Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:23:51.
300 Cuts: A Postmortem on the so-called human (10-14)
By M Satai
300 Cuts: A Postmortem on the so-called human (10-14)
10.
It’s not enough anymore to say only what’s been said before in a completely new way, if that’s even possible,, but to say what’s never been said before—or the strangled inarticulation that coincides with the effort—is the only thing for which it’s worth interrogating oneself: from this point forward the full “confession” of the last “human being,” a heretofore undiscovered species that for all practical purposes is already extinct. The text of the full and final confession of this already extinct species, of this “last man,” is strangely correlated with the discontinuous appearance, if not altogether indistinguishable, from what comes next…not an evolution, but an “alien” visitation, an egocalypse, a spontaneous eruption: afterhuman.
11.
Imagine a world in which humanity voluntarily left the stage: a great museum of art and artifacts that would say everything worth saying about the struggles of man…and his greatest statement of all—his utter absence.
12.
It’s a fortunate thing, given the facts of mortality, that life is ultimately so unsatisfactory, that desires go unfulfilled, that love resolves itself into a struggle of spite and selfishness, that we’re never understood, that we are so utterly uncommunicable--otherwise who could ever bear the thought of dying into the long autism of eternity without going insane?
13.
To say that I haven’t fully enjoyed a single moment of my life, not even the ostensibly joyful ones, that even these “happy” times weren’t haunted by not merely the possibility of catastrophe, but the spectre of it’s inevitabllity at any moment, is to say that I haven’t allowed myself to forget that I belong to death, that I never took my eyes from the impossible, that I was never fooled—not for an instant—short of death itself.
14.
Life is a matter of compromise—and by compromise I mean existing in a state of suspended disbelief. We must not demand that anyone really love us, that truth or justice really exist, that even the chair we sit on is the solid surface that it appears to be instead of meaningless chaos. Likewise, all the values that we hold, all the things that make life worthwhile are also a matter of compromise, of suspended disbelief. Those who refuse to compromise, who can’t live without proof of the existence of this or that, who won’t live with one eye shut in disbelief, are relegated to the psychiatric hospital, the prison—or the grave. They exist, however, in a solitude so absolute, so concentrated, it requires no suspension of disbelief to sustain—and this solitude is the substance of their greatest torment, illusion, and reality.