In a post-ideological age, the chain that ran from election to promise to community has grown suspect. What comes next will not be built in the political field.
In days of absent intellectual creativity and of banality in the political field, the mythic becomes personal. The personal, in fact, flows out of it. This is not a modern accident. The return of Carlyle, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche at the close of Romanticism to that personal place is the story of a civilizational movement arriving at an understanding of itself — an understanding later realized again in the stream-of-consciousness currents of literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. When the shared field goes quiet, the mythic does not disappear. It withdraws inward and waits there.
What is at issue in such a moment is the beginning of a new movement.
Consider the story of Abraham, and its continuation in the stories of Jesus and of Muhammad, each of whom became a kind of local Abraham. The story of Abraham is the story of a personal mythology of election, one transmuted into a promise to descendants — a promise that the mythic and personal moment of divine election will be able to multiply in the world in the form of a community. Election happens to one man, in one place, and is then converted into something transmissible. That conversion is the engine of everything that follows.
Today the world enters a post-ideological condition, and it enters it precisely because that field of meaning — the mythic moment, the transcendent that elects within it, and the communal that issues from them — is met with skepticism. Not refutation. Skepticism, which is harder to argue with and easier to live inside.
And this is the place where art, and not the political or philosophical field, must rise.
This is the place where art becomes a reaction to the economy, and where the two of them together produce a field of meaning. Not a banal struggle against capitalism, as a French artist once put it to me, but a re-examination of matter, of its meaning, of its representation. That demands a great deal of humility — a humility that includes within it a return to the writings and to an understanding of the potential of myth, within the constraints and limitations of the political.
If that is so, then commentary itself must change.
Commentary cannot remain fatalistic. Its responsibility is neither political nor social, and it is not a responsibility to an identity. It is to the mythical — not in the megalomaniac sense, but in the civilizational and abstract one. This is the harder discipline, because identity offers immediate returns and myth offers none.
There is a heroism Nietzsche failed to recognize. Not the heroism of the believer, but that of the builders. Of those who see that oneness can become many, and that in becoming many it contracts itself into material entities — entities that themselves become gods, and therefore require shattering. The builder is the one who both makes the thing and knows in advance that the thing will have to be broken. With that we face the resurgence of multiple deities as a challenge within the world of property. Idolatry is not a religious embarrassment left behind in antiquity; it is what happens by default whenever the one contracts into the many and the many are owned.
Hegel foresaw this motion in a prophetic reading of it — Christian at its core — and offered a solution. Within the political. But today we stand in a post-Hegelian world without being able to see that this world, too, has shattered. And it is there that the search must happen: not for certainty, and not for Aufhebung, the sublation that was supposed to preserve every contradiction while lifting it into something higher, but for a new myth of the self, beyond what is known.
Transhumanism, read this way, is nothing more than the inductive reckoning that the journey of history has set us before a possibility that has become possible in exactly the time when we yearn for, and need, the mythical that is no longer there.
And no, the new is not obligated by the limits of myth alone, nor by the limits of the community, the concept, or the people as political. The limitation of one phenomenon is not necessarily a legitimation of, or a permission for, a new one. The limitedness of an existing field does not compel the creation of a new field.
Rather, the intellectuals must ask themselves whether they are coerced in the face of the phenomenon of death. Why is it necessary for them to go on believing in death, when the kingdom of words exists only in life? Will life lose its meaning once death can be chosen?
When we arrive at a given field in which the language is intelligible and the potentialities within the conceptual and phenomenal field are known, we move on to new insights, and we seek to create new fields. Why do this only in the kingdom of literature? Why not in the kingdom of life? Why should the world of words contract itself in submission — not only before death, but before ideologies that have tried to turn the world into a paradise, when every one of them has already reached its end?
God's promise to Abraham is a promise of eternity within the limits of death. All post-Abrahamic ideologies, whether holistic toward that promise or in rebellion against it, remain entangled in it.
The important question is a different one. Where does the surrender come from? Where does the complete acceptance and submission to what may turn out to be a mere possibility come from? What is there to fight for, if not life?
This is a question that poses a possibility to humanity, and only science fiction writers and people living under dark regimes have been willing to deal with it. Somehow the crumbs that are left of the Western Enlightenment refuse.
We are no longer in the era of the death of the author. We are in the era of the death of the author who takes upon himself the death of the reader, in his bewildered silence in the face of death. Do not believe him any longer when he says his struggle is for life, and in the name of a life he refuses to swear by.
