Captive
Eros
The
hot
source
and the cold
well
of the human desire transcend
the
simple immanence. They
refer towards elsewhere which is of sacral order. They refer to
the mystery of
the absolute source of sense. The mystery of unfathomable human
gaping.
The
animal tendencies remain in the end moderate. The human desire is
delivered to disproportion. Can you imagine man satisfied once and
for all? Man is not an animal, even a reasonable one; he is a living
infinite.
His gaping is done vertiginous. His desire is insatiable
ad infinitum. There are cultural spaces where this disproportion of
the desire is able to be contained in the proportion of a wisdom. So
Buddhism or Hinduism. But it goes differently in our Judeo-Christian
space where the infinity of the desire of man has to take part with
the infinity of God himself.
This
infinite desire is trapped by the tool system of our euphorias.
Our exponential tool system creates man at its image and its
resemblance. An articulated man. A handled man. A conditioned man. A
used man. An industrialized man. A mechanized man. A manufactured
man. A venal man. A man in crumbs.
When
the essence of the human project tends to be identified with
consumption
and production,
inevitably the desire is snatched in the vicious circle which buckles
up the consumer on the producer and the producer on the consumer. And
even exponentially like 'progress' itself.
Here
the desire of man is trapped in the infernal loop which controls it
in the illusion to fill it. To consume more and more. Thus to produce
more and more. To consume still more… The consumer society creates
a proliferation of artificial
desires.
It is a question of infinite consuming, not so much to satisfy real
needs than to give the exponential tool the pleasure of turning to an
accelerated mode. At the same time you get an inflation
of desirable,
not to forget the etymological meaning which says 'inflated
with wind'.
Our
'progress' is trapped. Locked up in an impossible to circumvent
limitation. So the desire has to be trapped itself. A homeostasis
between the infinity of the desire and the inescapable finiteness of
material abundance being impossible, the whole system of production
of our euphorias has just to turn for the pleasure of turning. As if the
headlong flight, supreme possible 'transcendence' of our time, were
sufficient to fill by itself ad infinitum a frustration starting
again and again. So, under cover of an illusion of 'progress', functions a kind of mechanics of exponential
alienation.
With an exponential frustration.
It is the infinite human desire which the schizoid space of our
modernity locks up. Narrowing the hot source and the cold well in the
only possibility of immanence. You have to come back to the prisoners
of the cave of Plato. As long as an 'outside' is not suspected, as
long as the sole 'inside' is presented in the form of an absolute,
the 'happiness' of the cave dwellers seems complete. Each desire is
conditioned according to the possibilities of the cave. And the cave
is arranged to fill them all. Is it different in the cave of
our euphorias?
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