The Penumbra of the Empty, Part XI

I assume dividing practices are only possible if what will be divided is presented as given, and given to be divided. The dividing practice cannot create what the dividing practice will divide up….What will be divided up must be given—how? By whom? How is the given, given…And why….These questions don’t occur…Can’t occur without derangement. Of course these latter questions are the philosophical questions.

Within any “given” (which I depict as a region of space, for example a circle, circumscribed)—all sorts of “activity” takes place—a kind of fastidious and obsessive-compulsive dividing up of that region such as that region has been set out—polishing and articulating in ever finer detail and exploring more closely whatever territory has been previously somehow demarcated as explorable (explicable? Explicable is I believe the more accurate term, but I do believe explorable and explicable are in fact confused by the demonic ants who labor in these hives.)

My point of contention is that many or even most of the regions of space demarcated and understood as given were given prehistorically and very often by the hominids…The rest of the motion, which could be centuries or millennia in length, has been a “coasting” or inertial movement riding on what these hominids set in motion. I also contend that it is almost certain the hominids would have understood their imparting of this motion to have been spiritual or religious, and the very worst dividing practice imaginable (from the standpoint of imparting motion or in other words from warding off Totalization) would have been when “religious claims were progressively withdrawn from the political and public spheres of society.” To do that would have been a fantastic boon for social practices of “information” but a mutilation of social practices of ecstformation…Or, in terms of Totalization, it would have been a mutilation of the ways social practices linked up with “net external forces.”