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KULTURTERROR: DOSSIER


A mighty angel stands on the horizon
   with naked sword, and causes their defeat:
crimson blood clots within their grateful bosom.
—Mallarmé
What we are starting is a war.
—Bataille

A WAR OF TERROR

When Bataille says that we are starting a war it's easy to get lost in poetic device. Bataille, however, is doing exactly the opposite: he, himself, is war (in the most literal sense of the term) and he is just now being born. Bataille, in French, means 'battle'. He is/was one of many battles of this war (of terror). A war of terror fought by terror. In this war all combatants become war, immediately. To be fighting the war is to be fighting oneself, and one never wins by fighting oneself. This is our first thesis, then. We are war because we refuse to fight it. We reap its ek-static alogic until the very last body drops.

He asked me if I was ready to go , I shot myself. . Then and there, as my halo flared red, I was made a saint .

Metaphor-qua-poiesis killed language a long time ago. The One is metaphor to the extent that nothing is so metaphorical as to die a second death. But everything is so metaphorical that it doesn't even make sense to talk about metaphor.

There is no metaphor. There is only war.