The Penumbra of the Empty, Part II

I hate the “dividing practices.” I oppose them. (And I am long aware of the irony of “opposing” the dividing practices…To oppose the dividing practices is to enact them.)

For me, the “dividing practices” never lose the flavor of “divide and conquer.” What is divided is reduced in force, in what it can do. It has been made ready for conquering.

The dividing practices seem designed to weaken. A rationality of dividing practices seems aimed at producing weakness. It appears to be a will-to-weakness and a rationality which eschewed dividing practices would have been regarded by me as a will-to-power.

I am subject to the dividing practices—subject to the dividing practices, I can apply the dividing practices such as I am able in a chain-of-command of dividing practice. For being divided, do I reap a compensating reward within the collective of all divided up? Is there even such a collective? If I am weakened as an individual, would the strengthening of the collective be compensation, or not further punishment? What if the collective was strengthened but nevertheless each and every individual of the collective were weakened? In what sense is such a collective to be considered strengthened?

Previously, I opposed the “dividing practices” on the grounds they destroy “living unity.” However, I no longer think there are “living unities” in the sense I once did: as organic unities, as the organization of organs…Life as necessary organization, as necessarily organized. A life world had an organic functioning of secular and religious which required systems of circulation and coordination in order to not be debilitated or dead. If the one became separated from the other, both would be sickened or destroyed.

On this basis, it didn’t surprise me to observe the post-Enlightenment sickness of both the secular and the religious. Neither in separation seemed satisfactory and the kind of recombinations enacted by individuals, groups, or “subcultures” in privacy appeared to be unsuccessful (how could they not be as the fact that these happen in privacy is the enactment and redundancy of the dividing practice?) Of course, if I call “living unity” by its other name: Totalization, or totality—the triumphant restoration of such a thing –its power—has no appeal.