The sky flies, upward, downward, inside-out; the sun is purple, displaced from its position as anchor of the planets—the vertiginous appellation of the heavens is imploded, and the gates to hell are wide open. There is arsenic in the water, LSD in the beef and psilocybin is in the tea. The world is, quite precisely, made of moving parts that know no stasis, and all of language is the thread that runs from one point in time to another, unifying space through the magical operations of a vernacular constitution that has been thrown into general disarray through the maniacal laughter of the woman in madness.
The stage is therefore set for the elaboration of this vernacular. What resides, not behind or beneath, but on, inside, and through, the vocabularic virtuosity of the body|mind in madness, and, in particular, within the factorial mode of meaning-production/hyper-valuation evinced in the manic experience?
Before we get in too deep: this is not an identitarian or a standpoint theory of language. That is, the theory we shall propose in this note is not that the manic possesses a unique language, but rather that language itself is structured manically. It is, by its nature, dissociative, paranoid, delusional, grandiose and characterized by magical thought. Language, in general, is expressive of at least two modes or spirits: for Blaise Pascal, these spirits are the esprits de finesse and de géométrie. In the one, the everyday, the common, and in the other, the elaborate, and the elegant. What we term the esprit de folie is simultaneously neither and both of these modes of speech or thought—it is both in the everyday, that is, the vernacular of madness is that which infuses the world with meaning itself through the frenzied and demented investiture of value, that is, it is occurring almost all of the time by actors unknowingly, and it is also elaborate and elegant, that is, grandiose, properly speaking, sovereign.
Let us now turn to defining mania. Mania is godhood itself, to be manic is to be a god, that is, to become-manic, to fall-fly through mania, is to experience divinity itself, apotheosis, apokatastasis. Reunification with an ur-principle structuring Being, but to also know that Being, the horizon of possibility continuously unfolding in/on/around all things in time-space across all dimensions, is itself a resultant fiction of the processes of language. And language, contra Lacan, is not the structuring principle of the unconscious, and thus neither is language structured along the model of the unconscious: that is, speaking subject-objects are also prejects, that is, in the ineffable before-of language in which there is no valuing principle, in other words, in the time before magic was invented, there was still desire and drive even though there were no symbols, signifiers, or signifieds, and thus no lack, and, even though these prejects were yet to be constituted in/through the mystical and alchemical operations of language there was still something that was there to later be enchanted.
Though in this space before language there was still the magical kernel of the possibility of meaning, that is, even though the valuation principle existed as pure potentiality, it existed more as a potential-ization.
Here is the empirical irony: by definition, the divine knows not of magic, because divinity, to be divine, is power itself, is to become one with power itself. Thus, prejects were divine creatures who knew not of hierophany, because divinity was a quality internal to their being-s itself. But after the invention of hierophany, what we find is a transformation in the prejects; suddenly, as they learned of the power of naming, the possibility of enchantment, that is, not merely miracle, that passive extension of sovereignty and grace into the realm of the everyday through the operation of providence, magic is the active investiture of value and the enchantment, that is, the decisional interruption of the mundane through the ritualistic and the divin-atory, that is, through a process removed from divinity because it relies upon a theft from the divine and the unabashed use of gifts that were primordially stolen, not from a God, because, remember in the state of prejection all things are divine, but stolen from Being itself, that is, from possibility. Magic is therefore a removal from the realm of possibility into the realm of actuality. It is the possibilization of actuality and the actualization of possibility.
Returning to language: the student of Derrida may object that we are constructing a set of binary oppositions, between actuality/possibility, divinity/magic and miracle/everyday. This indeed may be strong objection, but only considered from within the frame of a more primary subject/object duality displaced by the primordiality of prejection that intervenes ontologically within the linguistic structuration of the principles of operation underdetermining the horizon of manifestation of magic itself. It is the third term that intervened before and between the two, instantiating both through its dis/appearance in history with the bringing-down of the heavens to the realm of the earth, that is, from possibility to actuality; mediated, of course, by the purgation of purity/nothingness in the en-framing of Being itself.
Mania is the invention of magic through the invention of magic. The precise terms of its original discourse are unknowable because there was not one ur-language, even if there was one original Word, because the overflowing valuations of language assumed a totalized actualization with the utterance of the first name. In Deleuze and Guattari, we find an association of naming with judgment, that is, with organization; and with Lacan, we find a principle of structuring lack with naming, that is, the subject flees from its constitutive and originary displacement in language. Against both of these interpretations, we posit an alternative: that though language was born as a totality with its inception, that, as this was also the birth of magic, that is, valuation, language is also fundamentally self-undermining, it reverses itself at every turn; it forms a structured whole in which movement is possible. This is neither a structural nor a post-structural account of wording, but is instead a theory of language as a dance.
Within this frame mania is a frenzied movement, an impossible velocity, a constant becoming-otherwise/introjecting-everything that instantiates/arrogates meaning into the constitution of the subject and the becoming-objective of the process of valuation, that is, its denuding in time the life of space and the reversion to/projection into the state of prejection, that is, reversion to the original state of divinity in which magic is not a set of actions because the being of the preject is itself miraculous, gracious, sovereign. In prejection, language does not not-make sense but rather makes all-sense isofar as valuation is returned to its rightful state as, not disdainful judgment, but joyous yet melancholic dis-association between phoneme, signifier, and signified. This is why, for Deleuze and Guattari, the “unconscious” is modeled as a factory, because the phonemic correspondence does not arise from the Real but is rather the productive principle of the Symbolic itself. But we do not here retreat into the Imaginary, instead, we disrupt the constution of reality itself because prejection precedes Being insofar as it is the possibilization of actuality itself, the suspension of space and time and the interruption of flow and fusion with the processes of anti-stasis, that is, actualization of possibility. Language is furious judgment and unquestioning hospitality at the same time, the fusion of disgust and embrace, abjection and romance, the merger of the profane and the holy, the collapse of the divine and the repugnant. In short: the unbridled engine of meaning, revealed in the manic experience as itself unmoored from any principles of internal logic. If as I name it the Sun is itself orbiting around Pluto, and not the other way around, then life circles death, and being precedes nothing.
We have not yet addressed the role of witchcraft in its relation to mania, language, or magic, and which necessarily follows the invention of hierophany. That much is yet to come.
SchizoHeresy 