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At this hour of the night - The great watchmen are dead.  Doubtless they killed them.  The weak glow of their solitary stubbornness disturbed the party of sleep too much.  That, at least, is what we think, we guess - we who’ve come so late - in light of the perplexity that their name still stirs up at certain times.  Every living trace of what they did and were has been erased, it seems, by the maniacal obstinacy of resentment.  In the end, all that’s left of them for this world is a handful of dead images that it still haloes with the villainous satisfaction of having conquered those who were better than it is.  So here we are, orphans of grandeur, marooned in a world of ice where no fires light the horizon.  Our questions have to remain unanswered, the old ones assure us; then they say, all the same: “there’s never been a blacker night for intelligence.”

Hic et nunc- One day you pay more attention than usual to the collective silence on a metro line, and are overtaken by a deep shiver, a primal horror, coming out from behind the shared fakery of contemporary morals and suddenly plain for all to see.  The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses, mass-man; that’s how they represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes, as the catastrophic child of the industrial era and the end of all enchantments.  But even there, no matter the name, there’s still that shiver; they shiver before the infinite mystery of ordinary man.  Each of us feels a pure force growing behind the theater of our qualities, hiding out there; a pure force that we’re all supposed to ignore.  What’s left is the necessary anxiety we think we can appease by demanding of one another a rigorous absence from each other’s selves, and an ignorance of a force which is common, but is now unqualifiable, because it is anonymous.  And the name of that anonymity is Bloom.

In spite of the extreme confusion that reigns on its surface, and perhaps precisely because of that, our era is by its nature messianic.  What should be understood by this is that very old distinctions have now been effaced, and that many thousand-year-old divisions have now in turn been divided.  Our era is reducing itself to one single, basic reality, and to amusement in that reality.  More and more visibly, our contemporary non-societies - those imperative fictions - endlessly populate themselves with pariahs and parvenus.  And the parvenus are themselves merely pariahs that have betrayed their condition and would like to make it forgotten by all means - but it always ends up biting them in the ass.  One might also say, following another line of demarcation, that there’s nothing left of these times but idlers and the disturbed, and that the disturbed are in the end no more than idlers trying to cheat on their own essential inaction.  Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life,” which seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason to live, ever really distract them fully from the fundamental emotional tone that inhabits them: boredom?

The reigning confusion is the result of the planetary deployment of all these false paradoxes, under which our central truth nevertheless is born.  And this truth is that we are tenants of an existence which is kind of exile, in a world which is a desert, that we’ve been thrown out into this world with no mission to accomplish, with no place assigned us, and no recognizable filiation — abandoned.  That we are at the same time so little and already too much.  True politics, ecstatic politics, begins there - with an brutal and all-enveloping laugh.  With a laugh that undoes the pathos oozing out of the so-called problems of “joblessness,” “immigration,” “precariousness,” and “marginalization.”  There’s no social problem in unemployment, just the metaphysical fact of our own idleness.  There’s no social problem in immigration, just the metaphysical fact of our own foreignness.  There’s no social problem in precariousness or marginalization, just this inexorable existential reality that we’re all alone, dying of it alone in the face of death, that we are all, for all eternity, finite beings.  You decide what’s serious about that and what’s just social entertainment.  The era that opened in 1914, where the illusion of “modern times” completed its decomposition while simultaneously metaphysics completed its self-realization, saw the ontological burst out into history in its pure state and on all levels.  Such tectonic upsurges of truth appear in those rare moments where the lie of civilizations start to crumble.  Our times are part of a curious constellation, which includes the decline of the middle ages and the first Gnostic centuries of our era.  The same Mood [Stimmung] expresses itself everywhere, with the same radicalness: finiteness, perdition, separation.  “Modern times” and the christian west were born before that from such outbursts, as a reaction.  This kinship keeps us from considering the emotional tone that dominated the twentieth century as simple “malaise in civilization.”  And it’s not about subjective dispositions, nor some capricious propensity towards despair or disapproval: no, this tone is, on the contrary, the most obvious one of our era, one that they work ceaselessly to repress, at every stage in its advancement.  It’s not that men have - negatively - “lost their bearings;” it’s rather that they have positively become Blooms.  Bloom is the final upsurge of the native.  From now on there’s nothing anywhere but Bloom and Bloom’s escape…

-Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom

(Source: zinelibrary.info)