Saturday, October 2, 2021

Ecstatic Politics


Lucrecia Martell, Zama


On closer inspection, biopolitics has never had any other aim but to thwart the formation of worlds, techniques, shared dramatizations, magic in which the crisis of presence might be overcome, appropriated, might become a center of energy, a war machine. The rupture in the transmission of experience, the rupture in historical tradition exists, is vehemently maintained, in order to ensure that Bloom is always left entirely driven back onto "himself," onto his own solitary derision-to his unbearable mythical "freedom." Biopolitics holds a monopoly over remedies to presence in crisis, which it is always ready to defend with the most extreme violence.

A politics that challenges this monopoly takes as its starting point and center of energy the crisis of presence, Bloom. We call this politics ecstatic. Its aim is not to rescue abstractly through successive re/presentations- human presence from dissolution, but instead to create participable magic, techniques for inhabiting not a territory but a world. And this creation, this play between different economies of presence, between different forms-of-life, entails the subversion and the liquidation of all apparatuses.

Those who, as a final reprieve from their passivity, insist on calling for a theory of the subject must understand that in the age of Bloom a theory of the subject is now only possible as a theory of apparatuses.

- Tiqqun, This is not a Program


Ecstasy (from Ancient Greek ἔκστασις ékstasis, meaning 'outside of oneself') is a subjective experience of total involvement of the subject, with an object of their awareness. In classical Greek literature, it refers to the removal of the mind or body "from its normal place of function."