Lux lucet in tenebris

After Stirner, Lautréamont is the second artificial barbarian to burst onto the scene. Not this time a barbarian of the spirit, but of literature. Just as Stirner had shown the rash neo-Hegelians that they were a band of bigots, in awe of the state and humanity, so, painstakingly, patiently, clear-sightedly, Lautréamont shows the Romantic Satanists, a huge tribe that culminated in Baudelaire, that they had no more than nibbled the first fruits of gothic horror; they hadn’t gone into the details. Even the places that it is reasonable to suppose produced these poisonous clouds were similar: rented rooms in big cities, Berlin or Paris, upper doors, the sky deep behind the windows, shadows on the walls. In both men’s pasts there are hints of an overheated, fanciful, frenzied adolescence that “thrived on the violation of duty,” imprisoned between college walls that “breed in their thousands the scalding, unappeasable resentments that can brand a whole life with their fire.”

Poetizing is founding, a grounding that brings about that which remains. The poet is the one who grounds beyng. What we call the real in our everyday life is, in the end, what is unreal.

Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things of all even have a hatred for images and allegories.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. . . . . Yet, at the same time . . . man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they…. Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator!

“Where there are no gods, the phantoms reign,” Novalis had prophesied. Now one could go a step further and say: gods and phantoms will alternate on the scene with equal rights. There is no longer a theological power capable of taking charge and putting them in order. In which case, who will risk dealing with them, arranging them? Another power, one that hitherto has been forever denied its independence, forever obliged to serve society, but which now threatens to hoist anchor for good and set sail, sovereign and solitary, as the vessel that brings together all the simulacra and wanders about the ocean of the mind for the pure pleasure and play of the gesture: literature. Which in this mutation may also be called absolute literature.