“Because a better tomorrow requires tremendous ‘good work’ today, Leftists of all stripes are caught in a never-ending anxiety of activity, yet never get any nearer to their fleeing utopias.
That the revolution is so close on the horizon and yet flees from us means that we can’t afford the immature and irresponsible practices of jouissance which could distract from the sombre struggle at hand.
The ideology of Leftism is truly a living death for all who it entrances. Leftists argue that we must destroy power relationships, and yet they leave unchallenged the power relationship of reproductive futurism which necessitates an endless project of self-discipline and self-control.
Hocquenghem argues that opposed to this sombre struggle must be an insurgent project based in joy. “Strangely enough,” he writes, “whenever we speak of joy, professional revolutionaries only hear what churches or ideologies have put there.”
We are not professional revolutionaries, nor joyless prophets interested in spreading ideology. Rather we must set our stake on practices of joy and jouissance resonating to unleash an insurgent contagion.
Here is Hocquenghem at his finest:
All revolutionaries will have to become parasites of society, and more and more irresponsibly at that, or they will still be the knights of some morality or another. Our energy is devoted to the destruction of the animal that feeds us.
Only such a project of parasitism could resist the dead ends of activist frenzy and militant escalation. We must live, fight and enjoy at the expense of our enemies. Such a project is a queer in that it must depart from the paths laid out for us and refuse the specialization and captivity to time inherent in activism.
[...]
This system exists to erase memories, to evict us from our childhood homes, to incarcerate our loved ones, to execute the fathers of children too young to fully understand what happened. Our struggle has been an effort to create memories that they can never take from us. Running toward the sunset, we have found that the horizon only moves farther away. We awake every morning to the same cycle of death and power that we escaped in our dreams the night before. Yet we continue to trudge to the ends of the earth, we continue to fight. It is when the air is still, when all seems quiet, that we are planning our next move.
[...]
For every pretty theory that presents itself, study it only in the way that a cat studies its prey: for the enjoyment of the hunt, to be sure, but also so as to seize upon whatever unique revolutionary chance may appear as in a flash of lightning. So that when that narrow gate opens, you pounce without a moment’s hesitation. In the meantime, by all means, enjoy the diversion of the theory’s lines and moves, but if you are to avoid becoming its tool you must ever have in mind to shatter the system of mirrors and confront the dwarf that has been pulling the strings all along. Faced with this ugly little creature behind all the lines of play you’ve enjoyed and suffered, able at last to read the lines of its face and the dark of its eyes, as time stands still and the entirety of the past falls to you, you will have to make a deeply ethical decision that nothing in all the games before could prepare you for. The only decision that truly matters.”
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