Where Are We?

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In hell. Any discourse that does not start from this awareness is simply groundless. The circles in which we find ourselves are not arranged vertically, but scattered throughout the world. Wherever men associate, they produce hell. Its circles and trenches are all around us, and we recognize, as in Goya's caprichos, the monsters and devils that govern them.

What can we do in this hell? Not so much, or not only, as Italo said, to safeguard small pieces of what is good, of that which, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno.¹ Because it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part — in any case, no te escaparas. Rather, stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right moment, speak, shatter the curtain of lies on which hell rests. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that blocks the passage to non-hell, to a happy, simple, anarchic existence. To the non-state [mai stato] that hell always covers over with its state, as if there were no other possibility apart from the trenches and circles in which you have always necessarily been inscribed. Be the point, the threshold where the state ceases to exist, where the possible, the only true reality, springs forth. The idea is not to realize the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but to make the real possible, to find a way out of the inevitability of the facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in every sphere — first and foremost in politics. While in the infernal clamor around you everyone is trying to realize the possible diabolically, technically, and at any cost, for you every state, every thing, every blade of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, becomes once again, silently, lucidly possible.

September 15, 2025

Translated by Ill Will

Image: Pierre Jahan