Hay sólo dos países: el de los sanos y el de los enfermos/por un tiempo se puede gozar de doble nacionalidad/pero, a la larga, eso no tiene sentido. -Enrique Lihn
A brother-writer has been pumping iron and taking boxing lessons ever since Trump won. He’s Jewish (with a Latin tinge).
An oasis of fascism in a desert of liberalism…
First of all I’m not a writer anymore. I locked myself in a nauseating white room for 48 hours–the length of an ICE detainer for an undocumented immigrant picked up, say, for street-vending–with nothing but mineral water and a copy of Mao’s “Combat Liberalism.”
When I emerged, like the revolutionary Chinese general Zhu De, I was drug-free and no-fap, I was anti-fa: I was a Muskeljudentum unashamed of my hairy legs and swollen with radical chic Jewish sperm, like an Ashkenazi Nietzsche of the pure left, the un-cucked echt alt-left, the ultra-vanguard (Heidegger would have considered me a spiritual Jew worthy of an epistolary-onanistic romance or the creation of future ideologues of civilizational pain, Bataille would have approved of my Judeo-priapism, my genetic compulsion to messianic Bolshevism to the point at which fear of biological dissolution collapses in an impotent paroxysm of counter-solar violence).
In reality, as we all sense deep down, the times of left-Nietzscheanism have arrived.
The most badass genderqueer antifa chicanx combat veteran who leads the self-defense of Berkeley against deep state-funded fascists (and there’s no doubt that this is the cat’s paw of not only the police but of the university, of the state, of the military) understands that in the future they’re just a future perfect for a cyborgian warrior elite that, having eliminated the elements of Kantian kindness in themselves, defends the most futuristic kindness, the kind of kindness that survives from day to day, that they personally have no stake in because they’re killers, but certainly the kind of killers who not only never read The Washington Post, but never defended themselves on the level of Gramscian cultural-militarism. But they also know that kindness won’t be the same in the future, in this apocalyptic ecocide. If mothers, if women, if transwomen, if shamans, if brujas, if etc., take control, the fake Holodomor will be dwarfed by by faker counter-histories on the fringes of a Houston Stalker Chernobyl. Where in this planetary toxicity can one find the values of patriarchy? If we’re all going to die in deluges and drought, can we save a last gasp of misery?
When I emerged from that room I foreswore all of the shit I was warned about by Aimé Césaire and Thomas Sankara, those feline petty-bourgeois aspirations towards “literature.” At that point, clean and beautiful, I decided that I would never write again until the full emancipation of humanity and the planet, starting with the Twitterati fascist scum, the Brahmanic priesthood of Pepe, but extending, at least, until the execution by firing squad of Bernie Sanders.
When I emerged I was no longer a writer though I harbored a hope that come true communism I would be able to spend my time writing mediocre classical Hebrew poetry, mirroring with neo-pastoralist nostalgia everything from the Canticles to Bialik, I would even include as a gesture toward ecumenicism the oriental irrationalism of the Yemeni paraliturigists, the Afro-phallic cultism of Norman Mailer: I would torture animals while reciting Isaac Luria, I would stir up a crypto-Sabbatian revolution within the revolution: after all a Jew is a Jew, even under fully automated luxury communism.
When I emerged I’d already forsworn liberalism, so what I wanted was not to write macho statues but to engage in fleeting revolutionary threesomes, when a man comes together with two women in a fleeting demisexual moment, in which each pleasure is ubiquitous and semipiternal, is a metaphor for paradise against shortages.
There’s no poetry after Auschwitz and no good poetry after fully automated luxury communism. (Maybe there’s dadaist poetry, maybe life qua biological life becomes that unbearable that artists collectively decide to engage in aleatoric car bombings, aleatoric Manson cults).
Wasn’t that the point all along?[2]
Second of all my Latin tinge is in reality a Litvak tinge: lol genetics I guess one day they’ll tell me in the new concentration camp who fucked my great-great-grandma if I can work enough for Foxconn to pay for the mandatory testing. I swear that although I pass for non-white on certain occasions, I’ve never used that passing to get laid. That’s not quite true, but it’s more or less true, truer every day.
I’m not in fact training in boxing but in Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. And when I was in Latin America I was working for the Mossad, as the Men’s Recovery Project adumbrated. I had deep intel that in Dimona we had a secret weapon to destroy even Miguel Serrano’s Black Sun. That’s why I teamed up with the Posadists in order to advance their line to grotesque proportions (as if Georg Grosz had drawn Bosch with infinite patience). Because I knew at the end of the day not only would we win a nuclear base in order to destroy spiritual Hitlerism and the future Palestinian state in Patagonia, but that at the end of the world the nuclear-class conflict wouldn’t be won by the proletariat, nor even by the ruling class, but by the Chosen People.
And I don’t know if I’m some kind of Stern Gang Tom of Finland. Trust me I have psychopathic fantasies about scalping Nazis, like everyone else, and also trust me that my biceps aren’t all that impressive.
At the end of the day all of antifa is just a Zionist conspiracy to train fascist contras with NATO’s Kurdish allies, I suppose. The worst part about historical epistemology is that the tankies are always right by virtue of their always tailing, always expressing a Leibnizian worst-of-all-possible-worlds scenario. I want Chelsea Manning to be elected president and Chelsea Clinton to go to the gulag, but it’s possible neither Chelsea can be told apart, these days of Kristeva’s black sun, the melancholia that absorbs everything.
An aside about my “Latin tinge”. All I wanted in life, secretly and ideologically, the way Raoul Peck dramatizes it in Young Marx, was for Hillary to be elected president and to retire to a beach in Cuba, like Huey Newton when he’d finally had enough, manically drinking mojitos with Elaine Browne. I wanted to discern the slow imperialist eclipse through homemade romantic-neosavage goggles, secretly believing it to be just that, an eclipse, a temporary astronomical phenomenon predicted by genocidal European racists with a New Age bent. I never had any courage, I don’t have courage now, and my only virtue was a kind of cowardly inability to turn away from fear and from hedonism. I thought I was really good, and I was, at limning the necrophiliac margins of the capitalist apocalypse: I was gonna die doing that, cumming five times a day and “reading all the books.”
Okay.
If I’ve supposedly taken up an antifa-tical boxing on behalf of a fictive Jewish identity, a deep belief in my imminent annihilation, that seems weird, given the existence of Jared Kushner. In another life and body, I could have gone to idk liberalism. If I’d had a little more myopic opportunism I could have led a cadre of DSA activists through my sincerely ironic Twitter persona. I’d call it Pothead Gaddafi, some kind of pun on Juche and Juicy J, who gives a shit it’s all the same.
But in fact I don’t have any defenses, I’m just comfortably losing my mind. When I had my “Latin tinge” in Argentina I used to drink mate and discuss its diasporic existence, how Hezbollah fighters drank mate to fuel themselves. Now mate is drunk in the U.S. but it’s named after a genocidal slur against the Guarani. And now Hezbollah is fueled by selling Captagon to ISIS, and luckily, as always, the profiteers are winning.
The radical poet Heriberto Yépez says that he understands how people are radicalized by the Koran, because he was radicalized by the Quijote. If I was radicalized by The Savage Detectives, it was because I intuitively understood that the ability to be radicalized by apocalyptic or even just scatological literature is an openness to revolution. Even if it led me down the path on the one hand of macho tourist vanguardism and on the other of a kind of retro-modernist melancholia. I was always at least ready for a kind of fight.
How many people were reactionized by Trilling, or rather by the CIA $ that were given to innumerable Trillings? How many were killed by the New York Intellectuals whom Edward Said intuitively sniffed out even as a young colonial intellectual? How many people are going to die because of Tina Fey but, more importantly, how many Pinochetist helicopter flights has Tina Fey personally flown herself?
I’d rather be anywhere else than here than in the East Bay. I’d rather for us to go down fighting with our rudimentary training, to die generationally like the seventies Latin American left, guerilla-trained or hiding or going into exile, than sitting around at these counter-protests waiting to be mowed down.
I used to take bets with my close friends about who would be the first “neocon” renegade of our generation, and then Angela Nagle published her book, and everyone who has a fucking conscience reads that with a frisson of horror, with such disgust that it would be impossible to think of talking to those kind of people, yet at the same time other people who seem okay recite her points. I guess that’s how neoconservatism starts, how fascism starts.
I don’t know why there isn’t a militant antifa defense against neocons, an antineocoño (and don’t ask me how to scan that, only the most disgusting Silicon Valley yimby bros, the ones who “only read Chomsky for the linguistics,” pretend to side with antifa if only they would grow up and recognize that it’s phonologically and metaphysically impossible to use a word concretely manifested in actual history in its context and in the contextual translation of all contexts, and just give up on internationalism and admit their dudebro sins, because at the end of the day when I was in that college reading group the lazy charismatic PUA Marxist took the girl I was interested in, the girl who failed to understand Rawls .[3]
The truth is that I’ve lost everything to fascism and I’ve lost nothing to fascism.[4] In fascism everyone betrays you and gives you the gift of their transcendental honesty. In anti-fascism the Athenian and Thessalonikian kickboxing teams benefit from half the Syrian national team ending up in exile, in order to better take on their Golden Dawn rivals. The stuff of Vice. In fascism the woman you love most becomes unrecognizable to you, as does everyone else. For a half hour she knows the praxis of violence and self-masking, and for the next five hours she doubts herself, wondering whether wearing lingerie on her face in her first black bloc is embarrassing.
We both know that at the end of the day, of all days, we’d go to the desert like our murdered and tortured comrades, lured by a single mirage of a disguised neo-Nazi girl promising an orgy, a kind of peyote-infused sad apocalyptic sex at the end of the world, a slow sex surrounded by the howls of captive rattlesnakes, as if they had imbibed the voices of coyotes, and when we arrive we find instead of what we always wanted and feared, the very thing we always loathed and never wanted and never even thought about. The barrel of a gun, the vertigo of the helicopter, the death of our lives, the perverted laughter of the survivors, the commandment to survive, to die in your own way without a second of fear, the fear of lacking fear, the murderous hatred of everyone to your right, the knowledge that everyone to your right will finally plant the knife into your sternum.
Okay third of all I’ve gained some stuff from fascism.
For instance, I’ve had better sex.
The New York Times–to the chagrin of Marc Thiessen, who would rather get it all over with in a phallo-nuclear war with only a theocratic, Texan grunt–claims that the historic compromise between Brezhvenist state capitalism and the “occidental” sexual revolution produced the best modernist orgasms for women.
But the best orgasms in the necro-capitalist world are certainly Makavejev’s orgasms, the orgasms you get when you’re given a little time, a little political education and aesthetic sensibility, and a random partner, when the eternally horny working class is fucking itself to death under the centralized planning of an irrelevant Kafkian bureaucracy, but what’s going on is a panic only on one side, a Posadist or a Kafkian panic, which is to say that there’s a crisis of order, because when you fuck and they call you a neo-Nazi, a “moral Bolshevik,” you realize you’re an erotomaniacal Bolshevik, you’re a genderqueer Bolshevik with a thousand bestial names, you’re the thing they pretend to condemn but only want to kill.
And in response, trust us, we’re killing all normies.
In reality, it’s possible to fall in love three times a week under the fall of capitalism, passionately: and to experience the downfall of each love.
And it’s more than possible to fuck three times that amount.
I was at da starbucks yesterday and there were two women there. One was approximately seventy years-old and the other was approximately a decade older. The younger woman, with a quavering voice, naturally, led the conversation: about her weight, about Weight Watchers, about maintaining, about her Y workouts, about her willingness to take the older woman to the gym, to Weight Watchers, etc. Then they started to talk about their book clubs, about their past strokes. The older woman, who’d said practically nothing the whole time, said she was reading V Lenin. State and Revolution, she said. It’s about the downfall of capitalism. The younger woman said, I’m in two book clubs, and in both, we’re reading this book by a young man named J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy, it’s called.
And they proceeded to babble about Trump…
From an email from a lost southern-hemispheric comrade:
My life is strange these days. I’m in the middle of a confused pilgrimage in search of money. That’s how it’s been the last couple months, or years, I don’t remember exactly.
In memory of my comrade, Heather Heyer.
NOTES
1 An open and intimate reply to Benj, because I only speak to the liberals I love.
At this point an apostrophe to the people you claim not to love and who more importantly don’t love you can only be a secret complicity, an act of self-sabotage, and/or a flagrant snitching: a photogenic cop-hug or a botched autoerotic asyphyxiation.
2 My writing is inhibited by my sex drive. The more I fuck and get fucked the less I write. The opposite is true, too: my sex drive is inhibited by my writing drive. My death drive is inhibited by my anti-fascist drive but at the same time my death drive provides the cover for certain guerilla terrorist formations, for instance when I realize that my libidinal drive is dead-on-arrival, like for instance when Gudrun Ensslin stood up well before she joined the RAF and said “This fascist state means to kill us all…Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them.” I don’t know the extent yet to which my libidinal drive and my revolutionary drive are one and the same, or opposed to each other, or just effluvia in a meaningless ontological flux.
3 Jordy Cummings had an amazingly gentle, homicidal takedown of Nagle’s Strasserite manifesto I wish everyone were reading right now instead of this footnote. I don’t regret being myself, but I wish I had the social patience to deconstruct the manifestly evil, but superficially palatable, epiphenomena of bad supremacist thinking among a certain kind of so-called leftist would-be thought and leadership. These people are in fact fascists, they want to kill off every trans and disabled and non-white worker, not literally but more than literally: in reality. The book is popular due the hopefully shedding conformism of the new crop of eager activists. It’s also popular because it expresses the pain of being a supremacist socialist who wants a salve, who wants a lean socialism at end times for the dying petty-bourgeoisie. For whatever reason, when I was talking to my friend K about the ungenerate book, which we took as a kind of gnostic joke, we both immediately agreed that the most undoubtedly uncanny moment in an uncannily evil book was this throwaway line about Justin Trudeau. As described by Cummings: The politics Nagle is espousing are that of a parlour trick. She repeatedly throughout the book will combine in a single paragraph or even a single sentence a perfectly reasonable and defensible left position – let’s say Justin Trudeau being a white supremacist – with an absurd one – Hillary Clinton being a feminist and “Bernie Bros” being anti-feminist. So, to be clear, Nagle is saying to Indigenous people and the great swathe of the Left that have finally come to support Indigenous social movements that they are the equivalent of a liberal because they justifiably argue that, even if personally Justin is a nice guy with a tattoo, he is not your friend, he is an upholder of white supremacy. Opposing Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Liberal Party’s history of white supremacy is the same as supporting Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. Okay.
4 By fascism I don’t just mean Césaire’s classic definition of the boomerang and the introjection of an absolute horror inflicted outside of Europe: By fascism I also mean the fear that cuts to the bone among the very people who already have nothing left to fear. I mean what Benjamin said when he said that even the dead won’t be safe if they’re victorious. And we won’t let them step foot, ultimately, on the dead, on what is sacred to us, which is just a kind of posthumous guerilla warfare on behalf of our own shadows. Our own lives might be trivial, but when it comes to the dead, we’re ultra-nihilists. We would plant bombs on the uteruses of viable F-35 fetuses, even and especially if they had microdicks attached like barnacled Democrats.