Staged Succession: Marginalizing the Victimary and Scapegoating in a Single Move

Transcending the sacrificial is a demanding project. Sacrificial thinking runs deep, into all our assessments and commitments. Risk calculation is sacrificial: trying to figure out how much suffering is “worth” how much benefit is disguised scapegoating: even if we can’t see or name them, giving the process a more hygienic character, we’re setting aside some of our fellows in the name of preserving the health of the community. But we can’t really do away with risk calculation—indeed, our algorithmic order enshrines by automating it. Resisting stereotypes is part of the anti-sacrificial project, because the stereotype provides the ground for convicting and punishing the individual, not for something he has done, but because we can plausibly enough attribute characteristics to him such that, on balance, he can be taken out, one way or another. Normal life has an irreducible sacrificial dimension—which is why resisting the sacrificial so often veers off into craziness, becoming, in fact, ultra-sacrificial itself.

In response to the anti-sacrificial madness turned ultra-sacrificial of the woke it is easy to turn back to a normal sacrificialism, which seems harmless and stabilizing by comparison. I don’t think this will be possible in the long run, because such a return would involve renouncing available knowledge of the mimetic nature of the human—a knowledge that the ancients actually possessed far more securely than the moderns. Only ritual can provide a way of commensurating the transgressive deed with the communal response, and we have no more rituals, certainly not in the strong sense, because rituals are sacrificial. The Nazis chose to annihilate the Jews on thoroughly modern, “anti-sacrificial” grounds—that of eliminating, disinterestedly, a species of bacteria—rather than acknowledging that what they were doing was more akin to slaughtering a hostage held for security against the betrayal of the Aryan nations of England and America. Hostage taking is sacrificial logic applied to relations between groups. No doubt Curtis Yarvin’s insistence on refusing vengeance against the “libs”—and retiring them with pay, instead—is due to his own understanding of the implications of the desire to “pay them back in kind,” which presupposes the sacrificial logic of equal exchange (which is never equal and always escalating).

So, if we insist on preserving the wisdom of the post-sacrificial, we have a dilemma: how to act as forcefully as necessary without either denying our mimetic implication or indulging our sacrificial bloodlust. The pedagogy of exposure and disclosure I’ve proposed (Hamlet’s theatrical method + Freud’s transference; becoming an interface between power and the user) is designed as a solution to that dilemma: as opposed to revenge, the mirroring or reading back to the other of everything in their own actions that is in fact not their own. The certainty of individuality and suppression of dividuality that is necessary for evil, anti-social deeds is undermined. Of course, this presupposes the openness of the other to such an approach: Claudius’s Christianity, in the case of Hamlet, the patient’s desire to be cured, in the case of psychoanalysis. The stronger version of this pedagogy of exposure and disclosure, then, is originary satire, which uses positions within the system, positions that must be attended to one way or another, to expose claims to responsibility that conceal the operations of power. Originary satire can only work in a posture of prostration, a disclaiming of all power and responsibility beyond that which has been delegated and disabled, initiating the satiric gesture.

A model of a post, or, perhaps, asacrificial ,mode of power is implicit in originary satire, though. Let’s take the minimal absolutist model of good order: all is coordinated so as to ensure that the current occupant of the center is as likely as possible to select the next occupant of the center and so on in perpetuity. This presupposes a ruler who oversees a process whereby institutions are organized so as to generate the strongest candidates, to stage the most telling tests to distinguish between and form these candidates, and to refine and present in an ongoing way to the ruler the information that allows him to settle on a choice for now. The whole social order would have to be organized around the recognition that all questions in any social order can be reduced to the question of succession. All questions—of economics, foreign policy, technology, health care, the family, etc.—would all be greatly clarified if passed through this filter.

And this highly organized process of arranging for succession must itself model the pedagogy of exposure and disclosure. A continual convergence of all upon the various posts distributed would be continually encouraged and resolved in ways that perform, confirm and stretch where necessary existing hierarchies. Communities would love and cultivate those raised in their midst who aspire to enter the academies training potential candidates for ruler—they would organize and define themselves accordingly, as each striver would inspire his own narratives, coming from a specific place within the community, exemplifying certain qualities, highlighting certain traditions. The vast majority would not be serious candidates, but they would all be candidates for supporting roles, part of helping the community to demonstrate its worthiness to present those candidates who do rise to the time. The trials undergone by the candidates who enter the academies and make it to the “final rounds” would obviously be demanding and the criteria uncompromisingly and explicitly geared toward those abilities best suited to produce a ruler; at the same time, since the ruler would be using his own judgment to make the final choice, higher test scores or victories in specific competitions would offer no guarantee, and so the competition would take on a more intangible and contingent cast, as each would also have to think about how to win and how to lose and how to display oneself more generally, while always accepting that the decision is out of your hands, with the proof that you have put yourself forward for pure love of the central intelligence being that the odds are greatly against even the “finalists” and that if you are not selected you, in particular, have to be kept far away from power and therefore from any position an ambitious man might otherwise aspire to. The sacrificial is extracted from the entire order insofar as no claim to an ultimate commensurability between who one is and what one does and what eventually happens to one could ever be made. Maybe you “deserve” to be the ruler, but the ruler himself has decided that the next 30 years, due to historically specific reasons, will require a mode of rule someone else is better qualified to provide. And as above, so below—this will be a model for organizing all institutions. Various ways of approximating the model of rulership are put on display with no one having in advance anyway of saying what the closest approximation is. The limits, and also the real rewards (the “losers” will have to find inventive ways of making their lives productive) of any desire for centrality are made explicit.

The purpose of having such a model worked out is to claim that, since it’s the only real model, it is in fact in place now, only badly implemented. Does not every president and governor and senator and representative take an interest in his successor, and act in his official role so as to influence the party in such a way as to ensure his agenda lives on? Are not educational institutions, from pre-school to university, designed so as to produce candidates for the exercise of power—in government, of course, but also in the media, high tech, entertainment, and the university itself? What criteria are displayed in ensuring succession—what kind of succession seems to be aimed at? Like any political formalism, the same assumptions that provide us with prescriptions also supply the descriptions—our advantage over the actual power brokers is that we can make explicit what they must leave implicit, fobbing off inquiry onto mysticisms of “merit,” “networking” and so on. That there are in fact vast overlapping lines of succession with shifting interdependencies and degrees of power allows us to conduct an inquiry the rulers themselves cannot while constantly peppering them with wild hypotheses (“conspiracy theories”), as plausible as any other account, of who happens to be the designer of the scene from behind it at this moment.

The model of successionism I’m proposing, then, is a source of ongoing originary satire. It is also, though, easily satirized in turn: read the model of successionism two paragraphs above to any leftist or, indeed, any normal person, and you’re sure to provoke uproarious laughter and concerns for your mental health. That’s also good, as long as you stick to it. Such a pedagogy means putting yourself at the center, which involves some vulnerability, that is, the attraction of sacrificial resentments. An exchange of satirical representations is a good contest, providing training in responding to the ridicule any marginal position will receive, and allowing for a wide range of registers—from jocularity (we don’t have to take any of this seriously, but it’s fun to create these wild models) all the way toward focused inquisition (what, exactly, are you contributing, in the entire way you live, to the kind of succession that might do the things you desire?). It’s a way of talking, both seriously and luridly, about well-known individuals—it’s both a repudiation and appropriation of the celebrity culture. Meghan Markle is talking about running for president? Very interesting! What sequence might that initiate? The focus becomes trying to figure out what anyone might turn out to be “made of.” This installs the exposure and disclosure pedagogy within the idiom of intelligence—every discussion of the disconnect between power and responsibilities, and of the unmet needs and abilities unrealized, can be designed so as to zero in on individuals who exemplify this disconnect (and thereby render succession opaque) and those who promise to in some way remedy it, or teach us how to look for those who might.

In this way, you keep adding to and revising the content of successionism so as to make it match the historical trajectory you’re intervening in. Again, the entire character of a social order can be found in the way it transfers power from one ruler to another, as each institution is organized in accord with the same logic of instituted practices that produce those who would continue them. The reciprocal satiric representations of successionism and its others will produce one approximation to the model after another—once successionism is in the cultural bloodstream, there is always a timeline that is moving closer to it, and it becomes a question of showing how its enemies are aiding its conquests. This becomes a practice: transforming anticipated historical sequences into approximations of successionism. The proof of the practice is its resiliency in assessing the resiliency of this or another torchbearer of the mode of rule that can serve as an origin for successors in perpetuity. Whatever values or projects you wish to install or promote can be tested and refined in this way: how does (your) Christian nationalism or Faustianism or Prometheanism identify and reach for the levers that would increase the likelihood of a singularized power center that would see to its own succession in perpetuity? Not only does your project need to account for singularized self-perpetuity as the default position to be approximated, but it must be suited to prepare a population to contribute devotionally to the scenes of succession implicit in singularized perpetuity. Some projects might be ruled out in this way, while others will enter the contest and hone themselves. So, your pedagogy of exposure and disclosure reads the other back to himself as a particular way of approximating singularized perpetuity, and therefore never fixed as a target upon which all social energies are to be directed; and, in your own modeling of that other mode of approximation, you model a mode which can situate the other.

The model of singularized succession in perpetuity, then, situates all specific programs for appropriating power, without usurping any of them, since it will need some idiomatic articulation. In this way, it enacts the constitutive paradoxicality of human existence, a constitutive paradoxicality which irreducibly situates without usurping any program of metaphysics, faith, or existential commitment. If you ask me what I believe in, that would be my answer: the inexhaustible constitutive paradoxicality of the human. And then I would acknowledge that any mode of singularized succession in perpetuity would have to select from among the idioms circulating within its domain a creole, so to speak, in which that paradoxicality could speak under those conditions. But any such idiom would have to have a touchstone—there is “theology” because the events founding any faith require interpretation of the imperatives issued from those events, and “theology” must be judged on terms other than the circular one of conformity to the event itself. So, I propose as a criterion for what I’ll provisionally agree to call “political theology” that its touchstone or meta-discipline be the facilitation of participation in the staging of singularized succession in perpetuity in such a way as to accentuate its constitutively paradoxical character: the figure at the center extends his imperative into futurity without hindrance or interference insofar as the entire order is ordered so as to engage everyone’s energies in such a way as to make all institutions at every moment harmonized so as to be conducive to that extension into futurity. The perfecting of your practice so as to contribute to the barely imaginable future revelation of the articulated coordination of that very practice with all other practices made interoperable so one’s practice can make that revelation barely imaginable is the highest form of union with the central intelligence possible. To put it more simply: insofar as everyone is doing the same kind of thing you are doing, each in his own completely different way, the kind of thing you are doing will in fact be that kind of thing, as you can see, by doing it, in its indefinitely delayed form, which will have to turn out to be completely different so as to be exactly the same as what you are doing now. And no one could ask for anything more than that.