#conservative desire

Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition of the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western’ position – the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life – or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named – since it speaks Greek – a ‘eu-oudenose, a smug nihilism. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive. Every age – and in the end, none is worth more than any other – has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (‘ethics’, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe.