So the doppelgänger yarn of Imposter Klein is one little theological dispute taking place on the eve of what the ruling class is hoping — I think too confidently — will be its final victory over humanity, and its ascension to the status of All. Of divinity.
Barbie announces this simply, in the snark form that has even lost the buzz of snark as if the AI wrote the ad on a day it was trying to quit electricity cold turkey. And yes, the thing in the way of the final victory is death, which doesn’t afflict Barbie but still has a date with her owners in Samarra. The ruling class still ages and dies. But conquering death, or rather greatly postponing it, is honestly a project well under way. Also in the way: life. Living labour.
Bella’s identity as an organic, animal, psychic plenitude, the human fully plugged into the cosmic commons, is shown in the course of its amputation and its struggle to survive it in individual form, which is, because fecund, because the individual is the embodied code of the species, still infinite. (Really can’t wait to get to Freedom and Death, but as I used to say on my old blogs, sloooleeee, sloooooleeeeee) Barbie’s figuration of Plenitude as Property, as cosmic deified capital, is told. Announced. Lazily. Emptily. And then declared the winner. ‘She is everything.’ What kind of everything is Barbie? Everything you don’t want. DEATH. Not the same everything as Bella.
Klaus Theweleit:
None of the maintenance processes [the violent acts of the ‘not fully born soldier males’ attempting to achieve pleasure as self-coupling] functions in strict accordance with the pleasure principle. They subsume sexual drives under drives for self-maintenance: external objects are abandoned. The pleasure they ultimately yeild is the pleasure of survival. Since the ego of the not-yet-fully-born constantly threatens to fragment, all the maintenance processes produce some form of dependency. They generate a compulsive repetition of situations of unpleasure as well as pleasure - a phenomenon traced by Freud, in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, to the "death drive".
I am loath to introduce complicated discussions of the "death drive" at this stage; it should suffice to note that the soldier male's acts of maintenance originate in attempts to gain experience of pleasure. Their goal is the ultimate form of discharge, namely, self-extinction. The men's endeavours may almost unvariably be unsuccessful, yet failure itself does not place them in opposition to the pleasure principle; nor does it derive from some other "principle" antagonistic to that of pleasure. A more probable cause of failure is the lack of any adequate material basis in, around, or across these particular male bodies during their quest for pleasure. Where, after all, can the capacity for pleasure be located in a body whose periphery has been de-eroticized, its interior incarcerated and objectified as flowing with filth and dangerous waters?
In our society, there is no shortage of bodies estranged from the pleasure principle. But I see no indication that the effects of the drives in a destructive society can be traced to any source opposed to that of drives toward pleasure.
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There are by contrast very clear indications that the soldier male, in the process of differentiating himself from the “bloody miasma,” or transforming the teeming mass into “empty space,”” organizes his own struggle for survival as a direct onslaught on femininity.
In self-coupling, men invariably produce the “bloody miasma” - a fact that is particularly revealing for their own condition. When confronted with women, by contrast, their impulse is to pierce the facade of female “innocence,” to display the whole morass of blood and excrement into which they perceive the female womb to be transformed in sexual intercourse, menstruaton or childbirth. Men clearly attracted by feminine hybridity are presented, in contrast, as incurably infected. In both cases it is a shot or a rifle butt blow that extracts the evidence.…
"The Freikorps spirit could be amply demonstrated by the butt of a rifle." (Major Schulz)
The rifle-butt blow: the proudly displayed trademark of the Freikorps soldier.
Unlike the social democratic press of the period, which tended to dismiss the terror as a Communist invention - “all this claptrap about white horror” - the soldiers themselves took little trouble to hide the pleasure they experienced in killing, even documenting it in texts published at the time of the terror itself. (That it was murder they were guilty of was, however, denied in every single sentence.) They denied their involvement only if the naming of particular names appeared unwise, or, to be more explicit, if doing so would lead to legal action or to unfavourable propagandistic consequences. In all other cases, the accounts of the fascist male were more likely to resemble the following:My brave lads from Upper Silesia returned with their rifle-butts splintered, even hacked off completely - evidence of the incomparable and bitter resolve they had shown in battle. (Captain Scheffel).
A moment later one of his men had thrashed the Red's skull to pieces. (Zöberlein)
This is more than mere retrospective exaggeration. In military action during the German Revolutionary period from 1912, rifle-butt blows were second only to shooting as a method of killing workers "attempting to escape".
The rifle-butt was argued to be admirably suitable for hand-to-hand combat; but it was used in situations where even this rationalisation became untenable. In the following account, wounded ex-fighters have been brought by Red Army soldiers to a field hospital in Dülmen:When Reichswehr troops occupied the camp the following morning and discovered that the wounded men belonged to the Red Army, they stabbed and beat them to death with rifle butts and bayonets. The corpses were unrecognizeably disfigured.
Or consider the following tale from a West German national service classroom, relayed to me by Karl Müller. The Captain in charge once predictably asked why German soldiers used rifle butts in close combat, while the Japanese, for example, used short knives. Using the rifle butt, he said, was part of the mentality of the German soldier. An explanation to conjure with.
In the military actions of 1920, a large number of the dead were labeled “shot while attempting to escape.”Prisoners with shattered skulls could not easily be presented as the victims of attempted escape - the military was not yet quite as powerful as it had been.
The privilege of being killed with a “decent bullet,” as opposed to a rifle butt, accrues only to men. In the trial of one of Rosa Luxemburg's murderers, a witness recounts how Luxemburg was told:Gunpowder is too good for you. We're going to tear you open and divide you up so everyone has a piece.
Imposter Klein, schooling us in her superiority to Other Pundit, tells us Wolf has Vagina where Klein has Climate, which happens to be another word for Death.
Hieropunk: I feel empty inside! I feel empty outside!
“…But one must also have been with the dying, one must have sat in a room with the dead with the window open and random noises coming in. And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they become blood within us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable from ourselves--not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them.” (Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
…This sundered mind rails against the knowledge of its own properties and feels itself condemned by them; to be merely a European lowercased man and not Man, of certain letters and travels, and non exhaustive experiences.
The theological dispute that Naomi with a powerpoint is trying and failing to have with the Naomi who runs with the wolves is taking place in the endgame of this struggle that is class. Armed with her measurements of bullshit, Naomi with a powerpoint declares humanity is killing the magic source of all its commodities, the goose that lays the infinitely reproducible image of Barbies, the Ruling Class’ Earth, and she is enraged that armed with a human mind she believes is basically located in her Vagina, the Wolfwoman insists it is the other way around.