “Nihil est in voluntate et actu quod prius non fuerit in intellectu—There is nothing in the will or in action that was not already in the intellect.” This was to have a crucial consequence. “The will must thus undergo its phenomenological process as reason has already done. Political life [Staatsleben] must, in its turn, affirm its universal hegemony as art and philosophy have done, one after the other.” And here his pragmatism all of a sudden becomes brutal: “In the future, philosophy must agree to become principally applied. Just as the poetry of art passes over into the prose of thought, so must philosophy descend from the height of theory into the field of praxis.” Philosophy, “applied” at last, agrees to die, but penetrating first into every object, as we can now recognize.
Abnormal events were brewing in the inner recesses of history: a “new migration,” no longer of barbarians toward the spirit, but of the spirit toward the barbarities of nature, eager for deliverance. A dark process, “announcing itself with a fermentation, and indeed in part with a putrefaction” (and don’t Marx and Engels speak shortly after about “the putrefaction of the Hegelian philosophy”?). At the end of this alchemical process, coniunctio shines brightly once more: in this case it is the abrogation of Trennung, of that odious “separation” that had brought so much suffering to Lessing, and to all the cruel and tender souls of romanticism after him. “Thus absolute peace is celebrated between interiority and exteriority and this assures the appearance, outside and inside, of that mutual victory of theirs, which removes tangible appearance from the contempt in which it was held.” Cieszkowski’s tangled arguments enmesh what will soon be contending powers of thought. Marx (who claims in a letter of 1882 not to have read Cieszkowski, but this is difficult to believe), Nietzsche, and Stirner are still waiting, hidden in the dream of that unreal peace, to spring forth, split company, and clash.