Divine
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Shane Eide
A theme which has, for better or worse, become dominant in my thinking is the idea that the nature of politics itself relies on a paradox in this way: that those forces, institutions and powers which comprise the domain of sovereignty today seek the ends of their respective goals on the pretense that they are, through political means, protecting entirely apolitical features of life. Here is not the place to explain why I’ve come to this conclusion, as this idea seeps into almost every passage I write on the subject of politics, even if from different angles. Rather, I wish here to account for the spirit in which one will read in the following essays and pieces a constant sense of antagonism between the framing of societal crisis and the potential crisis which initially caused us to mis-frame such a crisis. One will have very little understanding of or will feel very little need to read the following pieces if one doesn’t first approach them from the position that what we accept as normal today is fundamentally, incontrovertibly wrong. However, if the reader accepts this position but is also willing to take it a step further, which is to say, if the reader is a fellow traveler in the hazy if all-important quest to revitalize life and is not content to merely cling to those few mirages of security one finds in the desert of nihilism, the reader will feel quite welcome here. I far from shy away from the term ‘Divine,’ for I can’t possibly think of another term which is better suited to describe a type of attainment which implies the very agency by which the reification of life as a unity of the nominal unit and the whole can or should take place. The Burning Block only has an allergy to words where they fail from the outset to keep those islands of determination which those speaking them so love from submerging into the ocean of chaos, where they are then warped, made porous and ill-conceived; objects to be seized upon through rhetoric and possessed by those who would use them for little more than the perpetuation of neurosis masked as catharsis, sickness masked as satisfaction and mania masked as mere expression. Nothing gets a pass simply because it exists instead of something else. We are here just as concerned with the good which doesn’t yet exist, and tragically, perhaps could not exist had things not become so incontrovertibly terrible. One methodology for such a position is to look at politics in terms of the occult, that is to say, by dealing specifically with that in politics which is entirely unknown, even to the very representatives of specific institutions, peoples and powers. In employing such language, I wish to describe the momentum and life of a force in the world, even where such momentum and life outlive or even directly contradict the intentions of their representatives. Though the essay ‘Occult Politics’ deals specifically with this theme, one will see a similar methodology finding its way through the other pieces.
OCCULT POLITICS
Shane Eide
I
That which announces itself outright is the excreta of that which is not announced. It is hidden by that very announcement. The theater of history is plagued as much by the lust of event as it is by the open interpretation of parties which most benefit from being either benefactors of enunciated events or victims.
The formula goes, that which conceals announces, and that which announces conceals. There are points of convergence, but one would not be entirely on the right
