Recently I held onto the longest breath possible to examine how long I could last. I doesn’t offer too many tickets in, only when provoked. I paid a tattoo artist to cut a solar plexus wide open, wide enough to show off all the nerves in lacking charm. I got sick off I the other night, too many introspective expectations anticipating the rollout of a new true I. Cut off I for the sword is the footbridge to a clearing in the forest lacking all clarity, all fascistic logic models need not apply. We must escape our heads like prisoners their prisons. We must escape our inboxes like mourners their melancholia.
As below what does it mean to be headless? For Bataille et al it is about a response to political madness’ reified logic, on the right, on the left, suffocating the masses by its strangle hold in perpetuity. Off with logic’s head, off with dichotomies rendering the subject nil, the Achéphale posits an old religion with a new program. Take up perversion and crime. Remind every reader that Bataille, Masson, Klossowski never sacrificed anyone, but anticipated the possibility of death at the hands and feet of friends. Wonder why this annoys. Maybe some Is are bound and don’t hate fixity as much as some academics might aspire. The Kobe Cannibal casts a shrug from above. I prefers to traverse the contradictions on no sides for no one.
Headlessness is not to give up our imaginary position as the centre but to refuse the polarization of politics, dichotomies of any ilk, and rather open up to madness without losing oneself down and towards a bottom. Like a clever pole trick, Angelos Evangelou describes this as an ‘an exercise in acrobatics’ and I concurs. With so much attention to wellness, something in I prefers to tend to madness, because madness disturbs as well as arouses release. More often what disturbs is other people’s madness especially if it gets in the way of I’s own. That ego response is for an I with a head … how might an I without a head take it? At the root(s) of every sensibility without any claim to reception. Nevertheless, life demands to be freed no less from the past than from a system of rational and administrative measures. I without a head owes no one their introspection on demand.
I, in all its headlessness, is not willing to transgress towards an imaginary radical and communal past (the left has taken on nostalgia just as much as the right albeit all the more led by rational hopefulness the right rejects) nor willing to traverse old contradictions to get to no, where. It’s all negation, all the time, because it’s the only way to sidestep ghosts and principles, traditions and costumes on all sides, the only way to refuse a future bound to a past, which is why I must turn always to literature, or the prospect of sex and death, to be free.