REFUSAL

RAY BRASSIER

Since no art form generates action, the most appropriate art for a
culture on the edge of extinction is one that stimulates pain.
Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre

Wisdom is always contemporary: it enjoins us to accept the way of the world,

whether through enthusiastic embrace or dejected resignation.

Acceptance is the surrender of thought.

Thought is the refusal of wisdom.

Since no thought generates change, the only thinking response to a culture of

authoritarian vacuity is one that begins with refusal.

Refusal is not querulous. Querulousness is self-indulgent.

Refusal is abstemious. It is the self-abnegating affirmation of what has been

deliberately excluded from the horizon of possibility.

Refusal is not capricious. It follows from the assertion of a principle that has
been forcibly suppressed.

Rejecting complicity, refusal prizes open unexpected horizons of solidarity.

The acceptance of the present reduces the future to the manufacture of novelty.
No future is possible without the refusal of the present and of the hope that
remains circumscribed by the horizon of the present.

Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling

the thirst for change.

Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the

whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change.

Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it.

Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake
everything on the total transformation of the present; a transformation in which
every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness of
what will come.

The only appropriate mode of thinking for a culture on the edge of extinction is
the thinking that stimulates pain.