Abstract
This article presents a gnostic division of truth and the world, or between theory and philosophy. In the course of the article the structure of decision is articulated in both political and theoretical senses. Against the agnosticism of philosophy, always an alibi given over to the functioning of the capitalist world where life is not worth living, this article presents a gnosis that requires creating and beginning with the proletarian subject akin to the way the French Maoist group Gauche prolétarienne began by taking theory into the factories in the late 1960s.
Notes
1 The original French has Empir(i)e, which contains both empire (Empire) and empirie, which refers to empiricism. I've tried to capture this pun in English as Empire(cal). All notes are the translator's.
2 This term was coined by Lacan and became a major concept for Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet in their L'Ange. It's a homophone for “c'est comme ça,” which could be literally translated as “that's how it is,” which is used in everyday French to denote a kind of realist fatalism in a way similar to the English expression “what are you gonna do?”
3 Translation slightly modified to match the French.
4 Translation slightly modified to match the French.
5 Here Grelet is playing on a neologism of his creation manance, which is the adjectival form of the noun manant, normally translated as yokel or low-born. Manance also plays on the manence of Proclus, as that which remains or is radically present and individual, and thus is closely related to the Latin haecceity, and so I have tried to capture both Grelet's stylistic performance and meaning with the pun “hickceity” and have translated manant as “hick.”