An excerpt from Henry Miller:
'Once I thought to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now
that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman,
that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds
and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity --
I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns
sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of
mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their
serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am
inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it
though it rains crocodiles.'
Miller had a brief run in with the Socialist Party as a student. I cannot help
but empathize with his glamorization of states approaching mental
illness although it betrays nothing of the suffering and oppression experienced
by those clinically incarcerated, diagnosed, and medicated on anti-psychotics.
That, and his virulent sexism and Lebensphilosophie-type racism, aside, he is
an uber-tremendous author. I take his critique of "humanism" as the most lucid
example of the "anti-humanism" genre available. Celebrating the inhuman in
human society is equivalent to being oriented on a different humanity, on the
"other" humanity, or repressed and dehumanized sectors of the world, i.e. the
proletariat (including the lumpen-), as harbinger of a future hegemony.
(yay Honduras!! [perhaps a "becoming-human" event?)
--Max Clark
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