this is going to be an analysis of the first of the four cardinal directions on the rotpolitical compass
the idea has been brewing in my head for some time, since the period in my life when i was most suicidal, winter-spring 2022. i don’t want it to be too heavy, but read the title
i don’t think death or beauty or suicide or fascism are good. if you read this and take that away, or think that that’s what i think, i’m a bad writer
my chemical romance had it right when they started it off at the end, but if they wanted to sing songs about death, that should have been it. instead of being about death, the black parade is really about rotting, the transition from one life to another. in my head, death and rotting are perpendicular to each other, because of course the rotting of a body is the swarming of a new form of life. instead, death is the total uncompromising annihilation of a body
honestly you can just watch mishima instead of reading this
or read zizek
sublime beauty exists in the gap between reality and the ideal or some shit. the ephemeral quality of things and their failure to properly realize their ideals produces beauty
god i hate writing so much, i’m so bad at it
when we talk about beauty, we need to distinguish it from cuteness, from sex appeal, and from allure, the aesthetic of rotting
since sex appeal and beauty are in direct opposition, it’s much easier to distinguish the two. sex appeal is kinda founded on a total disinhibition, a slut of course is a woman with no morals. beauty on the other hand requires a rigid adherence to rules, and it has an immense fragility
a perfect circle is beautiful, ending at the beginning
anorexia is an embodiment of a beautiful circular logic, to kill one’s self by rigidly receding into nothingness
i think that’s how we get to suicide. i think there are two different approaches to suicide. either it comes spontaneously out of nowhere, or - the beautiful kind - it’s the endpoint of a long, intentional (if unconscious) process of alienating oneself from one’s social environment, parting with one’s posessions etc…
the way that i understand death drive is that i have an unconscious life negating desire for something that is currently impossible, so i covertly do things in order to bring it about without being fully aware of it. my two examples are going to be suicide and anorexia, subcultures that i’ve felt death drive towards, even knowing that i’m a poser
i think the classic way we understand suicide is that there is suicidal intent, and suicidal ideation. i understand intent as wanting to kill yourself, and ideation as wanting to want to kill yourself. ideation is when suicide has a sick allure, but you haven’t yet transformed yourself into someone that actually wants to do it, and will if they have the chance
so of course for most of my life, i existed in the realm of ideation; eventually at some point i started taking actions to make suicide more appealing so that i could metamorphose my ideation into intent. this looks like starting to self harm, participate in very negative social spaces while alienating myself from positive ones, and third thing. at a certain point then my ideation suddenly flipped into intent - in a single instant i understood the poetic beauty of suicide, and that it was something that i had to do now, and i created a plan to inform a friend right before i did it who didn’t know my address so if they wanted to stop me, they’d have to get both their and my parents involved. it was a really sick, tragic idea, either all these people would be forced to care about me, or i would die. “if the war is lost, may the nation perish”
i failed to go through with the plan that night, and my cutting was half-hearted, so the next day i considered all the drugs that i had, and decided that i might as well do all the cough medicine i had because apparently people would get high from it and also maybe brain damage, and maybe i could mkultra myself back into that beautiful trance of suicidal poetry. i have no clue from where i remembered this, but somehow i remembered how 13 reasons why apparently inspired some kids to kill themselves, so i forced myself to watch it to try and get back to intent. it didn’t work haha, it mostly made me sad about how my family would feel, and as i look at the wikipedia page for dxm as i write this to figure out if it’s like an ssri or whatever, apparently it’s a rapid acting anti depressant for major depression, which it very much was. i got very lucky. don’t kill yourself, don’t be fascist!
but my lil personal story i think makes it very clear how the intent and ideation and death drive sort of work. death drive is the unconscious ideation of allure from some unexplainable place, which caused me to do self harm and drugs and watch kinda lousy teen drama in pursuit of turning flipping my life instinct into seeing suicide as something beautiful that i must do. beauty involves the rigid adherence to rules without passionate true belief - that comes later. pascal’s wager poses as a logical thing, but it only really works if there is an irrational death drive there somewhere, which makes religion alluring
the allure of religion, anorexia, and the final part of the title, fascism: i guess we have to talk about red scare
in the same way that i forced myself to watch 13 reasons why when i wanted to want to kill myself, i forced myself to listen to red scare when i wanted to want to starve myself
i’ve had a relationship with food of course aaaaaaaa i forgot where i was going
anyway, the last thing which clicked about fascism, especially in the modern moment, that’s all i can talk about, is that it kinda works through the identification with evil. the problem with things that are good, is that they can’t identify with good, because then they are no longer humble. truth is aligned with evil, because only evil can understand and vocalize that it is evil. this past week i wrote like 2 lines of code and i don’t think i made any commits haha i got sucked into minecraft, anyway i listened to a bunch of podcasts so my examples are a bit outdated, but like the kanye heil hitler song. this song works so well unlike all the other schizo things he does because of course jesus wouldn’t identify himself as jesus, that doesn’t work, or gandhi, i don’t really know my kanye lore… but being the villain being self-aware of your evil and doing it anyway, that makes you much more evil
evil is kinda a positive feedback loop, where good is negative feedback
in any case, when you have a politician like trump, the reason why people can identify with him is because he doesn’t lie. i hate the leopard eating face meme because it understands fascism from a liberal viewpoint and totally doesn’t get it. when all the parties appear as basically demonic, the appeal of the fascist is that they have a poetic truth on their side. elect a king; more taxes, less bread. fascists know they are evil, they want to be evil; they are not being duped, you’re being duped
walter benjamin said the thing about fascists aestheticizing politics, and communists politicizing art. how does this fit in?
i guess the aestheticization of politics is like the attempt to make politics from being the pragmatic, ugly allocation of resources, into a beautiful poetic thing. instead of the bureaucrat, you have the fuhrer. i think that this is why we see that liberalism also tends towards fascism, and in nostalgic communism. in liberalism, there is the idealization of procedure, and principles. i’ve been watching the west wing recently, and it’s so perfect, i’m just obsessed with the season 2 character of ainsley hayes, the autistic republican lawyer who just has a strong sense of civic duty that the democratic president couldn’t help but personally invite into the white house counsel, teaching the staff about the importance of bipartisanship. this show is so good as a critical watch for understanding the tendency towards liberal fascism, in my opinion. and of course, i think that when communism loses the plot of historical materialism, it’s very quick for it to slide into magacommunism. communism is not about just owning liberals or having a superficial understanding of colonialism, imperialism, the west, etc… i don’t want to act like this is a very serious strand of the left, it’s not, but of course it is a thing
the politicization of art is something which is quite difficult, because it’s very easy for one’s attempt to politicize art to further its beauty. this is not what should occur. i understand art to basically be lavish expenditure of superabundant energy, whatever you get from bataille. so the politicization of art is the attempt to do politics with art, turning it from pure expenditure into useful praxis. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can one understand the politicization of art as simply putting political ideas and messages into art. in my understanding, propoganda reproduces microfascism or something like that. instead, the politicization of art is really turning making art into a kind of doing of politics. so an example of what could be the politicization of art might be the film the substance. i feel like feminist films that are about how beauty is death often fail in that they convey their idea through the story. what i think is really powerful about body horror in this feminist context is that in order to actually see the film, you need to inside yourself destroy the part of you that forces you to look away from ugly hideous women. instead of just lecturing you, in order to engage with the film you need to take part in its political project
i think that’s more or less what i wanted to convey here, this is a start at least
i forgot if i mentioned how i did not do any work this week, but i did no work this week. alas…
however, i think that a friend wanted me to start doing my radio show again, and i think that’s a fun project, so i’m thinking about doing it next weekend! and then i thought that if i learn how to livestream on stream.place in order to do radio, then i might as well also look into doing programming livestream for xcvr! of course i imagine nobody would check in on me, but i feel like the potential of being watched and having a streaming schedule might encourage me to to work more on weeks where i feel like kinda shit. so! i’m thinking that i might mess around with livestreaming this week, and expect on my twitter i’ll post about when my radio show will be (probably on next saturday)
rot politics now!
rachel