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A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction. (Nietzsche)
An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. (Slavoj Žižek)
Advanced weaponry — gun violence — tears holes in the social contract; warps the gravity of the social fabric. But, paradoxically, it — that violence — is that tear: a symptom of it. Gun violence appears and disappears from the news cycle, but it is always present as an existential threat (now): in schools, workplaces, public transport; at home. Even when guns do not appear on the front-page of the New York Times, they are present in our minds. We’re obsessed by guns, because, in a sense, guns are obsessed with us: guns dominate us, through us — they proliferate. The death that gun violence — mass violence — brings about, is a manifestation of collective fear, suspicion, hatred; of psychological death. Stephen Paddock died months ago — months before he acted — went brain-dead, soul-dead; all that remained alive at the time of the shooting was a biological machine. Death seeped into him; ruled him. And that is true of any shooter who plans for months to murder as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, as randomly as possible: their first act is to kill their own humanity — or to let it die; be subsumed. In almost every case of mass-murder, there is an obsession with technology; guns, cybernetics. There is an obsession with becoming a thing; a will to thingness. Emptiness. Paddock was a gambler; and there is nothing more…
