Queerness
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Queerness is what lies outside the traditional hegemony of regulated love and desire. Queerness is what shatters the boundaries of what is seen as acceptable. Queerness is the rejection of the dogmatism of static identity. Queerness is the ultimate form of self-conscious sexual expression—the rejection of gender, the realization of Anatman in the realm of sexuality. It is in this sense that it is nomadic, animal, untethered; in other words, it is free.
Free? Free from what? Free from purpose.
Free? Free to do what? Free to love without expectation.
“Chuang Tzu was walking through the heart of the mountains when he saw a huge verdant tree. A woodcutter stopped beside the tree, but did not cut it. When asked why he didn’t he said, ‘It’s no good.’ Chuang Tzu said, ‘because this tree is not considered useful, it follows all the years heaven has given it.’”The Book of Chuang Tzu, tr. Martin Palmer (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), p. 167.
Queerness is a rejection of the suffocating view that the ultimate purpose of sex and love is reproduction. Freed from the pressure of purpose and utility, queerness gives love the room to become what it really is: never ending excess, collective egoism, overflowing desire. “The sociality of man reveals itself nowhere more strongly than in sexual sociability and solidarity. The sexual need, more profoundly and more immediately than any other, reveals the fallacy of narrow egoism – the need to touch another person, another’s body; to be physically close, to caress and be caressed.”The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything, §91.
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Queerness is not an act to be performed or a role to be filled. It is not the affirmation of an alternative static identity, but the negation of all static identity. It is a negative space to be occupied rather than a positive space that must be cleared, utilized and compartmentalized. Queerness is unobstructed by gender, family, ideology and law. Queerness, by its very nature, must overcome all such Oedipal structures and grind them to dust if it wishes to remain free. Gender binaries, the nuclear family, patriarchal structures, matriarchal structures, the state, moral judgements; these are all borders that must be overcome, broken past, infiltrated, so that queerness can attain true formlessness, unrestrained by the boundaries put up by Oedipal society.
Queerness is a space that we have deterritorialized, and we must continue pushing for its expansion. Beginning in the shadows, slowly creeping into the light, queerness launches its attack against the Oedipal-Humanist security system and its defenders; against humanism, gender, against Truth and Goodness. It launches its attack from darkness, for that is where it has been banished to. Our exploration of the world, turned into an attack upon it, is a multiplicity that finds its affirmation not in the negation of the hegemony of civilization, but in the unchecked flow of free desire. It dwells in darkness, in hell, and “hell has no interest in our debauched moral currency,” for hell is the negation of divinity, which is the origin of the moral dualism that dominates life. It is belief in this moral dualism that is “for the allies and slaves of light, for all those who do not rely on the subterranean passages beneath belief to avoid the panoptic apparatuses.”Nick Land, Fanged Noumena (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 216-225.
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Queerness is the rejection of the commodification and exchange of identities. The moment identities crystalize and become static is the moment they become objects whose sole value lies in helping the individual distinguish himself from others. In this sense, identities become pure exchange values; society becomes not a large and complex network of individuals who face each other as individuals, but rather, a network of individuals who face each other with static and foriegn identities that have taken hold of them. Because they are commodities, they must be “exchanged.” Marx writes that “in order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent… Here persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities.”Karl Marx and Ben Fowkes, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, ed. by Friedrich Engels and Ernest Mandel (Penguin UK, 1990), pp. 178-179.
Queerness is space in which static identities are deconstructed and the desire that is trapped within them is released to wreak havoc upon the Oedipal-Humanist Security System. Queerness is a space in which nothing is forbidden, and there is no hegemonic power that blocks the free flow of desire. Queerness is the abolition of freedom, but also the abolition of law. Queerness cuts up the pages of history and arranges them however it sees fit. With the death of the Security System comes the death of the past and the future. With the rise of queerness comes the rise of now.
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Queerness is to straightness what anarchy is to the state. No matter how much violence is used to uphold straightness, queerness will always exist, in the same way that it is impossible for the state to crush anarchy entirely, and that no matter what the state does, anarchic relations will always thrive in the shadows where none dare to venture. It is in this way that queerness not only survives, but thrives. Queerness has no need for a linear history. It has no need for a grand historical foundation. The revolt of queerness is not revenge for some past injustice. Queerness is not a revolt against any particular facet of commodity society; it is a revolt against all of it. As Breton writes in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion… it must be stressed that on this point there is no room for compromise.”
Queerness, is, in a sense, surrealist, for its nature is to sever sex from the phantoms that have haunted it; love, hate, romance, closeness, intimacy. All these things which have hitherto been associated with sex must be cut from it. Queerness seeks to recreate sex, remold it until it is ungovernable, and can be sought and found anywhere, in anything. Queerness seeks to free sex from the phantom of Oedipal power, and allow it to lose itself in ecstasy.
Primal Femininity
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Our queerness must be accompanied by feminism, but not just any feminism; it must be the most radical, unflinching and uncompromising feminism, that opposes not only the cultural hegemony of straightness, but also the sick, perverted feminism of the neoliberal regime. Our feminism must be a defence of femininity in its most free form; wild, primal, ecstatic, and warlike.
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“Warlike? But isn’t masculinity what is warlike and femininity what is peaceful?” That is the binary that has been constructed by straight hegemony, yes. But the femininity I speak of does not exist within the binary; it is what negates it. It is what will here be called “Primal Femininity,” and it is the one and only defining characteristic of Queerness.
So what is Primal Femininity? Despite the name, it is genderless. It is in all of us. It is the voice in your head that whispers mischievously to you, urging you to live a life of freedom, a life sustained by vandalism and plunder. It is what drives the lion, but it is also what drives the gazelle. It is the instinct that urges you to rage against the regimented life of modernity that crushes souls and shatters minds. It is the urge to wage war against that which wishes to keep you in chains.
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Primal Femininity is suffocated by capitalism, the firm, the office, the workshop, the factory, the police, the law; all these things reek of theology, and appear to it as repulsive sludge. As such, the only role Primal Femininity can play in the urban metropolis is that of an anarchist, a vandal, an outside agitator.
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Queerness is the battlefield where the revolution takes place, and Primal Femininity is the revolutionary force itself. It is the outright revolt against the conservative utilitarianism of straightness. Where straightness asks, “is it safe? Is it practical? Will it reduce struggle?” queerness asks, “will it increase my power?”
Enemies of Queerness
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There is a certain type of person who, when confronted by queerness or queer people, is immediately overcome with a sense of discomfort, disgust even. This is the man who, when he discovers that the woman he was flirting with is trans, becomes overcome with rage and brutally attacks her. This is the man who defends such an action by claiming that he “was tricked into flirting with a man.”
I should not have to explain what is going on in such a man’s head, but I will anyway; he views the trans woman as having intentionally threatened his masculinity. Any reasonable person will have trouble understanding how he came to such a conclusion, but once you’ve taken up the mindset of an infantile half-wit that is incapable of challenging themselves, the connection becomes quite clear; because he does not view the trans woman as a woman, but rather, a man, he subsequently views any sexual or intimate interaction that is had with her to be queer. Why would this challenge his masculinity? Because he, for some reason, views queerness as being inherently feminine. Why he holds this view doesn’t matter, and can be chalked up to pure idiocy on his part. However, what does matter, for our purposes at least, is why he views trans women as not being women.
The common view held by such a person is that gender nonconforming people (usually trans women) are not the gender they identify as, and are in fact deluding themselves by “pretending” to be so. Why they would go through the trouble to do such a thing is never explained, but I don’t find that all too surprising. However, what the transphobe fails to consider is that it is not the trans woman who is deluding herself, but rather, it is he who is doing so. Is it not he who guards vigilantly against any and all questioning of identity? Is it not he who viciously attacks anything and anyone that seems to threaten his identity? And, on the contrary, is it not the genderqueer person who dives deep into themselves and asks that undying question: what am I?
It is, in fact, the transphobe who is deluding himself, deluding himself into believing that his identity is enshrined in natural law, that his identity is stable and based in objective reality. It is he who is weak, it is he who has no spirit, it is he who regards his identity as nothing more than a commodity that exists eternally for the sole purpose of differentiating his being from other beings.
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Though the transphobe and the homophobe are the most obvious threat, there are others as well which may not seem so obvious; trans-medicalists, gender essentialists, exclusionists, moderates, etc. These groups are enemies because they wish to keep people within the current social organization. They wish for people’s ability to live, love, and enjoy to be limited by gender, sex, the psychiatric establishment, the “democratic process.” There are also, of course, the obvious enemies: racists, sexists, the bourgeois, the police. But as these enemies are obviously against us, and have been thoroughly discussed before, they will not be discussed here.
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What is meant by the term “enemy”? An enemy in what sense? A moral or ethical sense? A personal enemy? Simply put, an enemy, for our intents and purposes, is a social enemy. To use Marxist terms, a social enemy is like a class enemy; that is, a class enemy is someone who opposes and fights against the interests of the proletariat (or, I suppose, if you were a bourgeois, a class enemy would be someone who fought against the interests of the bourgeoisie). A social enemy, then, is someone who is an enemy on more than just the class front; a racial enemy (racist), a sexual enemy (homophobic or pro-straight hegemony), a conservative/reactionary/moderate (someone who opposes liberatory insurrectionary and revolutionary movements and/or wishes to build a society that suppresses freedom and enforces inequality), as well as a class enemy, and many other categories that I have likely forgotten.
However, it must be made clear, that despite the fact that they are our enemies, we do not condemn them on a moral ground. To condemn someone on a moral ground is to imply the existence of individual agency, which is largely irrelevant, seeing that all people are merely products of the environments that they live in and the systems that molded them. That is why they are “social” enemies; they exist within the same social systems as us, and are utilized as tools of self preservation by those systems, whereas we seek to abolish them.
Social War
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Social War is war stripped of all centralization and bureaucracy. It is called Fifth Generation War by Colonel Thomas X Hammes, and it is war carried out by “super empowered individuals or small groups.” These are groups and individuals who “are not embedded within wider networks, and are therefore far less visible.” (Desert, 142).
Good examples of social war are provided by the anonymous author of Desert, such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), but I would like to offer some examples of my own.
- The Haymarket Bombing, which took place at a peaceful demonstration that was organized in solidarity with the striking workers who had been killed and injured by police the day before. During the protest, an unknown individual threw a homemade dynamite bomb at the police line, which exploded, killing one police officer, and leaving six others wounded, who would later die in the hospital. After the bomb went off, the police opened fire on the crowd of protestors, and some among the crowd fired back, resulting in the deaths of a handful of others, officers and demonstrators alike.
- Ted Kaczynski, who, from 1978 to 1995, carried out a bombing campaign which killed 3 people and injured 23 others, hoping that he could draw attention to the problems being caused by industrial civilization and inspire others to take up arms with him.
- William Van Spronsen, an anarchist and antifascist, who, on July 13th, 2019, was shot dead by police when he attempted to attack an ICE detention center, armed with a rifle and a homemade firebomb. His intent was to destroy the transportation vehicles, though he (unfortunately) failed.
Furthermore, it could be argued that acts of spontaneous insurrection, such as the riots in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, which led to the destruction of many police vehicles and the torching of a Minneapolis Police Precinct, are also acts of social war. However, I would argue that they are slightly different. Whereas people like Ted Kaczynski and the Earth Liberationists acted with a specific political goal in mind, the Minneapolis rioters were just pissed off and wanted to fuck shit up—which is, in my opinion, perfectly reasonable. To quote Ulysse Malcoeur: “The insurrectionary is the one who wishes for nothing at all, except to assert their dignity—not the Eternal Dignity of the Human Being, but the dignity of the one who simply will not tolerate this any longer… Civilized one, you may find this hard to accept, but nothing is being said and no one is being addressed. You think this is a desperate measure that the insurrectionary performs so that they might have you as an audience. You flatter yourself too much.”Ulysse Malcoeur, Coldness and Cruelty in the Time of Insurrection, Chapter 1.<https://metaspinoza.wordpress.com/2020/07/13/coldness-and-cruelty-chapter-one/>
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This is how it all begins. As a simple assertion of dignity, the assertion of freedom by the one who is oppressed. The insurrection of the Primal Ones who can no longer tolerate being confined within their cages, whose only wish is to break free and wreak havoc on the world that has abused them, to set fire to the symbols of tyranny, to destroy while laughing, to take what they want, whether it belongs to them or not. This is the beginning of the conquest of queerness. And God help anyone who stands in its way.
Queerness in Revolt
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When Primal Femininity begins its conquest to expand queer territory, it does so in no ones name but its own. It does so for no cause but its own. It pays no heed to the cries of the moralists. Rather than listening to them, it takes the opportunity to draw its blade and slice out their tongues.
When Primal Femininity mobilizes, it leaves a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. Whether or not its revolt will lead to a better world is irrelevant. All that matters is that the current world is intolerable and must be destroyed. All else is secondary. Camus, describing surrealism, says that “the instinctive joy of being alive, the stimulus of the unconscious, the cry of the irrational, are the only pure truths that must be professed. Everything that stands in the way of desire—principally society—must therefore be mercilessly destroyed.”
Queer revolt does not hold out any hopes for a bright and shining utopia where all are free and equal. “One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation,” Camus writes. Queer revolt, as already stated, does not seek to establish a new world order, but merely to destroy the current one, and ensure that such an order never arises again.
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The Queer Revolution is a revolution against the suffocating norms of conservative social life, those norms that chain pleasure, cage desire and punish joy. It is a revolution that utilizes the force of pure political terror in order to stamp out all traces of reactionary sentiment. Law, universal morals, patriarchal hierarchy, all these are ruthlessly crushed by the Queer Revolution. In other words, the Queer Revolution is a revolution which aims to overthrow the decadence of the current order. What is decadence? Nietzsche writes; “I understand corruption in the sense of decadence. What I maintain is this, that all the values upon which mankind builds its highest hopes and desires are decadent values. I call an animal, an individual, a species corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it selects and prefers that which is detrimental to it.”Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1986), p 117, §6.
Because what is Queer is what lies outside, what is hidden, the Queer Revolution will seemingly come out of nowhere, and the Queer Revolutionaries appear as “a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad.”Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings, tr. Walter Kaufmann (Random House, 2000), p 522, ‘Genealogy of Morals’ §17.
But contrary to Nietzsche’s warlike conquerors, who for him are the origin of the State, the queer revolutionaries come not to found a state, but crush it. And because the State was formed not by contract, but by force, it must be abolished by force. “He who can command, he who is by nature “master,” he who is violent in act and bearing—what has he to do with contracts! One does not reckon with such natures; they come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different” even to be hated.”
This sudden surge of force and will, this assertion of power over the world: this is the revolution. It seemingly comes out of nowhere, but in reality it was always there, lurking, waiting for its time. It strikes like fate. It is fate. And for this reason it does not judge. It does not come to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. It comes, and does what it does, and that is that. It comes to rise above the old laws, and eventually shatter them.
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The Queer Revolutionary arrives from the future to break the old laws and conquer the territory that is controlled by the current order. He comes down from the mountain, bearing a stone tablet, and upon that tablet is written the one and only law that will reign henceforth; take what you will, and keep what you can. “Love is the law, love under will.” All other laws are heresy, and to follow them is to be sentenced to death.
Thus the Old Aeon ends, and the New Aeon begins.
Queer Futures
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The day after the battle, nothing could be heard in the city but a deaf and echoing silence that rolled through the narrow streets, once filled with cars and pedestrians, now empty save for smoking rubble and scattered debris. Slowly, a group of men, women and children, ragged and dirty, emerged from out of a ruined building and began searching for other survivors.
They wandered the dead and empty streets, desperately searching. But they found no one. They were about to give up and return into hiding, when a boy came running; he had found someone.
A lone man, wandering the streets, shuffling silently with his left foot dragging behind him.
“Who are you?” a man from the group asked.
“I am he who seeks,” the strange figure replied.
“Seeks what?”
He looked up at them, and they were able to get a clear look at his face; his eyes were brown, and his skin was the color of deep bronze.
“I am he who seeks God. Have you seen God?”
Confused, the man looked back at his group and shook his head.
“Then we must go. God does not dwell here.”
And with that, the strange man turned, and began to walk down the road and out of the city. Slowly, one by one, they began to follow him. They passed crumbled churches and derelict skyscrapers, burned out stores and charred corpses.
At last, they came upon the outskirts of the city, and the man turned to them, and they looked upon him. The man began to turn, but one among them spoke up.
“Where are we going? Where are you taking us?”
He looked upon him, and spoke, and his words broke the silence like a gunshot in the night.
“The Promised Land.”
Nikoli O’Dwyer is a writer that specializes in philosophy, radical politics and occultism of all kinds.