Kapital and Katalepsy: an exercise in Kapitulation

This article is only of note for the sake of later discussion. It is written down in a hurried and unthought manner, that does not betoken any genuine thinking, in fact thinking itself is lost.

The point from the beginning has been to become lost, hopelessly entangled in the dense forests of thinking, much better this forest than the technological conception of eternal perfection, high fidelity completeness if such a thing exists.

I have suggested that the essence of Dasein resides in its capacity to render what is proper to itself: Mort, mortgage and finitude. The attempt to "own" any property leads to mort-gage, to debt that must be constantly repaid: it immediately acknowledges the juridical-political system of the state. A dead end. What is proper to Dasein is mortality... is death. Death however tends to upset the order of ontic exchange perpetuated by the state: there is no price that is put on the threshold where one feels the exchange between human life and death.

And yet the ontic is death, the very opposite of the ex-stasis of the living world, which exists without property, immortal and thereby "free."

Oppermann and I have pointed to the issue that ex-stasis is always a kind of cover, that is eternally proceeded by a shadow: capitalist appropriation: this would have to do with being another spiritual system that can be sold to you by another one of those "fucking" (sic) (Oppermann's language) sages.

Catalepsy, I posited on a lark, is dialectically (hah! "dialectically!" how non-heideggerian, Heidegger being the greatest non-dialectical thinker) opposed to ecstasy (ex-stasis). If ecstasy is commodified and marketed away, then catalepsy simply grabs you and pulls you down and holds your nose to the topic till you can't think or speak any longer. It may be somewhat of an embarrassment, and it may be signs of a mild form of epilleptic disorder (which a friend of mine called "being attacked by the devil;" this friend sometimes is quite brilliant, but Oppermann and I labeled a "phillistine" just to express our considerable misogyny, and Deborah agreed if only to be rid of her, so I apologize.).

I very much admire the act of giving in: it leaves room for all sorts of subversion after the fact. When it comes to Kapital there is always more to say because it capitalizes on this. There may in fact be a commercial value to all of this drivel, and if there is not then it is likely to be whisked away as the next wave of dross. Kapital however is death, money is death, it is the lowest form of matter, it is matter that has reached it's lowest form of potential and thereby is potential for everything: a universal currency, Mercury stands in every door... and yet how unfortunate that we live in an era of a cliche believing that most everything we can discursify can be bought or sold... we keep seeking for a discourse that relates to our truth, but then this puts us at the point of our own mortality, where finitude creeps in and lifts it's weary face. 'Death old friend, the death of my cock," Jim Morrison will say, speaking of his own "sore and crucified" phallos, as ribald and repulsive as any poet has dared to speak. "And death shall have no dominion," speaks Dylan Thomas, but that event shall only come at a profoundly later date, when after we have suffered the warring and warning of the word and language to suffer us at last: you don't know how badly we have faltered and fallen into the political world.

I traced the whole thing back to Mircea Eleade (Oppermann calls him, appropriately Mer-che-ah) "Myth and Reality" the distinction between Mythos and Logos is the dawn also of the political world: Eliade cites Xenophanes (565-470) as the author of that distinction. The dawn of the secular world. And what is secular, a seclorum (latin for a "age" or a grasped period of time), is a tie, or a debt (from the Hittite), a bond of trade. It may be that from this distinction we can see the eventual rise of capital, though the necromancy of money in the form of tithes records is at least as old as the Egyptian religions... some attribute the first coinage to the same time as Xenophanes: Croesius of Lydia, Ca. 560 BC.

This is just a preliminary sketch, more on this will necessarily be posted later. One piece I would like to emphasize would be the issue of Katalepsy as something that grabs one, rather than a voluntary act of "stepping" out that one sees in "ex-stasis." This distinction seems flat at the moment, and rather lifeless, the point is that ex-stasis gets easily re-capitulated... catalepsy throws one off the path, a mortification, pointing to the dual ontic and ontological sense of death.