Chop! Chop!
Swinging daggers into the world of thought
So every thinker has a focus. A singular focus, right? Even if they try and field something holistically, systematically, as neutral as possible within the world of the opinion — it still has to be hook, and be sharp like a dagger. And that dagger always has something to cut — it has its context within the pre-civilised spaces of thought. In other words, thought is a pointed object that gains its power (and threat) within a pre-existing environment and ambience. This is simply the development of thought and history and language that has led up to the present moment.
In this way, even if a thinker tries to be extremely neutral, extremely holistic, extremely factual. Tries not to have his radical parts, his edgy parts. Tries to pay his dues to every single party. Tries to represent his thought in the most holistic way, the way with the least possibility of being construed in the wrong way. Still then — by trying to sit at that precarious balance, he ends up covering the sharp edges with a piece of cloth that feigns (well-)roundedness. Nevertheless, whether conscious or unconscious, the thought when wielded is sharp as a dagger. And it points itself into a certain void in the space of thought, threatening the pre-existing order of the moment.
That void in the space of thought — that’s the dimension that is the life of all politics. It is the eternal threat of thought’s expression, which implicates the daggeredness of every thought. “Create dangerously”, Camus says, because there is no such thing as undangerous creation, or safe creation. Thought is a dagger. Ideas are forces. All ‘plausibly neutral’ thought merely masks its dagger-ness and renders a covert operation. And the dagger always cuts and births a new configuration — like God performing Ent-scheidung [a cut] upon the void before the universe explodes into being with all its force, in an operation equally energetic and destructive.
What this means is — all forcible, rhetorical, or provocative thoughts are simply thoughts that have embraced its daggeredness. But the implication, then — every thinker sharpens into every wrong reading ever made of them. Because that is the nature of a dagger when confronted in a world of daggeredly activity. It can always be said to be pointed in the wrong way. Sharpened in the wrong way. Made too sharp, too edgy, or exposed for its covertness. This is how everyone disagrees with everyone; and will continue to disagree, for all time to come.
What is the alternative? The dagger does not pierce. And if the dagger does not pierce, it simply does not exist. I mean, it might exist in a physical sort of sense — like a neighbour that wields many daggers but bears no threat — it is as if the bluntness renders the dagger far removed, residing in the far corners of the universe. Like ghosts that reside in the piping of the house or underneath the tiles, it does not quite affect us. It exists, but it does not insist upon its existence. Which essentially means that it, practically speaking, does not exist to us. This also means — to exist is to pierce. To exist is to cut through. To exist intensely is to torture, to brutalise. Those who live poetically are, whether they like it or not, crusaders. Gandhi is a crusader.
“Is this a dagger I see before me?” It is now at this same void that I stand, one among many, with the same dagger in hand — swinging into the space of thought, slicing across every idea that takes itself to be pure and wholesome, twisting it into the sides of “plausible neutrality,” pruning every thought into what it is nakedly.
Daggers.
