A Polemic on the State

It is proper to every gathering

that the gatherers assemble to

coordinate their efforts to the

sheltering; only when they have

gathered together with that end

in view do they begin to gather.

Heidegger

I

The starting point is Heidegger’s distinction between gathering and sheltering. The

distinction does not arise from the fold of an argument over what differentiates, qualitatively or quantitatively, gathering from sheltering. Sheltering is what arises through coordination. The coordination of the assembly. This is the proper value, the eigenvalue of gathering. It is not that there are cases when we may talk of gathering without sheltering. The case is this: for gathering to be, sheltering must be on the horizon of thinking. The path in view.

Sheltering is the thinking of the position. Man rethinks himself in the vicinity of sheltering. In the vicinity of Being that is the shelter. And the eigenvalue, that which is proper to gathering, is the coordination. The interaction, that is; the effort that is expended in the process of gathering.

The interaction, the communicative process, that reveals itself in the language of Being. The road of coordination is the language of Being of Man rethinking himself in the vicinity of the shelter.

Man rethinks his position, orients himself toward an encounter.

Man seizes the essence of the encounter without quite caging it. The encounter of the sheltering.

* * *

For the coordination to be, Man, himself, is the coordination itself. Otherwise, coordination, itself, is a falling into physical resources; the physicality, the scienticity, that takes hold of the imagination.

II

However, Man falls into the folds of History. Man turns into making History. Man turns into encountering himself as an item of resourcefulness in History. Society turns into an itemization of Man’s resourcefulness in History.

* * *

Society as an itemization of Man’s resourcefulness is the same as saying that Man encounters the world as a metaphysical complicity. A representational complicity.

Complicity with what? A complicity in the making of error.

Error is the order of things in a space of measurement. The appearance of things in the conscious ordering of the world. The world of configuration.

Society is the world of configuration of resources. The calculation of error. The ordering of error that is the order of things.

Man falls into the social world by falling into the calculation of error. The world in the history of error is the gravitational manifold into which Man gravitates.

Man gravitates into the world of error. He does not quite fall into in, but grasps it as though it was of his making. In a world of error, coordination is the justification of error, and interaction is the exchange of signs without referents.

* * *

This is not to say that Man rethinking his position in the vicinity of sheltering rethinks the possibility of the referent.

Man in the vicinity of sheltering is the thinking of the referent.

Gathering-coordination-sheltering is the language of Being in the vicinity of the referent.

In the world of error, language is itself the configuration of error.

In the world of error, the referent is lacking because the difference is smashed, and disfigured into a homogeneous abstraction of the world. Where objects are differentiated by merely reaching into them as abstracted signifieds.

* * *

In the world of error, resistance is the possibility of exile. Difference is the potential of exile. Rebellion, in the world of error, is the layering of the world as the textual evidence of Man’s existence in what could have been: Man rethinking his position in the vicinity of sheltering.

Rebellion is the uncovering of that which through coordinated effort refuses to surrender itself, as it is in itself, and that which we will name, in the world of error, by two names: gathering and sheltering.

The logic of error is the logic of reason. The configured exchange of ideas through the language of error.

Society is an itemization of resources, with Man, himself, as the maker and inventor. In addition, Man, himself, as an item. Society appears as a space of commodities. Man in this space is a special commodity that can make other commodities. Man is a special commodity because Man can perform the linguistic exchange of signs that claims to refer to things. This claim is the basis for the logic of reason. The mathematical precision by which the logic of reason proclaims/claims its hegemony on the world is the precision of the abstracted signified that claims to represent a referent.

In this scheme, language itself is a commodity, and society is itself a commodity. However, these two commodities are very special. They are mental technologies that are the universe of signs.

Into this universe of signs Man gravitates.

* * *

Man is a special commodity, because he is the commodity that can be conscious of its own specialness, not only through the exchange of signs, but also because Man allows his imagination to be held.

The exchange of signs and the hold on the imagination are equivalent.

The state has a hold on the imagination. It cheats the imagination into imagining itself imaging the world.

This is done through two stages: In the configuration of error, thinking is led to conclude that the state and society are same. Then, through the linguistic exchange of signs, Man, the special commodity, is led into the consumption of the world as mere byproducts of the state.

The state is the culmination of error. The logic of reason, the precise mathematics of error, thrones itself in the fold of the state.

Man does not fall into the state, he gravitates into the fold of the state.

But the state is not only the political hierarchy of error. It is the order revealing itself to Man as the meaning of the world, as Man reflects on History as that of his making.

III

The state creates physical and mental technologies, and Man appropriates the world that

is the state by the way of appropriating the sign.

Appropriation of the world as such points to the world as a frame.

In the frame ideologies are not manufactured.

Man pursues the sign. That’s the way by which Man appropriates the world/frame.

Thinking in the frame is the outlining of the ideology of the state.

Knowledge in the frame is the topology of the sign.

The state of the social world is the power hierarchy of the order.

The world in the state is the picture of the order.

Man in the state can not appropriate his own death.

Man appropriates his own death by appropriating tradition into the present tense.

Being-unto-Death is the appropriation of the referent into the sign.

In the vicinity of death, Man is seized into exile.

The currency of the order are the items of alienation.

Alienation is the coordinated effort that transforms gathering into an assembly of objects that can be reconfigured within the order.

Exile stands diametrically opposite to alienation in the same way that gathering-sheltering stands with respect to the configured picture of the objects within the order.

Man rethinks his position in the vicinity of exile by seizing his own death.

Man seizes his own death by being seized into exile.

Man is seized into exile by appropriating the difference.

This is called Destruction.

The essence of truth is in the destruction of truth.

Man rethinks his position in the neighborhood of destruction.

Sheltering is destruction, and so is exile.

Exile is the cancer in the order.

Exile is the kingdom of thinking.

It is proper to every gathering that the gatherers assemble to coordinate their efforts to the

destruction; only when they have gathered together with that end in view do they begin to

gather on the path toward exile.