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 Emergence of Another Reality
III. GENESIS OF HUMANITY The Emergence of Another Reality The empire of economy long ago gave the knock-out punch to the symbiotic evolution of man and nature, and now that it’s falling apart, the path of the living has reopened. After the tyranny of work will come the primacy of enjoyment where life forms and perpetuates itself. What was tied is untied. The complexity of the old world is getting dislocated in a clutter of peremptory truths the ridiculousness of which never ceases to amaze. How could we have suffered so, killed each-other, and died for so many inanities of puffed-up importance? It’s all over for the gods, for fate, for the decrees of nature, for characterizing and categorizing people, for blind destiny guided by... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Humanity: The End of Hierarchical Power
The End of Hierarchical Power There is no domain in which authority does not degrade itself and announce the end of all the power engendered by the exploitation of nature. Disbelief stripped the priests of the respect and scorn their ministry draped them in. God only ever shows up when he’s dug up in archaeological expeditions, and the episodical shop-floor bitching is never going to stop the collapse (at last!) of all religious enterprises. In a few poisoned lands of the third world the last tyrants crop up. A universal discredit has buried the military dictatorships little by little beneath the shit of the past; it does a better job than the most virulent antimilitarism in giving the stink of death to the uniforms of all the armies ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Inhumanity: Ending and Beginning
II. GENESIS OF INHUMANITY Ending and Beginning Their lives are broken upon getting out of bed like they were broken in infancy and at the dawn of history. How can you tell it’s the end of an era? When a suddenly intolerable present crystallizes in a short period of time what was so uneasily put up with in the past. And everyone is suddenly quite easily convinced that he or she is either going to be reborn in the birth of a new world, or die in the archaic netherworld of a society less and less adapted to the living. With the first rays of dawn, a new lucidity is born. And it shows everyone instantly how drawn and quartered we’ve been by the clash between the desire to be human and the daily obligation of renouncing that desire a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Genesis of Humanity: The End of Judges and the Judged-Guilty
The End of Judges and the Judged-Guilty Fear and aggressiveness diminish along with the price society puts on prohibitions and their transgression. Free trade manages to dismantle the old walls of agrarian structure, and every newly opened breach in the wall brings up new ideas of openness and of freedom. Archaic societies surrounded their fields, property, cities, and nations with protective and oppressive walls. Commodity modernity is tearing them all down. The cities have lost their enclosing walls, the borders are being abolished slowly. Have they become the last bloody pages of this commodity-saga? The war of 1914 and the rekindling of its poorly-extinguished embers in 1940 mark, so far as it seems, the last ubuesque vociferations of p... (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.)