‘Provoked Life’: Expressing Nihilism

Abstract

Floods caused by melting icecaps, whole land-masses submerged; the oceans starved of oxygen by burgeoning algae which thrives off effluent; the once innocuous soyabean genetically modified into an insidious, all-pervasive, cancer-provoking substance; clinically brain dead women used as ‘alternative reproductive vehicles’; the countryside resounds with the bleats of absolutely identical ‘Dollies’: such is the future facing us. Cows and chickens transformed into zombie killing machines, whose sacrificed carcases seep into water reserves, polluting the whole ecosystem. Humans are eating their own madness as they tuck into their carnivorous cow-rumps. Something is seriously wrong. But who do we trust to put it right?¹

Having always forged its way with acausal steps, the brain is the prime example of the pygmy character of causal laws. Faced with the brain, all biological hypotheses fail. According to the work of Versluys, Poetzl and Lorenz, it seems to have developed itself through a saltatory doubling of the neurones accompanied by new formations of the cortical zones. ‘Intermediary forms are missing’. Nothing here to do with adaptation, no summation of the smallest stimuli, no gradual decomposition and maturation leading to any purposive adjustment (Zweckmäβigkeitsumstellung), here there always were creative crises. It is the mutative, i.e. revolutionary, organ par excellence. Its essence was never content, but always form; its means intensification; its demand stimulation. This lodge of rudiments and catacombs brought everything with it right from the beginning; it never had to rely on impressions, it produced itself when called upon. Its predilections were no way limited to “Life” but included lethal factors, hunger, fasting, walking on nails, snake-charming, magic, the bionegative, death.

Benn ‘Provoked Life’ (1943)