Pan's Optician

To dwell in the desert is to dwell on the desert. And yet, the desert can only be a site of futility - even if one has especially good reasons for leaving everything behind. There is a desert of solace - an escapist desert, a desert of flight and fleeing, a desert never far enough away, no matter how far one walks. The desert of solace is remote and relative - one deserts one’s life, flees from people, and abandons a culture deemed barely worthy of the name. There is no real destination, only a departing. Politically unacceptable, morally reprehensible, threatening to collapse the still-fragile membrane between philosophy and its decision, this desert is as necessary as it is familiar - I would even say that whoever simply dismisses the desert of escape has not really lived, either in the World or on the Earth.

Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of ‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me’.

If I ever have occasion to write out my last words in blood, I’ll write this: ‘Everything I lived, said, or wrote — everything I loved — I considered communication. How could I live my life otherwise? Living this recluse’s life, speaking in a desert of isolated readers, accepting the buoyant touch of writing! My accomplishment, its sum total, is to have taken risks and to have my sentences fall like the victims of war now lying in the fields.’ I want people to laugh, shrug their shoulders, and say, ‘He’s having fun at our expense, he’s alive.’ True, I live on, even now am full of life, though I declare, ‘If you find me reluctant to take risks in this book, throw it away; if on the other hand, when you read me you find nothing to risk yourself, then listen: Throughout your life up until your death, your reading will only corrupt you… and you’ll stink with corruption.’

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

Moralism is a defense mechanism against the intensity caused by the void at the heart of human subjectivity.

If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed.  With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation.  Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate.  These puritanical politics of shame – which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies – leave us cold.  We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror.  We want superior forms of corruption.

To preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world ..and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction

“Western Buddhism” is … a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the … capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; [pretending] that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; [pretending] that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which … you can always with-draw.