Bloom lives in dread, and above all in the dread of being recognized as Bloom.
It’s as if the mimetic hell that is stifling us were unanimously judged preferable to the encounter with oneself.
Biopower is shaping, more and more visibly, into a planned economy of subjectivations and resubjectivations. There is an inevitability, therefore, in the feverish excitement associated with the industrial production of prepackaged personalities, throwaway identities, and other hysterical natures. Rather than considering their central void, the majority of people recoil from the complete, dizzying absence of properties, from a radical indetermination, and thus, at bottom, from the abyss of their freedom. They still prefer to sink into the bad substantiality, toward which no doubt everything pushes them. So it will be no surprise when they discover, via a detour into an unevenly concealed depression, this or that buried root, this or that spontaneous adherence, this or that incombustible quality. French, excluded minority, woman, artist, homosexual, Ph.D., citizen, fireman, Muslim, Buddhist, or unemployed, everything is good that enables them to give voice, in one mode or another, their eyes blinking into the infinite, to the miraculous “I AM...”
Thus, no matter what empty and consumable particularity, no matter what social role, will fit the bill, since it’s solely a matter of holding one’s nothingness at bay. And since all organic life is missing from these premasticated forms, they never take long to quietly re-enter the general commodity system of exchange and equivalence, which reflects them and pilots them.
Bad substantiality thus signifies that ONE has consigned all his substance to the Spectacle, and that the latter acts as a universal ethos for the celestial community of spectators. But a cruel ruse determines that finally this only accelerates the process of deterioration of the substantial forms of existence. The game of musical chairs featuring dead identities, which the man of bad substantiality takes on one after the other, is played to the steady drone of his basic indecisiveness. What is meant to mask a lack of individuality not only fails to do so, but increases the instability of whatever individuality might remain.
Bloomism triumphs first of all in those who flee from it.
It’s useless to aspire to substantiality within the Spectacle. In the last analysis, nothing is more inauthentic or more suspect than “authenticity.” Nothing that boasts a proper name or claims to adhere to itself can be anything but an instance of usurpation or foolishness.
In the present reality, the question of determining what is a mask and what is not is pointless. It is simply grotesque to try and occupy a place exterior to the Spectacle, outside a mode of unveiling in which everything is manifested in such a way that its appearance within it has become autonomous, that is, manifested as a mask. Its disguise as a disguise is the truth concerning Bloom, which is to say that there is nothing behind it, or rather, opening our minds to far more cheerful thoughts, that behind it lies the Nothing, which is a potentiality.
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It is part of Bloom’s destiny to be visible only insofar as he partakes in the bad substantiality, that is, only insofar as he disowns himself as Bloom. All the radicality of the Bloom figure boils down to the fact that the alternative before which he is constantly placed presents the best on the one hand and the worst on the other, without the transition zone between them being accessible to him. He is the neutral core that brings out the analogy between the highest point and the lowest. His lack of interest may constitute a remarkable opening to the agapê, or the desire to merely function, as a cogwheel, in a technocratic project of extermination, for example. Similarly, the absence of a personality may prefigure a transcending of the classic petrified personality, as much as the terminal incoherence of the metropolitan hipster.
There is the “me ne frego” of fascism, and there is the “me ne frego” of the insurgent. There is the banality of evil, and there is the banality of good. But under the circumstances of domination, Bloom’s banality is always manifested as a banality of evil. Thus, for the 20th century Bloom was much more Eichmann than Elser; Eichmann about whom Hannah Arendt reports that “it was obvious to everyone that he was not a ‘monster’” and “one could not help but think that he was a clown.” Let it be said in passing, that there is no difference of nature between Eichmann, who completely identified with his criminal function, and the hipster who, being unable to assume his fundamental non-belonging to this world, or the consequences of a situation of exile, devotes himself to the signs of belonging which this world sells at such a high price. But more generally, the banality of evil prospers wherever THEY speak of “economy.” And the same banality shows through the various kinds of allegiance that people pledge to “necessity,” from “We’re getting by” to “That’s just the way it is,” with a nod to “There’s no such thing as a stupid job.” This where wretchedness begins, when all the attachments are replaced by that of surviving. Attachment appears in its bare state, with no other object than oneself. Living hell.
The pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also forms the illusion of pure interiority.
Bloom is that being who has taken the emptiness around him back into himself.
If the capitalist takes after the mystic through his activity, Bloom takes after him through his passivity. And in fact nothing more resembles Bloom’s existential situation than the detachment of the mystics. His reified consciousness gives him a definite propensity to contemplation, while his indifference corresponds to that “measured detachment (which) is nothing but the fact that the spirit remains unmoved in the face of every vicissitude of love and suffering, of honor, shame and outrage.” To the point of paralysis.
In the end, Bloom makes one think of Meister Eckhart’s God, who is defined as “the one who has no name, who is the negation of all the names and who never did have a name,” as the pure nothingness for whom all things are nothing.
In its perfect state, Bloom’s alienation recovers the originary alienation.
