René Girard’s praise of a straightforwardly, intrinsically good mimesis (directed towards Christ) against a bad mimesis (directed towards creatures) is in my view a Pelagian tendency that I believe we need to challenge, precisely insofar as it effectively disavows our own creaturely horizon, and instead I think we really should try to reoccupy the non-mimetic critical escape hatch exploited by Peter Thiel in what some have called a “misreading” of Girard, but which I really think is a creative Protestant appropriation which fills Girard’s own failure to think the analogical grammar of creation with a manipulative transhumanist instrumentalism of superego jouissance (as the logical conclusion of Luther’s hypothesis of total depravity). Instead of merely imitating Christ or creation, we should learn to take up our cross as creatures in OBEDIENCE to Christ (qualitatively different from mere imitation), recognizing that His divinity exceeds our imaging of Him absolutely and that therefore we cannot perfect ourselves, but are only made perfect externally in Him by negatively resisting the temptation to sin, sin which is always a transgressive identification with, and imitation of, God’s uncreated potency. This is St. Augustine’s crucial revolution in thought, corrupted by the Reformers’ inability to accept the relative, but ONLY relative, goodness of God’s creatures. The other night I saw Slavoj Žižek and Robert P. Harrison speak in San Francisco loosely on the topic of Žižek’s new book “Liberal Fascisms.” Of course these two atheists went on to praise Girard and critique Thiel’s “misreading,” spouting truisms about how one cannot escape the mimetic economy, that this is supposedly a Christian point. Beware of such arguments; at the beginning of the event, Žižek explicitly identified his atheist “God” with the Hegelian “collective spirit” or “social pact” and then called for “moderately conservative communism” as a form of “global coordination” pulling the “emergency brake” on “capitalist progress.” I confess that I find such a call to be fully Antichrist in character, to the point that even Thiel is right to criticize it; but Žižek is just as correct that Thiel’s “liberal fascist” tendency is an unbounded superego compulsion to enjoy, which requires a kind of Lenten rejection of its total submission to sin. The issue with Žižek’s communism is that he tries to restrain sinful man by sinful man, when sinful man can only be restrained by God, and by God working through an obedientially potent humanity, which can be analogically recognized as qualitatively distinct from mere human agency. Thiel and Žižek are united in the Protestant assumption that obediential potency, the key category of Catholic Mariology, must be rejected. But if this assumption itself is rejected, and the creaturely horizon of all humanity is accepted while prideful mimetic desire of divinity is checked, the possibilities of Christian resistance to the apocalyptic rise of Antichrist forces become infinitely more vital.

It’s time to stop thinking in terms of Left vs. Right. But we have to move onto a new framework for political compassing. I have a proposal, based on a metaphysical distinction of Spinoza’s—yes, Spinoza, the arch-heretic who gave voice to the Radical Enlightenment architects of anti-Christian modernity, as the appropriately named Jonathan Israel details in his historical classic. I do not endorse Spinoza’s heretical framework, but rather, following (critically) A. Kiarina Kordela, I believe that it expresses the ideological space of “secular capitalist modernity” within which Christians have to operate as counter-modern “aliens,” opposed apocalyptically to its idolatrous Antichrist dreams. @xenocosmography has written of this in terms of “GNON,” which is a demonological semi-acronym for “God of Nature or Nature’s God” (in Jean-Luc Marion’s terms, this is precisely the IDOL par excellence, a function of HUMAN original sin rather than objective creation). The distinction that I would like to see replace “Left” and “Right” respectively is that between NATURA NATURATA (“natured” nature) and NATURA NATURANS (“naturing” nature). Agnes (@biophysiqs) has graciously accepted the role of helping instantiate this distinction through a personal contrast between the two of us. Recently we have been having a series of arguments over the stakes of (in my terms at least) Catholic orthodoxy and Gnostic heresy which I believe illustrates well what is at stake, in a manner similar to @kkolozova (with whom I have just completed a seminar sponsored by @MethexisATX on similar issues) in terms of her (still critical in certain respects!) defense of François Laruelle’s method of self-consciously “heretical” religiosity. For Agnes (and in a different way for Katerina), what is principally at stake in politics is the relation of subjugator and subjugated, from the standpoint of the subjugated. There is a perpetual, and understandable, skepticism towards any principles deployed alongside historical forms of really identifiable subjugation. In particular, Agnes defends heretics historically persecuted by the Catholic Church, and aligns herself with a theological position that I would describe as broadly “Marcionite” (in essence, the view is that the biblical YHWH is actually the devil, from whom Jesus came to save us). I would describe this thinking from the position of the subjugated (those whom Laruelle thematizes in great depth with the category of “victims” in his theoretical apparatus) is thinking from the position of natura NATURATA, or NATURED nature, the nature that receives itself to itself as always-already objectified. Most “leftists” think this way, generally speaking. But what of natura NATURANS, the agency of nature in its mode of ACTIVITY, of what actually governs reality rather than what is subjugated by it, the Left typically (though not always) fails to ask this question. For example, “authoritarian” leftists like Slavoj Žižek and A. Kiarina Kordela do in fact care about the NATURANS or the “naturing” function. For Žižek, as well as for Kordela, this function is discursively identified with what Jacques Lacan called the “master-signifier,” as opposed to the “signifying chain,” which is at once “natured” by the “naturing” master-signifier (henceforth S1) and reflexively, in a way that both Žižek and Kordela agree is roughly Hegelian (in the sense of the dialectic of Self-Consciousness from The Phenomenology of Spirit, so beloved by Lacan’s mentor Alexandre Kojève), “sublates” or “suspends” the “naturing” function of the S1 back, in a higher form of determination of the NATURANS that Hegel calls “speculative reason.” Speculative reason, which I would identify with the “Right”-coded form of thinking from responsibility for the NATURANS, did not begin with Hegel. Rather, already in the Catholic Scholasticism of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, “speculatio” was conceived as a grace of prophetic insight. The Bene Gesserit exist.

Daria Dugina is the unconscious of every Nazi “moralfag.” Much like Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille before her, she counsels the methodology of adopting the position of the Hegelian (“naturing”) master, while just adopting aspects of Deleuzian monadological Hermetic theurgy of the flesh to make up the difference of the fact that the master is perpetually outmaneuvered on a providential-eschatological spiritual level by the agency of that which they attempt to master. The correct approach here would be to doubly identify both with the mastering-naturing position from the strict standpoint of prophetic Speculatio in the Scholastic sense (best outlined by Ratzinger), as I counsel, and with that (“natured”) choratic material which is speculated on, the soul qua soul (traditionally referred to in feminine language—see Amy Hollywood’s work) which Lacan refers to as “horsexe,” that which escapes sexual reduction and is the object-cause of all transcendent speculation. Practically, this stands for the meta-moralistic form of confessional reduction presupposed in every act of narrow-minded Pharisaical moralism.

David Bentley Hart is, at least, an ally against the openly Satanic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: “Of course, Deleuze has no need to retain Spinoza’s “God” (a word that in the Ethics has already been conformed to a kind of naturalized version of the Qabbalism of the Florentine Academy). Deleuze’s expressionism is, naturally, differential; his understanding of necessity is inescapable chance, the “necessity” of the dice throw and its uncontrollable result; hence, in place of Spinoza’s complicative and explicative Deus sive natura, Deleuze extols Chaos, whose celebrant is the Antichrist or the Baphomet: “the ‘prince of all modifications,’ and himself modification of all modifications.” Analogy is excluded not only from the interval between immanence and an illusory transcendence, but from the nomadic distribution of diverging series within being; the doctrine of ontological univocity is simultaneously one of absolute ontic equivocity.” Here is the full “mask-off” pro-Baphomet Deleuze passage that Hart is quoting (one which rather helpfully “takes Kant down with him”—you can have him, for the Christian philosophy to come is that of the pneumatics, and neither the Pharisees like Kant NOR the Babylonians like Klossowski and Deleuze, for whom theology is always-already ontotheology!): “In Kant, therefore, we see that God is revealed as the master of the disjunctive syllogism only inasmuch as the disjunction is tied to exclusions in the reality which is derived from it, and thus to a negative and limitative use. Klossowski’s thesis, with the new critique of reason that it implies, takes on therefore its full significance: it is not God but rather the Antichrist who is the master of the disjunctive syllogism. This is because the anti-God determines the passage of each thing through all of its possible predicates. God, as the Being of beings, is replaced by the Baphomet, the “prince of all modifications,” and himself modification of all modifications. There is no longer any originary reality. The disjunction is always a disjunction: the “either-or” is always an “either-or.” Rather than signifying that a certain number of predicates are excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of the corresponding concept, the disjunction now signifies that each thing is opened up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, on the condition that it lose its identity as concept and as self. The disjunctive syllogism accedes to a diabolical principle and use, and simultaneously the disjunction is affirmed for itself without ceasing to be a disjunction, divergence or difference becomes objects of pure affirmation, and “either-or” becomes the power of affirmation, outside the conceptual conditions of the identity of a God, a world, or a self. Dilemma and solecism acquire as such a superior positivity. We have seen, however, how often negative or exclusive disjunctions still subsist in Klossowski’s work: between exchange and repetition; between language concealed by the body and the glorious body formed by language; and finally, between God’s order and the order of the Antichrist. But it is precisely inside God’s order, and only there, that disjunctions have the negative value of exclusion. And it is on the other side, inside the order of the Antichrist, that the disjunction (difference, divergence, decentering) becomes as such an affirmative and affirmed power.”

Entropy (per se) is not the enemy. While it’s tempting to physically localize the Satanic curse of death and decay in the entropically constituted thermodynamic “arrow of time” (I have done this in the past—for an interesting discussion of this in a Christian hamartiological context, see James Wetzel’s “Augustine and the Limits of Virtue”), a careful critical study of Reza Negarestani’s philosophy of thermodynamics in “Intelligence and Spirit” is convincing me that it is instead the state of affairs at the *origin* of the (always relative) entropic arrows—which I would theologically gloss as the site of cosmic (“meta-historical”) fall—which represents the peak of the Satanic curse, insofar as it represents the peak of energy made available for finite exploitation, with the continuing (“apocalyptic”) development of entropic exhaustion actually depriving the Satanic fantasy of the total finite exploitation of energy of its means of “Promethean” realization, requiring external reliance on absolute divine order and hierarchy, rather than the imposition of merely created commands (however once “angelic” they may have been) over a “standing reserve” of readily exploitable energy. This dovetails nicely with Jean-Luc Marion’s emphasis on the categorical priority of final causes (and so the apocalyptic “end of time”) over efficient causes (and so the “beginning of time”—arguably Satan’s fall rather than divine creation) when it comes to the order of divine love in “God without Being.” The implication is that rather than history being the story of progressive decay from a good cosmically immanent divine origin, it is the story of the progressive victory of a good *transcendent* divine origin over an evil/false linear “beginning” which corrupted the order of divine creation—still making up all the real substance of our world—in a privative angelic fall. All of this is of eminent relevance to the paper that @PervertGuide and I are preparing for the upcoming “Nature Lost, Nature Regained” conference contrasting (in catastrophe-theoretic terms) the themes of cosmic fall between Hegel’s heterodox theory of cosmic evil, which makes evil a positive logical moment in a total divine noetic structure and so (in Gnostic fashion) the work of the divine, and St. Maximus the Confessor’s more orthodox view, which preserves the goodness of nature by situating evil as instead a Satanic disruption of the purely good and graced order of created nature itself at the foundation of this cosmos tainted by sin, obstructing the flow of uncreated grace into creation. See how this connects to the “unnatural” situation, at the dawn of linear time, of a surplus of finitely exploitable mechanical energy over the finitely non-exploitable heat energy which increases with entropy in the relational constitution of time’s arrow? I may also be organizing an upcoming seminar on Negarestani’s thought with @pachabelcanon soon; stay tuned for more details.