Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
In the beginning, humanity was undifferentiated and, for the purposes of this text, agendered. Living as herders and nomads on the lush earth, an original act of evil was done which caused the primordial differentiation. This event, in Ancient Mesopotamia believed to be an act of climate change, forced the creation of men. These men (as a position, not referring always to biological gender), were the ones who coerced the people around them to developing agricultural society in order to withstand the new environment they had found themselves in. Anthropomorphizing this original event, the men make it into an unknowable founding event, an opaque patriarchal signifier, such as a pantheon of gods. The men who performed the original act of coercion in response then simultaneously submit themselves to this patriarchal signifier and then use this patriarchal signifier to develop a means by which to submit the other-men, that being the individuals who had to be coerced by the men, working and conquered enemy peoples. To perform this function, the Law is created from the patriarchal signifier, the God.
Law comes into being in order to not only speak in the name of this patriarchal signifier, but to prevent the uprising of another God to take the place of the God which the law speaks for, the God of any Other-Man: underclass, the mass of people coerced to being enclosed as well as the enemy not under the control of the single signifier. Revolutionary action and warfare are one in the same here, competing patriarchal authorities asserting themselves, the once-oppressed fighting for the throne of the enclosers to commit the enclosing themselves. This is the goal whether consciously or not, with Catholicism and Leftism as keen modern examples with which to pry apart the mechanics of law, due to their purity of being solely laws, and not having been “corrupted” with any of the feminine sedimentations or additions a law acquires once it’s been put into place and made superstructural.
To specifically analyze the nature of the patriarchal law, the greatest examples are those already mentioned, the “non-hierarchical” revolutionary ideologies of the modern and ancient worlds, Catholicism and the Enlightenment (Liberalism & Leftism). When the law seeks to assert its God, the decrees of that God predate anything found by the Law as it stretches into the world. This is evident in both Catholic and Leftist moralism with regard to women’s sexuality, where particular traits are already identified pre-existing the judgement and then looked for in the judgement, doing nothing more than rewriting the text of the judged into the text of the law. The film rating system of the United States and the “content warnings” of leftist internet culture follow these identical guidelines. At the core of both is a God to which they serve, the proponents being his servants, seeking to flatten the world beneath him. The flattening is evident in the universalism of all peoples, as immortal souls in Catholicism, or, in Enlightenment thinking where the urge for scientific progress, universal theories of all people and all things. Those who speak for the law have the entire world pre-existing, already enclosed. The world is simply a troublesome entity which must be in some way tamed, conquered, policed, in order to conform to Eden within the God. Such is shown in the way leftists talk about the sublime object of “fascism” and the way Catholic moralists speak of women’s sexuality.
To further compare the greatest legalisms of history, the language of sin is the same in both, where some concept of exclusion is the ultimate curse. In Catholicism, Hell is defined in the Augustinian sense, by exclusion, where Hell and sin are only that which is excluded from God. When Leftists curse peoples in the same way it’s through “cancellation”, the language of that word drawing the same schematic as the exclusion model of sin in Catholicism. Both Catholicism and Leftism claim to be ultimately liberatory, yet the enclosed bubble in which they exist is an ever-shrinking sphere, reduced by endless purges and disputes as the outside is made to include more and more until only me, myself, the one true believer remains, as a result of this bubble having a terminal velocity, towards the sublime Father-God - in Catholicism, the god of the jews, in Leftism, a true utopia-on-Earth, a society without hierarchy, without division, without any bumps or ridges, as smooth and pure as Heaven itself, an idea Marx himself knew to be sublime in his warning against utopianism.
The conflict of ideologies is a conflict between fathers. Between a Pagan warcouncil and a Roman civilizer, both have the same mechanics: under them, all humans are universalized to a pre-existing text which all of the Earth must be conformed to, even if by force. Both are seeking to make this conforming happen by their spreading out, and the only conquest is who will succeed, the Barbarian Chief or Charlemagne the Butcher. Which law wins ultimately matters little, with the victims changing slightly and the exact laws changing, but the mechanics remaining identical.
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