Address to the Living : Concerning the Death That Governs Them and the Opportuneness of the Present Moment for Getting Rid of It

Chapter 4, Part 5 : The Materia Prima and the Alchemy of the I: The Alchemy of the "I"
The Alchemy of the “I” The alchemy of the self is the conscious creation of individual destiny. The rationality inherent in mercantile practice has rejected traditional alchemy, in the long night when it burned the lamps of a secret science. However, its parallel language and its operations are most often narrowed to transpose the economic process in a field of coherence where the salt of the earth engenders the celestial gold and spirit. When they weren’t looking to enrich themselves, the alchemists of the past aspired to the power that commands beings and things (except for the most discreet among them, who doubtless landed on the shores of a totally different reality). Denatured Alchemy In a particularly vulgar sense, alchemy is taking place all the time these days. The transmutation of lead into gold and of libidinal energy into intellectuality is now effectuated by means of a hygienic treatment of trash and ex... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4, Part 4 : The Materia Prima and the Alchemy of the I: Creation Versus Work
Creation Versus Work The act of creating is to the humanization of nature and life what work is to denaturation and to a programmed death. An accelerated reading of the obvious now ranks among the banalities a truth which was yesterday put in doubt: economic exploitation has brought humans and their surroundings to the limits of a survival the apogee of which coincides with its fall. The history of the commodity and the history of the people who produced it is one and the same: it is made by unmaking those who made it. We have been warned repetitively from century to century, and, if not reassured, at least precautioned, that there are many terrors to fear, terrors which we know to be inherent in a system the mechanisms of which have lost their inescapable character. The apocalypse is part of the past, part of the sinister procession of its cyclical horrors. The real Flood, pouring forth from the first walls of Jericho, was never anythi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4, Part 3 : The Materia Prima and the Alchemy of the I: The Humanization of Nature
The Humanization of Nature Exploiting nature has denatured it, while denaturing humanity. The nostalgia for a primitive nature and for its impossible return is the morbid consolation of a society sick with economy. It’s not a question of re-naturalizing people and the earth, but of humanizing them by giving primacy to the living energies they harbor. The exhaustion of natural resources and of human nature draws a demarcation-line between the men who work at it and succumb to it, a line that defines the one great confrontation to come. While the parties of death dip deeper into the well of fear and draw out the power to reign over the ruins of the spectacular and financial edifice, a unanimous cry is rising from the streets, from the forests, and from hearts: “Life above all else!” Before these rumors even reached public opinion, their echoes were heard in the enemy’s ranks, since there are no polluting commercia... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4, Part 2 : The Materia Prima and the Alchemy of the I: The Primacy of Love
The Primacy of Love Love offers us the only model there is for truly human accomplishments. There hasn’t been a moment in history when nature was brought to such an extreme degree of denaturation, and no time when such a firm will to recreate it by stripping it of what enslaves it has reared its head. Stimulated by the conquest of commodities, the sciences have clarified one side of the planet by plunging the other side in night and ignorance. So many truths have been rolled about from tide to tide; in the blocked ports so many ships about to set sail are rusting. All voyages have stopped short in the sole, changing scenery of creeks stuffed up with soot. To get to know things means nothing anymore if we do not come to that knowledge by means of self-enjoyment above all — that’s the key to knowledge. No knowledge is worth anything at all without the consciousness of love, and there is no love that is learned without a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4, Part 1 : The Materia Prima and the Alchemy of the I: The Child's Second Birth
IV. THE MATERIA PRIMA AND THE ALCHEMY OF THE I The Child’s Second Birth The return to infancy initiates the renaissance of the human. The malformation that withers people away comes from the fate handed to children — they are born with a nature, and they grow up with a character. The freeness of love gives them life, and society strips them of it; it is thus that the poison of business and numbers strip their trees of their leaves and their passions of their attraction. Infancy, wealth of being impoverished by having, the morning of desire darkened by the boredom of the factories, history abridged by a civilization that substitutes mercantile efficiency for the art of being human. Death triumphs in the planetary triumph of the economy, and everything that it destroys the hopes of works to perfect it. Enough of these revolutions that rot like the corpses of their dead! Only the creation of the living is revolution... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Humanity: The Decline of the Doctors
The Decline of the Doctors A double evolution announces the end of the morbid marriage that foments the sick and the doctors. According to the first, the sick man thinks that he needs a doctor, according to the second, that he is, like the doctor himself, a living being that is afraid to live. Medicine has never so sovereignly imposed its power over death and suffering, and never have its efforts ended up so vain before the specter of incurable illnesses; the sickness of surviving with them obliterates the body. The truth is that medicine can vanquish everything but the essential thing — the fatigue of having to work all the time and everywhere. What a discouragement is cancer, where cells, frenzied in the shadow of death, proliferate... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Humanity: From Intellectual Labor to Relaxed Knowledge
From Intellectual Labor to Relaxed Knowledge Separate thought has only ever produced an intelligence of self-denying life. From the combined triumphs of physics, chemistry, medicine, math, astronautics, biology, architecture, psychology, and sociology has not so much come happiness, but oppression and money. The sciences have propagated well-being throughout the world within the limits of supply and demand, taking human activity and pressing it back into market activity. We have gotten a lot of hell for incriminating progress and the other side of its coin from those who are proud of having exploited and raped nature down to the atom, from those who tear an energy of death from a nucleus of life, an energy quite useful for illuminating our ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Inhumanity: Work
Work Work has mechanized the body like it imposed the reality of its mechanisms on the world it transformed. The world changed fundamentally with the Neolithic revolution: it evolved away from a symbiosis of the natural and the human, and was flipped upside down by taking, for the foundation of its progress and civilization, a specialized activity which destroyed that primordial unity, exhausted nature by denaturing its resources, and generalized a system of constraints that made men into slaves. There’s the great result of all our pride of having done things impossible for animals — we’ve immediately forbidden ourselves access to creation, which makes up the human genius! Economic Mechanization By substituting itself for ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Inhumanity: History As Broken Evolution
History As Broken Evolution Human civilization is aborted when commodity civilization is born. A succession of wars, genocides, and massacres, adorned by three pyramids and ten cathedrals — you’d have to be pretty bitter and cynical to dare to call this “the history of humanity”. The magic Flute, the cinema, the refrigerator, organ transplants. What they consider to be “good sense” consists in putting even a lower price on millions of sacrificed existences than they put on the coins and medallions they have their faces engraved on the backs of. Nonetheless, how can anyone really say anymore with a straight face that progress needs holocausts, the engineering of unfortunates, the bloodied gasoline, the mon... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Inhumanity: The Child
The Child They raise their children the same way they arise in the morning – in renunciation of what they love. For as long a time as they’ve forced themselves to ignore their secret desires, they’ve never stooped to learn anything about children. The more pressing needs of making war and governing hardly authorized them to study such subjects. Looking back over the centuries, the truth is that above all they were scared by this always-new Life, surging from the belly of woman to grow and multiply. The mirror of their own past uniqueness sent them the confused memory that existence was somehow promised to all spirits from the depths of their own infancy. And there in those depths, they found an embarrassing presence that t... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)