Life on the periphery, renouncing centre.
---Ammons.
The radical individual has no name, only a purpose, a Cause. And what happens when this too fails, when the Will itself is paralysed?
The unique individual expunges all sense of belonging and cannot be defined, he resists the easy classifications of the bourgeoisie, the soul-destroying abstractions of powerful elites. No nation or land binds him, his being is infinitely malleable: he can become anything.
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P.Valery:
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The ..being of the immense cities returns to the wild state-that is, to a state of isolation. because the social mechanism allows him to forget the need for community and to lose his feelings of connection to other people, which were once kept alive by his wants. Every movement in the social mechanism renders useless certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes to communal life.
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From now on there will only be one act, one clear and decisive movement of the Will that will crystallize his very essence: Die Tat.
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Man no longer had a profile, the man from the underground, the egoist denies all dependence, but every sort of dependence is a root, terrestial or celestial.
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The shapeless mass, vagabonds and prostitutes, the alienated, incapable of class loyalty, rootless from the womb, violent, inarticulate, disrespectful enemies of labour and learning ..an underground emerging into the open.
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But in this day and age everyone in the city will claim to be a nomad-from the disaffected intellectual to the global citizen to the richest entrepreneur: all touch the earth only lightly.
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The ruined proletarian, the pauper, the slum-dweller without fixed abode, has an energy that cannot be chanelled into historical progress (from the Marxist perspective). The wretched of the earth, every sort of obscure and marginal existence is a counter -revolutionary (Rosa Luxemborg). The anarchist is like an intellectual (Lenin): declasse.
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Cut loose from society, norms, customs, social conventions, place, what else is this individual but a terrorist ?
1 comment:
Hi, Billo,
I was encouraged by his to look up The Greenwich Park bomb -episode. Fascinating. There's a full account here:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.413
The article ends thus:
The incident remains as the only anarchist inspired attack in Britain during the period and it became famous due to the author Joseph Conrad in his 1907 book The Secret Agent. In this book the evil mastermind 'The Professor' plans an attack on the Greenwich Observatory which ends in a bomber being 'blown to pieces' by his own bomb when trips and falls in Greenwich Park. Conrad was inspired by the reality of the Observatory attack but wove a literary tale of conspiracy and tragedy which was all his own invention. The story further inspired Alfred Hitchcock in his film Sabotage (1936). In this film the innocent dupe who carries the bomb dies when the bus that he is travelling in explodes on the Strand : a strange pre-figuring of the real event in early 1996 when an IRA bomber blew himself up in a bus just off The Strand.
The echoes of this long gone incident continue to resonate : in July 1996 the FBI described how the 'Unabomber', Theodore Kaczynski, was inspired by Conrad in his 18 year bombing campaign against scientific institutions. Kaczynski had apparently often used the alias Conrad.
The final words on the Greenwich bomb are left to Conrad who wrote : 'The attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory : a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that is is impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. for perverse unreason has its own logical processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to pieces for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory, it did not show as much as the faintest crack'.
The things I don't know about London!
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