“For demons are the magistrates of this world: they bear the fasces and the purples, the ensigns of one college.”

Tertullian, On Idolatry

Liberalism, n. of-the-free, befitting-the-free, of-noble-birth, of-the-rulers.

The corruption of quality into quantity breeds the absurd – a genocidal warlord proclaiming himself victim, the “leader of the free world” conspiring in racist bloodshed, the “only hope for democracy” being the starving of children and the leveling of cities. First tragedy, then farce; now afterwards, the tragicomedy. Look over there, it’s Trump! Yoo-hoo! The bogeyman is scarier, so you better listen to the pig. “No matter who” always included war criminals. Presidents are mass-produced Caesars, the content of Augustus crushed into pure form, the work of democracy in the age of mechanical reproduction. Politicians are hollow beasts of pure circulation, capital-energy puppeting societal motion – M-C-M’ as zombification.

Here’s the story: Each Unique makes itself and the world around it through conjoined activity. Each act is qualitative; in quality, all is gift. But, with accumulation comes exchange, exchange necessitating measure. Measure requires comparison, quantity – qualities-in-relation. This relation generates value, the identification of quality with quantity. Value is reified in money, a commodity relative to all others that halts the infinite chain of qualities-in-relation. Money replaces the need for immediate comparison and allows for mediation, a single commodity that reflects the whole circuit of exchange. This circuit, however, is forever-rooted in quality, the activity of the Unique. Money is only a fetish, an idol obscuring the root of value, an icon mimicking the real. What separates the Unique from value is time – the measure of the activity of the Unique, the unit that is capable of crossing between incomparable modes of life. Time turns the irreplaceable, immeasurable Unique against itself in comparison and measure.

In this being-against-itself, the Unique is alienated, quality collapsing into quantity through self-measure. This measure is captured through the buying and selling of labor-power, the activity of the Unique sliced into a series of units in a circuit of exchange, accumulation operating through enclosing activity-in-time. This activity produces an excess, or surplus, that is the difference between the price of one’s time and the price of what one creates – the ratio between the quantitative time of the Unique and the qualitative product of its activity. This surplus moves through the circuit of exchange to become capital, self-reinforcing or self-expanding value, the accumulated excess of the Unique.

This excess was made possible through the re-mapping of the old feudal order. The modern Leviathan is architected in the shadow of a former apocalypse, Hobbes scribbling down monarchist screeds in fear of the caroling masses singing for a World Upside Down. This re-mapping occurs through proletariatization, the transformation of enlanded activity into contract labor, the peasants forced off common lands and into factories, the lives of the poor carves into smaller and smaller units. The potential that erupted into witchcraft and peasant rebellions is forced back into the home, the whole of the world being slowly privatized, devoured by Luther’s God, the second of the Two Bodies. Capitalism is heresy, Caesar swallowing the cross.

Proletariatization creates the conditions for accumulation, quality becoming quantity and quantity becoming machinery, human beings becoming Humans becoming proles becoming living machines. The factory expands to cover the whole of life, every excess squeezed out of the lives of the Unique and reified into a universal fetish, the icon passing into simulation, simulacric bricks in the System of Objects. The Time-Machine speeds-ever-forward, transforming being into Tartaranic spectacle, hurtling Gaia into the Night-Mare. The telos of the social factory is the eclipse of being, the ever-starless night that inhales species-being and bellows out smog. The head of the Leviathan rolls down the hollers and settles at the foot of Fenrir, the unraveling of Jörmungandr proclaiming Ragnarok. The Empire of Myths envelops itself in the lifeless shallow deep of the pretend. Fin.

The bourgeoisie are consumed by their own creation and re-shaped into circulation, a headless ouroboros. The machinery of congealed quality is melted down into weaponry and turned against the oppressed, the biopower of the social factory corrupted into colonial necropower, white phosphorous as fascist austerity. Needing to forever devour to survive, the Time-Machine turns the whole world into a machine, consuming every other world for fuel, capital accumulation a modal cancer. The Empire becomes a Great Settler, the Roundhead deity proclaiming the whole universe as his, reactionary intercommunalism decaying into absence, a contentless Ghost that is all worlds and none, only the haunting of being, a never-presence. The Unique is re-totalized in the apocalyptic One of Moloch, incinerating becoming in lead and lithium and radioactive flame.

Biden is a necrotic president, pure signification condensed into fascist imperialism. He is a Mickey Mouse in purples, a mascot in the faded image of a king, a paper Zeus ruling over a blood-stained Disney Land. There is no hope to be found in Leviathan; the path out is through the Unique, the creative flow of the community-of-communities acting-in-revolt, the seizing of the Time-Machine. Our hope is the no-place that is already-here, the Gemeinwesen of Pan, Uniques-in-loving-play reassembling quantity into quality. In the common-form of our collective unfolding, the healing of the Unique is found in the Many-in-One, the doma-between. Holy joy emanates utopia.

Leviathan is the enemy of being.

"Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook,
    restrain his tongue with a rope?
 Can you put a cord through his nose,
    pierce his jaw with a barb?
 Will he beg you at length
    or speak gentle words to you?
 Will he make a pact with you
    so that you will take him as a permanent slave?
 Can you play with him like a bird,
    put a leash on him for your girls?
 Will merchants sell him;
    will they divide him among traders?
 Can you fill his hide with darts,
    his head with a fishing spear?
 Should you lay your hand on him,
    you would never remember the battle.
 Such hopes would be delusional;
    surely the sight of him makes one stumble.
 Nobody is fierce enough to rouse him;
    who then can stand before me?"

Job 41.1-10 (CEB)

Image: Leviathan (Job 40:21) by Salvador Dali (1964-1967)