Maktoub

Definition is what comes after the act: to define. To define is to presume meaning. The definition then is what draws out the lines, contours, and boundaries; it is what offers the meaning. So is the good/evil in the act, to define, or in the definition? Equivalently, is it in creation or in the creature? 

“Fiction” is the antithesis, of “science” and “fact.” And with that “Fiction” is unveiled or concealed, but never absent, or non-existent; to unveil it by distinction (differences beyond similarities) against the scientific and the factual; to conceal it be concealing the imaginary line separating fact from fiction as real. Equivalently: fiction is that which is not known as a fact, but just as orderly.

With fiction then comes order. And with order comes placements and patterns. And particularly through said order, fiction, like the fact, is first and foremost an imposition that lives not in a simulation rather an abstraction. Within it the critic and the director find themselves in the same placement; but where exactly? There are two ways to answer this question albeit via another question; “Where are you?” is one way; “What do you see?” is another. In describing the scene in “one of those new but already dilapidated buildings where the city’s poor now live” the critic can only echo the director for they must share the same gaze:

“This is what a visit to the people is: someone leads you, take the tram all the way to the end of the line and all of a sudden everything is in the frame: the people, which is a way for many to occupy a little space.”

The sickness. perversion, is in proportions; the many in the little; the little in the many. The devil however lies elsewhere, away from arithmetics and proportions. With the liberty “to frame” the people, the gaze incoming inwards from elsewhere outwards has the utmost liberty of creation: moralization, romanticization, theorization, annihilation.

“Only the ‘good-hearted’ falls for Hamas’s [Palestinian] narrative” what a western media official had to say on current events. Deceit does not involve a lie necessarily. Rather a deformation of the truth, for the real devil in this case was in the tonality: one of sarcasm and pity.

But who else but the good-hearted would hear and feel for the tormented? As for the tonality, it does raise questions. What is it that ties ‘good-hearted’ with ‘naïveté’? And to whom? Amongst other questions.

In an attempt to ‘move the masses’ the egalitarian parasite would say: “What is the use of people without land?” But only the conqueror would challenge that and say: “Exactly.” The consensus is not surprising: the egalitarian and the elitist are merely each other’s double.

The fever is not in ownership of land (property), rather caused by it: the withering away of the line separating spend from pay; a fate similar to that between good-hearted and naïveté. You pay for others to spend, you spend for others today, was the formula early into capitalism.

As the industry overdetermine itself so will the spend-pay dialectics. At the stage of maturity (imperialism) the residuals too mature from the visible to the invisible: some only spend, some only pay.

Regarding the enclave “both parties must compromise for a ceasefire” a parasite would say: perverted equality. “Those who only pay will only keep paying” they will never say: greed!

“What is the use of people without land?” Repeats the egalitarian parasite. But if that is the case what would make the slumdogs of the refugee camp die for it? That who is of no use is more likely to be suicidal is one way to put it. A refugee is a de-facto victim of murder, is another. A separate question is “What makes others so threatened by the utopia of the dead, that is the camps, to have to turn them into the largest open-air prison known?

One can say then that the refugee, this person that paradoxically needs to be murdered to commit suicide, the fusion of life and death, the everything and the nothing, is just an anarchist. Who else is a prison for? One of many institutions on first line of defense against the suicide of the tormented, or ‘the useless.’

“Those who need to feel a sense of belonging to call it their land” are not the double of “those who need a land to find a sense of belonging.” “Those who lose sense of belonging to gain a land” are.

If asked “What comes to mind when hearing the word ‘desert’?” Would it be wrong if one answered “equality”? One can then argue against equality and say that it must have been the natural cause of events, the pursuit of inequality, that drove man out of the desert into, what will be later referred to as, the “bank of the humanity.” Be that as it may, at least for as long as man was trapped in the desert, inequality was incomprehensible. For that who never left the desert, cannot reach beyond it. But “reach” should not be confused with “stumble.” If inequality was found at the bank of the oasis, it may be because rot is cannot be found where there never was life.

More importantly, a rot-less world like the desert has no place for “competition” either. Only in the history book one can say that man “struggled” his way out of the desert. Because if this man can never say “there is no life without struggle,” or vice versa for that matter, could it be perhaps that even if competition and struggle are not equivalent, they both belong to the same, albeit still up to this point, foreign language? For man in the desert was too concerned with the only thing there is under equality: the course of life. It turns out then that if rot comes after life, struggle comes after both.

Today things are very different however. Most recently, a chip can now be planted under the skin that allows a human being to control a computer and play videos games at the same time, using their mind. This chip can also “assist” the human cognitive system and may be able to resolve visual impairment for instance. Even for those born blind. Prosperous!

Regardless of the cost of producing it, this product will be at first affordable, accessible, only to the rich. Unsurprisingly, for “marketing” and “branding” can only do so much for profit maximization. With this exclusivity, an extra-element to the product would start to develop: a social status that would transform its purpose, from “to be used” to “to be consumed,” from a mean to an end. As it is produced more efficiently, the boundaries of accessibility start to loosen. With that we arrive to the inevitable bondage of overconsumption with overproduction: the product matures into an enterprise, putting an end to the notion of ‘visual impairment’ altogether, for instance.

A beautiful story indeed. One observation is hard to avoid, however: in this same world, prosperous and de-humanity seem to go hand-in-hand more than one might think. For if human progress was quantified in the past through a medium, progress in cognition for instance, prosperity here works in the opposite direction: by neutralizing cognition in the case of the chip. It is not that no one will be born blind anymore but we would just simply not know who was born blind or otherwise. A trip back to the desert then. While the desert remains a desert, man is no longer the same man. If in the past a man in the desert meant by induction man versus nature, the desert of tomorrow will maintain an urban identity: man versus man.

As for equality, in visual impairment at least, it may sound a bit too dystopian for those less-parasitic social beings it is because equality somewhere by no means implies equality, the absolute and the whole, the only equality there is. On the contrary, for otherwise it would not have to be singled out.

With all this in mind, here is a conclusion. If Jared Kushner can disregard the lives of millions for real-estate in a talk at Harvard, two questions, albeit rhetorical, may come to surface: “Who else?” and “Where else?”. As for what he particularly said, it is hard to argue it is not “prosperous.”

The same prosperity that started by calling Gazans “human-animals” until it turned them into something far more extreme: cannibals. Not those who feed off others human flesh. Those who have been starved to the point their organs started eating themselves.

An attempt at a shot: the Palestinian authority (PA) is pointing fingers at the resistance factions for their “adventurous behavior on October 7th.” 

“Adventurous.” Maybe because “the struggle for liberation” is an unexplored territory for a “policeman.” Anyway revolutionary-turned-policeman Arafat was the coincidence that gave the materialist a choice: to realize that liberation and state-hood do not coincide. And those who do not see it, maybe chose not to.

A Palestinian authority, without a Palestinian state since that coincidence. If you have the former do you need the latter?  If you ever wondered why a world recognized “flag” and “national anthem” for any other state/authority, it is because that is all there is to give the illusion that “state” and “independence” can ever go hand in hand. 

Now we have a long list of questions that can be answered through more questions. If asked why the harmony between the PA and Israel the response can be: why not? If there are no aspirations for “state-hood” within the PA, why would there be? If it is missing some “key elements” as compared to any other state, so what? The rule-book, any rule-book, gets more and more lax as the distance from the order of equality increases, to quote a philosopher. 

What is the difference between Israel and the PA? Nothing. For the linguistic constituents of the “state” such as “nation-state,” “minority,” “majority,” “indigenous,” and many more, were all conceived on the night “rapefest” flirted with “mass-murder.”  It is not that the PA aims to annihilate the human in Palestine. One can make the argument no state ever aims for the disposable-human. But that argument is only sound if the state was founded on the latter. 

As for why “rapefest” comes before “mass-murder” it is because how else would the utopia of worms sustain? Bastard or otherwise, a corpse is a corpse. 

On day 158, even starvation as a topping on genocide did not make the resistance, the idea before the soil from which it emerged, budge: the tribes of Gaza refuse to partake in any policy initiated from anyone other than the resistance factions. Even if it is a policy that is “branded” to put an end to their reality of starvation.

There is no room for morality in oppression. If the tribes did not budge, it is more likely because for some individuals, particularly in an environment resembling a besieged and tormented enclave, it is never about the “right” thing to do. It is more about the only thing there is to be done.

But this is merely an additional proposal, a new attempt concerning a new policy. What is policy? Whatever the answer is, it involves a choice. For it presumes “right or wrong” as seen by the “policy-maker:” a term more resembling of a social status than a professional title. In a way, policy involves a transformation, through “caprice” and “convenience” of said “policy-maker,” from the language of choice to the language of God: from the binary utopia of right or wrong to the absolute utopia of “the right.”

So even in a world where the Pope was beheaded right after the “state” was separated from the “church” into the bosom of the Central Bank, one reality persists: an impossibility lies in liberating the notions of “state” and “order” from the religious devotion of “policy-making.” 

Contrasting the language of “choice” is the language of “lack.” If there’s no room for “policy” in armed struggle it is because the dictionary of the language of lack consists only of the words sufficient to make up the following sentence: what is necessary necessitates itself. 

Justifying the events on October 7th as “the right thing to do” is as “left” as a “policy-maker” can get.  By induction, nor was it intentions, “good or bad,” that incentivized it. It does not require a deep investigation to realize that if the quasi-state that the resistance factions were governing in Gaza for almost two decades had any form of future, whether for the best of its people or governing entity, then armed resistance would perish, and the tunnels would be destroyed by their own diggers.

But if popular struggle decided to gamble with its own life it is particularly because gambling is a sickness manifesting in disobedience and abolishment of “normalcy:” in this case, that of oppression. Through a simple translation, the same applies to all those who decided to join forces with the Palestinian resistance factions: in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Irrelevant too is how easy or difficult it is to support the argument for necessity. Because that who says “we are all struggling in a way” would never comprehend the “other” who is struggling in every way. And that who appeals to the “best of two evils” cannot imagine the world of the singular, one evil: a boot stamping on a human face. In other words, an argument so easy to comprehend in the language of “lack.” Impossible on the other hand in the language of “choice.”