Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt

Ladies, Gentlemen,

Today, I would like to tell you something about the Guillotine or – as it’s so jarringly presented in the subtitle that even I stumble over it – about the connection between death technology and rationalization. If I'm stumbling, it's safe to assume you're not doing much better. And when I put a word like death-technology into my mouth, it’s not astonishing that you stumble, too. So you’re probably wondering how the Guillotine, that sinister instrument taking us back to Modernity’s threshold, relates to our topic: Time.

Another title I’d had in mind that could have more clearly marked the relation to our topic was a temporal rift [Zeitriß]4 – and the idea behind it that sometime in the late 18th century, Occidental thinking underwent a profound upheaval. Of course, this isn’t new – we’ve founded a whole series of revolutionary formulas for it, such as Human rights, the Industrial Revolution, and even the very concept of Modernity – and all of these formulas say nothing other than: New Times. This is what the French Revolutionaries were attempting to stage as the first year of a new calendar with great fanfare by dispensing with the Christian calendar, as they proclaimed that terrible year of 1792 when the Guillotine also took up its duties – thus marking the beginning of a new time.

However, what I am concerned with, and why I’d like to return to the Guillotine’s timeline, is for something else: I’d like to look at the time of the revolution anew: inverting it as a revolution of time. If you hold a Guillotine in front of your Eye, you will immediately recognize, with me, that the term time rip takes on almost a metonymic dimension here – ruckzuck5, and then it happened. The time of the revolution is really a revolution of time.

Here, time does not take on the abstract, metaphysical dimension that a concept based on the natural sciences so readily accepts, but time is understood as a specific, personal time. And that means: at the same time, it’s both historical and personal time. And if I hold my head under such a knife, it’s my time that tears – and I take that personally.

So I want to write time back onto the body – which is what everyone who attaches a gearwheel clock or one of those digital, quartz-controlled6 wonders to their wrist does. When I talk about time, I’m essentially talking about a time technology – about how I deal with my time. It's here, I claim, that a rift runs – a rift that runs through our present – and through mine. That’s the meaning of this convoluted title: temporal rift [Zeitriß]. Perhaps – and here lies my having relied on this stumbling of thought instead of choosing this snappy title – one of the essential problems of Modernity is that it’s simply progressed over this smoldering threshold and not stumbled, as would have been appropriate. That’s how it’s left us Postmoderns stumbling about in retrospect to this progress of ours, which actually means: a failure to stumble.

So, the Guillotine – who doesn't stumble when it comes to death? Everyone, we would say, but that’s not entirely true. For there are people engaged in the professional business of death: dealing with its particular technological requirements without stumbling, using a sure, prudent hand – the Executioner as our exemplary.

The Executioner's position is already very interesting. For instance, why does a phrase like death technology cause us to stumble? The reason for this seems very simple to me, and it becomes even much simpler if we don't speak of an abstract technology but of its embodiment. So it's the Executioner who operates on the threshold between life and death, reminding us that all technology, as the philosophers say, isn’t just an inner-worldly phenomenon of immanence – it also provides the ways and means of transporting us Out of the World. This means technology always has the problem of Transcendence on its neck, perhaps to the extent that it decides on life and death – today even more than ever. For a long time, this power to touch the transcendent was reserved for the role of the Executioner – and, understandably, thaumaturgic and miraculous powers were attributed to the Executioner and the blood of his victims.

Either way, the ‘Executioner role’ marks that outer edge of reason insofar as he incarnates the death technology in himself as where death is pronounced and executed. And he uses specific techniques – that is, the Techniques of Death.

Insofar as the establishment of the Guillotine is already elucidating – we’re at a critical border, a suspension where a transformational shifting takes place. Normally, as I said, ‘in the belief in progress, we pass over such things’ – indeed, in the foresight of Progress, ex definitionem, is such a disappearance of the borders – only that here, at the border of death, we may hesitate to speak of progress.

Nevertheless, those running the business of death are strangers to such scruples. Like any other tradesman, they wonder whether this or that detail of their activity couldn't be made a little more comfortable. In this sense, the Guillotine is undoubtedly a step forward. Now, I don't want to bother you with too gruesome details – but – I also don't want to withhold from you a passage about the Reasoned Opinion on the method of decapitation, written by Dr. Louis, the permanent secretary of the Academy of Surgery.

We should here recall the facts observed when M. de Lally was beheaded: he was on his knees and his eyes were bandaged; the executioner struck him on the neck; the blow did not sever the head, nor could it have done so. The body, which had nothing to oppose its fall, was overturned forwards, and it was only after three or four blows of the sword that the head was at length severed from the trunk: this hatcherie—if I may invent the word—this hacking to pieces was witnessed with horror.7

There, you can see that a phrase like death technology has its justification. It was – and this was the famous philanthropist Doctor Guillotin’s argumentation of recommending this device to the National Assembly with the somewhat clumsy argument: ‘I'll chop your head off in a twinkling of an eye, and you’ll feel no pain at all’ – the higher, human-friendly reasoning of using his prosthetic hand which convinced the deputies. Thus, assuming the credibility and integrity of its philanthropic name-giver, the Guillotine can now truly be seen as a technological blessing – at least if we look at the technology of death in the abstract.

Now, as we know, it isn't that easy to implement any technological innovation. When the Guillotine was ceremoniously inaugurated on the Place de Grève in March 1792, the public, which had flocked to the site in large numbers, was not taken with it. The spectacle was simply too short, the agony of the victim hardly perceptible – and so the mob, who felt cheated of their thrilling, cathartic effect, subsequently ran through the streets bellowing they wanted their good old gallows back. (Whereby the French word for the gallows is potence, that is, virility – to which we’ll return, in connection with the disempowered authority, the King).

As a spectacle and a popular amusement, the Guillotine was a flop. Only when the process became serialized, and head after head began to roll, did the population begin developing a particular taste for the thing. As an exemplar, a restaurant was built across the street from the scaffold, where the menu listed not only the food but also the expected victims. As I said, we're dealing with a dialectical entanglement that the well-meaning doctor may not have had in his Eye. For it was precisely through the fact that the Guillotine, in no time at all [Ruckzack]8 and quite serially, rolled head after head that it made the terreur, the mass murder, eaten as a side-course, possible in the first place.

Of course: if you're dealing with the early days of the cinema, and that actually means: the photographic image, the historical – the structural parallels become much more obvious. Just as the primary concern of the Guillotine's designers was with the physical fixation of the patient, so too were the first portrait photographers concerned with directing the body so that the camera's shot would catch it. In other words, the Guillotine was, in a certain sense, the first cinematic cut because only it could record in real time what the world of technical images could record much later.

Let me tell you a little story that I learned from Guy Lenôtre, a French historian who wrote a wonderful book about the Guillotine at the turn of the century.9 I'm going to digress a bit in this part because it's a very strange story, and it's one of the few stories bringing into relief what was then happening, so I'm going to take this time to tell you about it. It is (keep in mind) about the Eye, the I, the Ego10 . The hero of this story is Abbé Carrichon, a young Oratorian priest11 with an aristocratic family attached to him, which he’s gone into hiding with in Paris in 1794.12 This simple, sensitive soul has promised the Countess of Noailles, her daughter, and her aged mother-in-law, who has already become senile, that he’ll give them absolution when the time comes. And so as not to appear as a priest, he’s also agreed to dress in a dark blue tailcoat and a red vest.

On the morning of June 22, 1794, on the day of St. Madeleine, the time had come. There’s a knock at the door, and the family's tutor is at the door, together with the unsuspecting and cheerful children – who are about to become orphans on that day – who announce that the time has come. Even though Abbé has known that this moment will come, in the blink of an eye, its reality hits him suddenly – and what hits him the most is the pending encounter with the scaffold. As I said, he's a very sensitive soul, and the thought of seeing blood is a headache that won't let go of him. Like a ticking clock, he changes his clothes; letting nothing indicate he’s leaving, he goes to the Revolutionary Tribunal; he then goes to the church where he has a friend prepare him a coffee to help dispel the headache; he then goes back to the palace, with the desire not to arrive, not to meet those who ordered him there. The courtyard of the building is closed, yet the movement inside announces something is about to happen. The first cart drives through the gate – and the Abbé discovers the old, childish marshal is sitting on it. Her daughter-in-law and granddaughter aren’t there, and he gets hopeful – but then, on the second cart, he discovers them: the mother in a blue and white striped robe, the daughter in the white dress she’s not taken off since her father's death. The two carts stand in front of the Palais, exposing the about-to-be-deceased to the mob’s insults for a quarter of an hour as the Abbé tries to make himself known to his confessors – but the mob is too thick, he can't get close enough to them – and they don't see him as the wagons start to move. He wanders through the crowd and makes a big detour to a place where he can sit on a bridge where he thinks they must see him. But in vain: ‘I did everything I could. From everywhere, the crowd is getting bigger and bigger. I am tired. I will retreat.’

In the blink of an eye, a thunderstorm breaks out. Within seconds, the streets are swept clean, and Abbé Carrichon, soaked with sweat and rain, manages to make himself known to the ladies. Running behind the cart that’s accelerated its journey, his head protected against the falling rain, he gives them absolution. And he, whom the fear of the scaffold has been haunting all day, could now turn back…

But strangely: he follows the procession to the place du Trône, where he sees the scaffold that makes him shudder as the rain has stopped, a large mob has gathered – strangely: now the Abbé’s narrative shifts in tone...

While waiting in front of the Palace of Justice was a kind of rumination turned inward, a cramping thought in which he’d been unable to think of anything but the passing of time – another two hours, another hour and a half, another hour, a milky dim fear clenching itself into a headache: he steps out of himself. Now that he's fulfilled his promise, now that he's given absolution, he too is absoluted – absolved. He is now all Eye, and to see better, he changes places. ‘I see the Executioner Master and his two assistants. One of the two assistants stands out because of his size, his fullness of body, the rose he holds in his mouth, the cold-bloodedness and prudence with which he acts’ – and like a Camera, his Gaze captures everything, ‘the rolled-up sleeves, the curled hair tied back in a ponytail’ – and so his Eye notes, with a certain admiration, how precisely all this is going on here, how gentle the torture actually is – horrible only because of the quick succession of blows – so he sees how the first sacrifice is carried out, sees how quickly it’s done, sees how an old man with white hair is led up to the scaffold, sees how he’s supported by the two assistants – who, by the way, are quite respectful and deferential – sees how they tie him down, how the blade rushes down, how the head plops through the hole in the floor into the bran sack, sees how the headless body is turned onto a tipping cart, where everything is swimming in blood – and he sees how the Countess is led up third in the series, sees how, in an attempt to expose her slender neck, the hood is torn from her as it’s fastened with a pin in her hair, she’s pulled by her hair and the head of the Countess is torn off – he sees how the daughter, after the mother has been removed, takes her place, he sees the streaming bright red blood shooting out of her head and neck – and all Eyes, he can't help but watch as he sees how the next victim is led up and he looks and looks until he notices that he has become cold and numbingly frosty. This in the blink of an Eye moment has lasted twenty minutes – and in these twenty minutes, the serialization of the scene was repeated twelve times.

This Gaze of the priest, that looks over-it and forgets himself, seems to me to be essential: it’s in the Eye of the Beholder that lies the temporal rift [Zeitriß] I am concerned with. For he, who’s wanted to assist another person with his gaze, experiences that this gaze forgets itself – that it becomes rigid and cold, that the place of contemplation, you could say, leaves the interior of this sensitive soul, that this Machine operates it remotely.

And as if to convince ourselves that it is nevertheless so, this blink of the Eye is serialized. Death's not-being-able-to-see-more marks the transition into unrealness. Death becomes a film, a thin, un-real layer. Where the Guillotine, as I said, structurally anticipates the film cut. – Hitchcock, if you'll allow me this short bow, knew this precisely: because in Psycho's famous killing scene, you don't see the knife penetrating the victim's body – no, the violence of this murder inscribes itself on the Eye, in a hundred cuts, for a scene that barely lasts a minute and a half.

You see, we are in the middle of it, in the double-edgedness of our subject, exactly there, where we get to the edge of reason – in the same way as our priest falls into his stupor. And this brings us to the connection between death technology and rationalization. The Guillotine thereby leads us into that mental darkness of the word itself. The ratio, consulting my Latin dictionary, is the Business, it's the method, my way of proceeding, and it's finally the reason itself; and because this reason’s engaged in the business of dissection, we’re dealing with a rationalized reason, decomposed into individual portions: a rationed reason, which at worst can change, become a false form of rationalization. Whereby, at the end of this increasingly headless reason’s scale, there’s that use of the word which says it's been somewhat ratiocinated away – meaning, and this is remarkable, that in this form of ratio, you can see here there are no small, but also no big heads anymore – only an abstract, masterless ratio: a large roaming blade, a Mowing Machine.

Incidentally, one of the paradoxes of our history is that the profession of the Executioner has fallen victim to this Machine's rationalization. It may sound strange, but using the exemplary of the Guillotine and the Executioner, we can re-trace an almost classical case of rationalization. Contrary to our assumptions, the Revolution was not a great time for the Executioners, but rather their downfall.

In the ancien régime, just about every village had its Executioner. These executioners were granted all sorts of privileges whose origins can no longer be traced but probably date back to the end of the Middle Ages. Besides the right to seize dead horses, the most important was the so-called havage13. This meant that the Executioner, equipped with a large sack, could go to the marketplace and claim as much of the goods for sale as he could carry. To mark that he’d already helped himself to a particular merchant, he would draw a cross on his shoulder with a piece of chalk – a procedure that aroused displeasure in the 18th century as people became more sensitive. The curious thing about this large, widely scattered band of Executioners was they suffered from what today would be called covert unemployment. They had so little to maintain their skills in death technology with that they allowed themselves to be credibly released on the grounds of ineptitude and inexperience when the revolutionaries needed them. Of course, this wasn’t too bad since the business of death could be conducted just as easily and even more efficiently with volunteers and ideologists.

It’s at this point that we might pause. That the Executioner is less efficient than the Machine, it’s one thing that the Guillotine does this cruel business more precisely than a sword-wielding hand – and quite another why the ancien régime could afford the luxury of a vast, idle Executioner's staff. Here, we come to an essential question. Evidently, it wasn’t until the middle of the 18th century that the first complaints were heard about the Executioners' privileges. The Executioner was there, that was all – probably no one thought of lamenting his lack of efficiency, as it’s genuinely an absurd thought.

The fact that such a thought arises at all is due to the Machine. Only with the Machine does a concept like energy really make sense; only through such a concept does it become possible to think of man as a thermoelectric Machine. But this is a historical category that must be read, as such, against the background of the steam engine– no slave-owning society would have come up with such an idea. And so the documentaries of the revolutionary tribunals teem with references to how proud people are that the little machine runs like clockwork.

You see, now, if I, regarding the Executioner, introduce a term from our contemporary economics, such as when I speak of ‘human capital’ or even the destruction of human capital, I get into quite a lurch. What, pray tell, does human capital mean here?

Coming now to the most prominent Guillotine victim, we approach the image of the beheaded King. Imagine the procession carrying Louis XVI to his grave in the Madeleine cemetery. There is no service – instead, a regiment plays revolutionary songs. The King lies in an open coffin, his body dressed in a white lace vest, gray silk trousers, and gray silk stockings. He has neither shoes on nor the small tricorn hat with a cockade on it that he‘d worn on the way to the scaffold. His bareheaded head is between his legs; his Eyes are open. And this is precisely how he is buried: the open coffin is lowered into the grave, and unslaked lime is spread over it.

Isn't that a strange picture? If we follow the philanthropic motives of Dr. Guillotin, who praised the humanity of his machine to the National Convention, doesn’t this picture seem even stranger? Why, we might ask, did the revolutionaries have to exhibit the headlessness of their sovereign so graphically? Perhaps we might conjecture because they wanted to demonstrate that the time of his potency was over. But then: Why didn’t they at least give his head, which had been separated from the torso, the honor of closing his eyes?

Now, no matter how this may be – and we will come back to this - one thing is certain: it’s without a doubt that the Machine's rationality is counteracted in this funeral ritual. Just letting the bright lamp of enlightenment shine here is an inadmissible blending of that cast shadow. You can't simply pass over such a picture; you will stumble. Here, rationality reveals itself in its double-edged form, of which we don't want to know anything if we only chant human rights and Enlightenment.

The Guillotine, as I already mentioned, is a serial machine - which brings an essential reinterpretation of death. Because from this time on, death is effectively serialized. But in the serialization of this process, the respective death is also erased. As such, the headless King also marks the death of sovereignty, leading us to another characteristic of the Guillotine – it gives us a much more complex automaton prototype that modernity subsequently provides: an automaton that no longer needs a human being but functions for itself. It's precisely this aspect that the philanthropists and Enlightenment thinkers noticed so clearly: that with this apparatus, no one will sully their hands by the death of another. Because the ratio of the Machine exculpates whoever starts it up, as he doesn't have to feel that he’s getting his own hands dirty.

As exemplarily, under the proconsul Joseph Lebon’s rule, who’d erected the Guillotine in front of his playhouse so he could witness his theàtre rouge from the balcony – or occasionally when he felt like using the sinister backdrop to intoxicate himself with a speech about the Fatherland.

Now, this may be perverse, but if so, then this shadow also falls on a whole series of figures of thought that are extremely familiar to us, even highly esteemed. The crime without the perpetrator belongs to the image without the image-maker that’s the camera's gaze – distinguished precisely by the fact that it’s incorruptible: objective. The reference to ‘an objectivity’ of whatever kind also carries a knife with it, only that this knife, just as the doctor promised, cuts off our heads, and we don't suffer. Now, I don't want to pursue this strand further, other than pointing out in the disappearance of perpetrator & victim, that a leitmotif resonates whose cataclysms reach far into our time. Yes, I’d even go so far as to locate in the image of the decapitated King a new image of man – the modern di-viduum.

At this point – in order not to lose myself in a vague, theoretical somewhere – I'd like to tell you a second story, reaching back deep into the 18th century. So, this story may appear to have little in common with the Revolution, but it gets there by returning to the beginning of the sensibility narrative. It’s the year 1746 in a big empty field (which I imagine to be like one of those war cemeteries in Normandy, only without the crosses); it’s early morning, and an Abbot’s instructing seven hundred Carthusian monks to line up in a circle; the circle is enormous, a few hundred meters in diameter, but the monks can still see each other. The monks, silently as their order dictates, begin wiring themselves to each other with iron wire. When this is done, the Abbot touches a container wrapped with metal foil, inside and out; it’s filled with water and has a small wire inserted into it, looking like a small, homemade antenna – and, in the blink of an eye, as the Abbot touches this container, something strange happens, something deserving the name temporal rift [Zeitriß] because the seven hundred Carthusian monks all begin to twitch simultaneously.

Now, this act isn't an obscure rite – rather, it’s a scientific experimental procedure designed to determine how fast electricity runs as its question – and the answer is clear. The electricity flows so fast that it can't be perceived with the naked eye; there isn’t a time flow here.

But there's more to this experimental arrangement – it's nothing less than the phantasm of Modernity. Here, we have the man in the crowd; we have the idea (or better: the phantasm) of what’s today called the public space; we have the flow of energy as the mass medium of electricity; and we have the archetype of what can be called the aesthetics of shock. And finally, we have the sensation of synchronization through space and time: what we call actuality – and what can be called the 'distance of distance': Right Now, Live in New York....Here lies the archetype of Modern Society, what in the 19th century will then be called Nation or Public– and today, in a more austere sense: communication and membership. The sensation of being plugged into the same cycle. This is what’s conveyed to the monks (and what had never before conveyed so intensely): Synchronization, the certainty of forming a collective body.

From now on, society hangs in the net; it's electrified. Perhaps the King and the Executioner had already died on that day in 1746, long before the turmoil of the Revolution. For they are necessarily foreign bodies in a world where One-is-plugged-into-the-Other – where all are hooked up to the battery of the masses – perhaps this is what the French revolutionaries were really celebrating when they inaugurated the feast of the Supreme Being: not man, but the battery that gives him the sensation of being One-in-the-Other. Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité – whatever it may be. In this context, where One-is-in-the-Other, bringing a historically powerful, autonomous subject into play is pointless.

When I quoted the image of the decapitated King earlier, I didn't mean a certain Monsieur from the House of Capétiens, but the King, whom we’ve read as the Representative of a Collective Body. The King, Mirabeau aptly says, is the Idol of a collective body – as such, it clings to him as an image that society makes of itself, which is the very meaning of that famous remark uttered by the grandfather of this King: L'État, c'est moi.

If there is a reading that I'd like to recall here, it is that of Ernst Kantorowizc's The King's Two Bodies, where we can read how the Middle Ages, through the construction of that phantasmatic body and the incorporation of Christological thought, arrived at the form expressed in Hobbes's Leviathan. In this register, it is not about One or the Other, about this or that private man, but about the constitution of a community, which sees itself expressed in an artificial body, of which the King is merely the representative bearer. This body is by no means subject to the arbitrariness of some Sun King, but it is strictly structured; it speaks the language of its time, which can be called the Language of Representation.

This language – which can be set quite precisely with the end of the Middle Ages, with the birth of the modern face, our Idol – consequently, experiences a fundamental shock in the image of the decapitated King. Yes, you can read the Progress of Modernity as a progressive shock; even more, you can ask if the revolution has stopped or if we are dealing with the aftermath of this temporal rift.

As exemplary, let’s take the year 1968. When we hear 1968, we remember the slogans of our aging revolutionaries, who, admittedly, don't like to be reminded of them very much – so instead, we’ll considerately praise the revolution of life forms. The moon, the contraceptive pill, the sexual revolution, the anything goes. 1968, above all, means IT happened: with a capitalized (Freudian) ID. Now, it’s interesting that 1968 didn't only happen on the streets – the year 1968 also knows two other revolutions that we only rarely, if ever, relate to each other.

The first silent revolution, whose aftershocks still reach us daily, is linked to Bretton Woods. With the end of Bretton Woods, people broke away from the gold standard – a notion that'd long since ceased to be tenable – and moved on to what's called free-floating as the notion of exchange rates being in fluid relation to each other. Strictly speaking, the moment of liquefaction (which you can also translate as liquidation) is much more far-reaching. If, until then, the assignations of money had been considered the representative of a material value such as gold, then from now on, it's nothing more than a sign that is hoped can be kept in check and controlled by other sign systems. But whatever the path of this new money, it comes down to the dilemma of digital money.

Let's move on to the second silent revolution. This is the definition of Death that was relieved-out in Medicine, stating Death occurs when the brain ceases functioning – that is: Brain Death. The physicians have proceeded like the French revolutionaries: they’ve separated the head and the torso from each other, with the aim of preserving the human body as a store of spare parts for other bodies. You see, headlessness is thus a condition for taking the body into service as a Machine with interchangeable parts.

Perhaps – at least, I hope – the reference to the image of the beheaded King becomes clearer. On a much larger scale, what's decided in the portrait of the headless King is repeated here. The way the body of the King has been carried to the grave is a precise foreshadowing of that revolution which hasn't stopped – and has now seized the masses. If the serial Machine demanded the King's head, it’s now making our heads roll.

You see, I take the burial of the King as symptomatic of a present constitutionality. Because the three revolutions that I've just pulled into relief – the revolution of life forms, the revolution of money, and the revolution of medical cartography – can be understood as bodily re-codings. We have the re-coding of the political body (that is, the revolution of the street), a re-coding of the economic body (that is, money), and a re-coding of the material body (that is, brain death).

What they have in common is liquefaction and detachment from the material body. Bretton Woods is detaching itself from gold; the definition of brain death is detaching itself from the integrity of the body; and the free-floating of the street, which was politicized, shows itself, almost thirty years later, as a softening of life forms – you could say everything has become software: digital. When we’ve digitized a body, we can copy it at will – it is no longer One but a clone, a hybrid, inflationary. – In this sense, the end of representation (which speaks of the One and its double) isn't a slogan but a reality.

Perhaps at this point, it's plausible what the story and the temporal rift of the Guillotine have to do with our present. The headless body of the King, whose head is laid out between his legs as a sign of impotence, his glassy open Eyes staring into nothingness, into a world without perpetrators and victims – all this announces an age where the One and the intact man can no longer be the bearer of our truth. This One, lying in the open coffin (and this is the underlying message of the picture), is no longer able to represent the others.

It's this end of representation that I had in mind when I spoke at the beginning of stumbling into Modernity – and it's this end that progress has passed over as if it were only a matter of distributing the King's power to the masses. However, this proves to be illusionary, perhaps to the extent that power has passed to the masses – so that we could say, in retrospect, that only being excluded from this illusionary power has guaranteed its continued existence. On the other hand, where you don't need the acclamation of the masses (in Art and Philosophy), it’s there that the thought of representation has long since ended.

I don't want to make it seem like the Guillotine represented something like a historical fall from grace.

Here, in the image of the twitching monks, lies the true beginning of Modernity for me, the real revolution and that temporal rift that has to be lifted into thinking.

However, this image of the twitching monks, which I’ve called the state of One-in-the-Other, signifies a re-coding of our thinking that isn't entirely completed. Take the essential pillar of our legal system: the autonomous subject. This subject is naturally nothing but a little King – who holds sway in a social subsystem. However, this concept of a subject assumes that there is a perpetrator, an originator (and it's no accident that the Artist and the Genius is the secret hero of modernity – although this is precisely what should make us think: for the Artist is a King without a kingdom, and even this is disputed since everyone pretends to be an artist).

So the question is: does the Author still exist? If we look at this century’s great catastrophes, particularly their legal reappraisal, it’s apparent this subject has long since taken leave of world history. Perhaps the great totalitarianism of this century has lived on the phantasm that One may merge in the Other, which is the metaphysical one-and-everlasting body of the people – while in reality, One set out to eliminate the Other from the circle of convulsively twitching monks. Perhaps totalitarianism is nothing more than a gigantic attempt to force a unified image, to erect a massive, larger-than-life ME. Significantly, this unity immediately disappears as soon as the mass’s battery gives up its service. There are mountains of corpses, injustice piled upon injustice, but the perpetrators (who have shrunk to harmless little guys) insist on being victims. I SPEAK isn't their slogan, but IT – and IT may be what it wants it to be: the money, the science of our body or the circumstances, thus the world spirit. Whatever it is: it comes down to the system. This brings me back to the year 1968: to Bretton Woods, the cartography of the body, and that year when IT happened.