Tag: Part 1

PART I – Chapter 1: The Apocalyptic Moment

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I once described In Good Faith thusly: 

. . .[a] book [that] began, in a way, as a novel —no, no, as poetry and prayers, in drug-fuelled nights dreaming and terrible moments scheming suicide, in lots and lots of tears and love. It’s the synthesis of paranoid nightmares and apocalyptic ecstasies, of doubt, faith, faith in doubt, remembrance, and an inescapable, infernal rage. Guilt and desire. Invisible chains and unanswered cries for justice. It arrived in the form of corpses, choices, and the realization that there are still possibilities of who and what to become…

In Good Faith (Original Version)

I think this captures the apocalyptic nature of this work in a deep way, and expresses much of the struggles that have birthed it (if you haven’t read the post on the “Introduction” yet, I recommend checking it out HERE). To begin, I’d like to mention some of my personal experiences of apocalypse: the visions I had of the world ending in numerous ways during my episodes and the highly-manic and self-aggrandizing belief that I had a role to play in it; my specifically Bipolar mysticism (featuring continued oscillations (both long term and short term) between faith and doubt, Heaven and Hell, madness and reason; my emerging queer and trans identity; my personal apocalypses (loss of relationships, addiction, becoming a social pariah) and our collective apocalypses (the rise of fascist tendencies in the political atmosphere, social tension and division, perpetual violence). If you know me personally, you probably know that I was on a semi-psychotic path of non-duality during my episodes that, as you can imagine, left lasting pain in my heart and mind as well as put formidable strain on my personal relationships. If you’ve been in the world at any point since 1492, it is arguable that you too have been a part of what I describe as the “Apocalyptic Moment”. 

While I will argue throughout this work (and shortly in this post) that we have always been in an apocalyptic situation, whether you measure it from the beginning of time, the birth of the human species, or any other significant point in history (many of which I will trace throughout IGF), I want to suggest the date of 1492 — the birth of Modernity/Coloniality — as the marker of import. Additionally, I argue that the Apocalyptic Moment has reached an important turning point in what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘the posthuman convergence’, the alignment of the death of ‘Man’ and the critique of anthropocentrism. It is my thesis that this moment in our shared history is a crisis of immense significance, an opportunity for what is the real definition of apokálypsis, “an uncovering”. In other words, the Apocalyptic Moment is an opportunity for realization of covered over potentials, whether they be historical, artistic, spiritual, philosophical, and/or political. 

The Apocalyptic Moment can also be understood as the series of transcendental (spatial and temporal), existential (social, racial, sexual, personal, spiritual, geopolitical, etc.), historical, ecological, economic, theological, mathematical, scientific, technological, linguistic, psychological, chemical, and categorical crises whose strata have converged as tectonic plates of conflicting dualisms. A cataclysmic event in which locations, figures, and historical points are like so many volcanic vents along an aionic (in other words, eternal) Ring of Fire. There have been watchwards who have run down from the mountains to warn us in many times and places of our current and historical explosions. The only difference now, it seems, is that we can identify the ring and begin to chart the “Moment”, which is understood aionically — in other words, in perpetua et unum diem (“into an endless and single day”) or hodie ad sub specie aeternitatis (“today under the aspect of eternity). Today, the 21st century, we are in a place that is both untimely and prescient: the end of the world is knocking at our doorstep and we can choose “good” or “bad” faith (which I will define later in this post).

Before that, however, I want to address some of the many reasons to claim that time and space are an apocalyptic mode of existence. First of all, the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth — the possible states of all matter and energy — are the immanent conditions of time and space, what all beings must pass through in the flows of becoming. Additionally, it is the process by which all desire comes to express itself: expression, consummation, and repetition (life, death, rebirth). Desire is immanent to all creation and therefore is at the heart of the world itself. Furthermore, if we understand history as the process of matter, energy, and desire through time and space, we may begin to realize that there is a particular arc to our story: one in which the revolutions of the past are born again, more potent, more vibrant, and more visionary. In other words, “uncovered” or “revealed” in an eternal day that comes out of and through an Apocalyptic Moment. Finally, we can see that we are in a historical period of death and rebirth, a paradigm shift beyond the past 500 years (Modernity/Coloniality), the past 2,000 years (the birth of Christianity), the past ~200,000 years (the birth of humanity), etc. The earth is dying, the division between the ruled and the rulers is ever-widening, and catastrophe and violence dominate our life-worlds. Injustice is the law of the land, masquerading as divine decree in the form of priests, politicians, police, and the military, secularized and reified, made into the “common sense” notion, ala Hobbes, that the world is cruel and evil, something to be avoided, something to be destroyed. But how will we respond?

It is my argument that we face two possibilities: that of bad faith (as explicated by Jean-Paul Sartre) and good faith. “Bad faith”, in this context, can be regarded as a lack of authenticity in regards to the task of living one’s existence as a free agent. The denial of absolute freedom and thus the denial of any form of existential responsibility. Being-in-itself. Sartre’s famous example of the waiter who pretends to be a waiter, plays at being a waiter, yet knows that he is not just a waiter. In other words, he makes himself into an object in order to make due. In regards to this book, this would mean one does not choose to face the radicality of the Apocalypse, which holds the raw power necessary to free oneself of objecthood. “Good faith”, on the other hand,  can be understood as recognizing that ultimately, despite the raw determinism of calculated life, one has absolute freedom as a being-for-itself. An existential (subjective) responsibility which is also a transcendental (absolute) responsibility. Confronting the Apocalypse within and without means that one may embrace an absolute subjectivity, an affirmation that can affirm all “bad faith” posturing as masks within an eternal dance of the I AM. I may be a waiter, but I am also all names in history. This apocalyptic moment, which stretches back to the beginning and infinitely forward into the future, is my responsibility, whether I have to play the role of a waiter or not.

This is the essence of what I mean by proceeding with “good” faith: to be awake to both the eternal and contingent, the ever-lasting and the contextual, the spiritual and the embodied, both the beginnings and ends of the journey while living in media res. It is the issue of both living the revolution and negotiating tactics and strategy at the same time. While whites may just be waking up to the apocalyptic scenario that our ancestors have created, the fact that “Apocalypse been in effect”, as Public Enemy announced on their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, is more than evident to the vast majority of people of color. As Mark Sinker writes, comparing the genocidal and enslaving monstrosities that occurred from 1492 onward to alien invasion,

The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and America—and so by extension Europe and Asia—are already in their various ways Alien Nation. No return to normal is possible: what“ normal” is there to return to?

Mark Sinker, “Loving the alien in advance of the landing—Black science fiction” (1992)

In this sense, the Apocalyptic Moment is an event which is inherently social and political. To pretend that we can simply return to a better time and place without uprooting the structures of Modernity/Coloniality, an Edenic vision which is inherently reactionary, is to live, in my argument, in bad faith of our collective histories. That I believe there is a spiritual, even mystical element to this project should be evident from my previous posts. Re/un-covering indigenous traditions, stories, and worldviews is inherently part of any decolonial revolution, and this also means that whites as Europeans and Euro-Americans must re/un-cover their radical roots, many of which were stamped out by imperial Christianity. Paganism, esotericism, witchcraft, and mystical Christianity can be revolutionary, but if we leave them in the past they will remain ignorant of their healing possibilities and continue to be reactionary forces.

So what would a radical spirituality of aionic space-time within the Apocalyptic Moment do for the revolution? It is my argument that, as I will express in later sections of the book, we will be able to create a congregation that transcends both the limits of space and time through connecting to figures of the past (and those of the (un)imaginable future) and archiving their teachings and stories. To find inspiration and community across time and space would serve to do what almost all religion has claimed to be after: the eternal life of the spirit. This eternal life is one which, ultimately, has to be lived immanently, within the flesh, in the here and now, though with a wisdom that stretches back into the deep past and forward into the deep future. To return the revolutionaries of the past to present consciousness and to gather the revolutionaries of the future in order to open imaginative possibilities for that very present is to breathe life into the revolution, to reorient ourselves beyond the limited, confined world of secular neoliberalism. 

While we live in these bodies of finitude, we have the opportunity to open up to the infinite here and now, before and beyond. It is this journey into an endless and single day in which all souls are gathered that I believe best describes the apocalyptic uncovering of this Apocalyptic Moment. 

For this gathering to be possible, however, we must continually pass through the dark night of the soul of our current crises (see the next post, “The End of Days: Capitalist Realism, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene”). I will stake part of my hope on the work being done in the posthumanities, which I will explore in “The Posthuman Convergence and Critical Posthumanism”. Finally, I will elaborate further on my conception of eternal space-time, the Aion, in “The Aion: Ancestral and Futural Communities”. These three subsections make up “The Apocalyptic Moment” chapter and set up most of the scaffolding for the rest of the book. I will be updating posts regularly so that mentioned chapters or subsections will be linked as soon as they are posted. I also apologize if this section is a bit messier or confusing than the previous two — I wrote it at a very late hour from several different, ambiguously-related notes. For any readers I’ve gathered so far, I thank you. I look forward to any and all feedback as I keep throwing my thoughts down.

PART I – Necrophobia and the Throne of Desire

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“Where has God gone?” [the Madman] cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. . .There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed they shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces:. . .Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

“By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, [philosophers] betrayed what was their own secret: to know of the greatness of [God], of a new untrodden way to [its] enhancement. Every time they tried to expose how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said, “We must got there, that way, where you today are least at home.”

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“This is our blessing, this is our curse: to be responsible for the corpse of God. But more than anything we must ask this: Which God has died? What is to be done with its corpse? And, finally, do we want answers to these questions?” 

In Good Faith (Original Draft)

In this post discussing the opening section of In Good Faith, I would like to examine Part I’s two titular concepts: necrophobia (fear of death/dead bodies) and the “Throne of Desire”, which I have in earlier drafts referred to as the infernal divine libido. 

Necrophobia is in reference to not only personal death, but to the death of God, the body of the God who was abandoned, left for dead, and yet still persists. Nietzsche is famous for elaborating on this concept and transmitting it into popular understanding as a core aspect of his philosophy. It is deeply related to the concept of nihilism, which can be defined as 1. “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless” and 2. “extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.” Both of these angles are evident in Nietzsche’s philosophy of value creation, in which he argues that nihilism is a troubling, difficult, even dangerous, but altogether necessary path forward into a future in which new values (ones devoted to this life rather than to some great beyond) can come into the world. In this way, nihilism is not an end goal, but instead an essential passage in humanity’s continued evolution. Importantly, I will argue throughout this book that the death of God via nihilism is the result of the anthropocentric-patriarchal-colonial-imperial dimensions of European Christianity and philosophy. As Nietzsche suggests, it is precisely life-denying values (of which I will argue these are pivotal examples) that have planted the seeds of nihilism in the Modern West. As I will convey throughout this book, a life-affirming, posthumanist, heretical, radical, non-dual, and cosmic Christianity may serve as an antidote to the secularized Christianity of Modernity/Coloniality.

If we are to make it through this period of time (both the death of God and what Foucault and posthumanists refer to as the death of ‘Man’), we must come to terms with this death and navigate it, explore what it means to have had a God who could die (and a humanism that could die with it), and become responsible for the world left in its wake. In this section I am specifically referring to the God of Western Christianity, which, despite still being a popular part of spiritual discourse and religious practice, has too often been distorted and made into a tool of the state, a disciplining apparatus, and a genocidal mode of domination. To face this death means that we must not only face our own mortality, but it also leaves us with a task: the creation of new gods, or perhaps, the revelation of forgotten ones. 

Following this, he throne of desire represents the libidinous energy that allowed for the “creation” of gods in the first place. It is our holiest spiritual power, our ability to craft the world, to destroy and enchant. Without it, the death of God is merely a sad song about the end of a bygone era, one in which spirituality filled the air and our destinies were set in stone; instead, however, the throne of desire, our root chakra, the origin of our spirit, is still able to pulse in rhythm with the heart of the world. It is the creative urge to reconstruct divinity, to dream of utopia, to fight, bleed, and die for something larger than ourselves: the liberation of all beings. 

Very key to this concept is the theme of desire elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, a work that explored the connections between Marx and Nietzsche, amongst so many others. In this work, desire is seen as that which creates values, constructs reality, bodies, and visions, and as the key to social transformation. Desire comes in many forms: it may desire repression as much as it desires liberation, a fascist desire or a revolutionary desire. In order to process this moment of multiple ‘deaths’, we must confront the repressed cisheteropatriarchal God who is not really dead, still growing his fascist seeds. He lives in us, in our dreams, in our fears, in our values. As argued by both Nietzsche and Sylvia Wynter, this dying God — who as yet has not finished dying — has simply passed the torch to ‘Man’, which is a provincial, particular being (Western, male, white, capital-owning, etc.) being passed off as the universal model of the human. As ‘Man’ has taken the throne, he has made the world in his image — a world that decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo have labeled Modernity/Coloniality. Here, the legacy of the cisheteropatriarchal God still lives, if only as the shadow of ‘Man’. 

In this sense, the creation/recovery of (re)new(ed) gods (and aspects of the Godhead) is a key part of my project. The apocalyptic struggles we face — the death of God, what posthumanist Rosi Braidotti calls ‘the posthuman convergence’ (the alignment of the death of ‘Man’ and the critique of anthropocentrism), the planetary crisis in the Anthropocene, and the lasting legacy of kyriarchy and Coloniality — is one which I believe requires a deep spiritual dimension. It is my belief that it is not spirituality which is the issue we have with Western Christianity, but instead its world-and-life-denying character, its anthropocentric-patriarchal-colonial-imperial dimensions, and its reactionary political tendencies. It is also my argument that the specific neoliberal secularism of ‘Man’ is in fact nothing more than a reactionary political spiritualization of Western humanism. The category of the human — which, in the control of ‘Man’, has always been understood in asymmetric relation to those cast as less-than-human, in-human, and non-human — is an ideal that has deep spiritual ties to the colonial and imperial projects of Western Christendom. It is my argument that the secularization of mass society is no less than a mask for the spiritual project of ‘Man’, which is colonizing disenchantment of the spiritual capacities of its Others and the simultaneous neoliberal enchantment of commodities. So, rather than abandon spirituality to the reactionaries, we must instead desire (and thus create) revolutionary spiritualities for our present and conjoining crises. The fullness of posthuman spirituality is a gateway into the spiritualities of both the deep past and the (un)imaginable future. To dream of (re)new(ed) gods/goddesses and an enchanted, decolonial, and infinitely-magical universe is to (re)imagine spiritualities that do not taste so bitter, feel so evil, or seem so naive. 

To navigate these waters, I will often throughout the book turn to the work of Death of God theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, various writers on liberation theology, and decolonial thinkers such as Wynter, Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, amongst others. I will also turn to both heretical and mystical Christian thinkers; revolutionary groups and individuals; esotericists; religious, yet non-Christian writers; indigenous authors; Afrofuturists; and posthumanists. The goal is to help plant some hopeful seeds for the religions and spiritualities of a post-humanist, post-capitalist, revolutionary, and decolonial world.

In conclusion, I’d like to go over the sections “Part I” will cover: they include “Chapter 1: The Apocalyptic Moment”, with subsections titled “The End of Days: Capitalist Realism, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene”, “The Posthuman Convergence and Critical Posthumanism”, and “The Aion: Ancestral and Futural Communities”; “Chapter 2: The Dead God”, with subsections titled “Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Death of God”, “Degodding and the Secularization of the West”, and “‘Enthroned over a world of terrors’: The Gifts God Bestowed to ‘Man’”; and “Chapter 3: State Philosophy”, with subsections titled “Political Theology and ‘Man1’”, “City Dis: The Philosophers and Modernity/Coloniality”, and “The Evil Outside: On Pagans, Heretics, and Others”. 

As a methodology for the blog, I will make posts for each category — in other words, one for each “Part”, each “Chapter”, and each “Subsection”. If you wish to explore them in linear form, you can check out the first blogpost (LINK HERE) which is an outline that will have updated links to each section as they’re written. Lastly, I just want to say that this project is devoted to many spiritual, philosophical, and political paths and it is in no way meant as an end-all-be-all. While I wholeheartedly believe a spiritual dimension to revolutionary action is needed, I do not find anything wrong with being an atheist or an agnostic — I was an agnostic for many years myself. The suffering that has been done in the name of God, along with the endless proselytizing of its followers, is perhaps too hard to bear, too annoying, and too sickening to ever make the spiritual (no less the religious) a worthy project for some. I understand that sentiment deeply. I once wrote this line in a song: “how the holiest spirits reside in the average atheist’s chest”. I still feel that way, and I hope to convey that atheism is in many ways a radical spirituality of its own, one that may be more revolutionary than the average believer’s. 

I would like to finish with a statement on what IGF is: an attempt to radicalize spiritual discourse, including Christianity, in order to participate in the many revolutionary and liberatory paradigm shifts that are occurring in our time. In doing so, I hope to help combat the reactionary nature of ‘Man’ on behalf of the Earth and Her peoples, spiritual or not, in order to foster a future worth living in, where each and every being can thrive and find meaning in what can often feel like a meaningless existence. I dream endlessly of finding those who wish to collaborate in this project and take it down their own paths. With that, I thank you for reading and I look forward to hearing what you think!