Bloggence, Cunning, Exile

The Power of Negative Thinking

The Power of Negative Thinking
by Robert Chasse

{excerpt for a Situationist classic}

...The polarization of means and ends — thought and action — into logical categories reveals a true antagonism between them in the bourgeois world. Thought is always separated from action, always hobbles after occurrence. Or else is discombobulated and deals with other. In his dirge to the bourgeois world, Spengler noted that there are two fundamental — irreconcilable — kinds of men: those who think and those who do. Malraux, another bourgeois haunted by the primacy of death, said: “Man conceives of himself but it is in no way necessary that he do so (and many don’t). The essential drama, or problem, is in the opposition between two systems of thought, one which tends to question man and life, the other to suppress all questioning by activity.”

The means elicit the emergence of the ends that realize them. The action you engage in engages you. Not to act is another form of action. Action always generates the thought, as thought generates the action. These opposites always fuse. The rest is liberalized fiction.

The radical who penetrates a group to radicalize it, who parcelizes himself, to bring some of its members up to his degree of radicalization, also enters on the level of the group. He is of them immediately. Any subsequent radicalization therefore is something other than thought, mediated by his creation of the conditions that negate that thought.

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{entire text at link above}

posted by E. Heroux @ 6:08 PM