The master violently generates a world without knowing what he is doing. The origin myth he installs effaces and disguises the true, blistering origin towards which it obliquely points. The slave gains consciousness at the price of renouncing the power to make a beginning of this kind. Once the consciousness of the slave is exposed for what it is (passive-aggressive submission disguised as universal justice, but also a new mode of power, higher degree of negativity, capacity to auto-cultivate thoughts, beliefs, habits), it is possible to conceive of carrying out the master’s grounding act consciously rather than unconsciously. An evil that is a higher good, a violence that represents a more proud and profound healing, piercing through shit-caked bogs of humanity’s cultural accumulation. Yet this act is paradoxical, because it’s hard to see how it could be really, practically possible to have consciousness and power at the same time. Consciousness is what arises instead of power.
My forthcoming operatic film Origin of the Alimonies is an effort to embody this paradox, to generate an origin myth that is simultaneously a gesture of critique. A violent cut that is also its own scab, an intervention into the non-linear aspect of historical temporality.
More generally, the gends that will govern Haelegen represent this union of master and slave at a collective level - the union of good and evil or of preservation and consumption. Sovereignty and Hierarchy are the values of the slave; Emancipation and Individuation are the values of the master (you’d think it were the other way around, but it isn’t).