Introduction

They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too 'different' even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms ... That is after all how the 'state' began on earth.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing if I were not preparing a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.

--Michel Foucault

From blinding light
to disappearance
from the irruption of the State
to the effacement of its subject.
We return to late-capitalist America
by way of ancient China
following the self-dispersing body of the
Despot.
Our face
which we cannot countenance
is his.
After all.
Leave it to the bureaucrats.
A history of the present
for a leaderless future
these eyes will never see.
Do not ask us to remain the same.

TO CHAPTER 2: "THE ELIMINATION OF STRENGTH"

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