On the Community Guidelines

Cigarettes aren’t simple pleasures. They’re destructive, which makes them complex all the more pleasurable. The drive towards self-destruction and the desire for pleasure are united in the divine moment: the drag of a cigarette. So too in the thrill of theft, the pain of an orgasm, the slash of the wrist.

Beyond good and evil there is desire and will. None of the earlier examples ought to be qualified morally, but it is important they are. This is the foundation of the Taboo. There exists a rule, for historical and/or gregarious reasons: against murder, theft, incest, etc. Simultaneously, there is the urge to transgress it.

There would not be a taboo against murder if murder were not committed, but the taboo against it elevates the act of murder to a sacred tier: the profane, the beyond-man, the taboo. It can be moralised, it can be ritualised as sacrifice or justice, but there is no joy in being a calculated exception to murder. The euphoria lies in the incalculable transgression of the murder.

The cigarette is less taboo than murder, and the pleasure of suffocating in its fatal smoke is therefore diminished. But it is still there! The unity of opposites - pleasure and death - are wrapped in paper and filtered into my lungs. Cigarettes are better than good, they are pleasurable.

I read the community guidelines.

The more I read the more eager I was to fill a page with sexual deviancy and triumphant suicides. An anorexic nun disgusted by her reflection, and by her fat Sister. A cat with a bell on its collar failing to kill a bird, a bird that’s too cowardly to kill itself. A bachelorette party venerating the image of the phallus, not knowing what they do. A son too old to breastfeed, sucking his wifes tits.

But the events I crave to write aren’t appropriate for this ‘community’, and if they were in not sure I would so want to share them. Transgression is a cultivated joy, and this ‘community’ is too cultivated to suffer my smut. And yet I want to revolt you!

Disgust is the highest virtue, closest to God. It is culture itself. To have a great nose for foul odours, a soft tongue averted to sour milk, these are the traits of an artist and a Caesar.

To know what is beneath you and not call it evil, but simply be disgusted. This is how man surpasses himself, the ‘moi’ surpasses the ‘soi-même’.

This procession is halted by the community guidelines I toil under, but I wouldn’t not have them changed on my account, NO! Without them I have nothing to rage against. I need them in order to be disgusted and transgress them, to surpass them; if only privately.

And now I will stop writing and have another cigarette.

T. M. Harrison

P.S. The revelation above is too short to publish, so here is are some notes a took from Klossowski ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’.

Schizophrenia is secularisation made creative? p. 57 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Anorexia as ‘will to deify’ as means of power p. 85-6 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Cause-Effect is a product of language Chpt. 5

(anti)Œdipal, Freudian inversion a al Deleuze p. 176

“Thus there is no longer anything that separates two different domains of the real - the simulacrum of the act, and the act itself.” p. 205 (Most Beautiful Invention of the Sick)

Nietzsche and Histrionics -Euphoria of Turin in Nietzsche and the vicious circle

I am determined that the six-hundredth word is my revelation is the word ‘shit’. And it is!