Maurizio De Simone

The Two Faces of Silence

Another contribution concerning Cells of Redemption and its depersonalizing nature. Dedicated to myself and to my affinity comrade Federico Del Buono.

Nothingness as Experience of oneself – Nothingness as Escape from oneself.

‘The ego, therefore, exists. But does it exist in the way it appears to me? No, because it appears to me in a way that involves the conformation of my senses and intellect, i.e. in a way that does not reflect reality in itself. My appearance is nothing but a sign, not a copy of reality.

The awareness of my ego is made by my appearance.

It makes me aware of an ego that is not my real ego.

Nevertheless this real ego reveals itself in flashes, as quite rarely and in an incomplete way, it bursts from the subterranean and dark abysses of the subconscious; and it gives me the vague and confused impression that I’m not what I seem to be but something mysterious and different. The real ego, the true ego, cannot be found but in the unconscious. And it is there that it is necessary to look for it, and understand it, as much as possible.’

The Cell as a place – which I’d widely extend to all the redemptive and non redemptive Cells that noisily clutter close morals and all ethical behaviours – where the act of depersonalization is carried out (here too it would be the case to start a full debate on the possibility of the individual, as a whole in its fragmentation, to be able to be a nonsense and a personal contradiction).

The Redemptive Void is nothing more than the purification of something of accomplished and irremediable – for those who condemn and those who repent themselves – out of space, already filed in the past by eternal presents.

I don’t want to discuss causes and contributory causes that lead single individuals and their jailers to enter in a relation with each other, at least this is not the point I’d like to discuss at present.

The Limbo a place without time and paradoxically limited; the Oblivion of each one concentrated in a few square metres; the emptying of scanned existence and therefore of the illusory certitude of existing: it is this that involves the loss and depersonalization in the representation.

In this it is necessary to strengthen the idea or the representation of this idea.

The individual is Indivisible by definition. If the depersonalizing void is discovered, this is not thanks to – or not only thanks to – a skilled sadist, but it is only because it has been pushed back again in the unconscious – proper Nothingness; it has been materialized, that experience of oneself has come about, which had been locked up until that moment (a metaphor exposed in another text by affinity comrade Federico; I add when the key actually locks, one can notice an openness, contradictorily). The induction or rather the fact of being induced to an extreme situation is the purgatory of the Io, which trembles at the idea to remain alone.

My general thesis is that one should produce in oneself the Ego that does not lose itself or assimilate depersonalization or attempts at breaking something that cannot be broken: the individual.

Our determination in front of the possibilities offered by the search for the extreme also has this advantage: it reveals us our EGO, it allows us to be face to face with our EGO, to play with our abyssal snakes in the cave of our EGO.

With this I express a critique to the exposition of splitting as exposed by my dear affinity comrade Federico. But this is not because there are wide or narrow possibilities that what he exposed can actually happen.

The representation that one gives of oneself can be altered or illusory – but this doesn’t mean it is less real – by the experimentation of outside situations.

We can think about it – with proud conviction – strong and invincible, but many of the struggles outside ourselves can show us the opposite; the representation of reality, in this case banal, fails or rather it reveals itself. Without being too much assuming, I’d like to explore this field in order to understand this difference along with affinity comrade Federico.

To cross the ‘Threshold’ – a striking metaphor – of a penal institute is certainly in itself, in the movement, an unnatural gesture – as far as my individual experience is concerned.

But everything can be brought back to anything or any gesture we assume it is like this. Every day we cross thresholds we wouldn’t like to cross, and we cross others willingly. The process of assimilation and tyranny we do of representation (there can be no assimilation without tyranny, if we want to quote Nietzsche, or if we want to disturb another Egoist – vulgarly remembered and quoted now – ideas and therefore what is mine can grab, dominate and destroy is my own.)

However, how can we doubt about Federico’s exposition of an alleged divisibility of the individual when we are in front of a ‘living death’?

The Threshold, the marked sense of frustration of living a situation we didn’t look for, personal rejection of coercion and authority revives the field where the individual loves himself and where he runs and spends his inexhaustible days.

Involuntary isolation is the extreme condition where the individual, paradoxically, talks to himself and unveils his essence. The jailers – those who push to crossing the depersonalizing threshold – unconsciously give an instrument for an individualist end. However, what characterizes abatement is simple. As he is an indivisible individual, the individual defeated by Force, which represses him in his muscles and bones, fells that his representation of himself and therefore of his indomitable Ego get slandered in this way.

The affinity comrade with whom I’m developing these elements knows what I mean, a strong personality absolutely doesn’t fear life, it just feels resentment for life.

If the body suffers the mind inevitably also suffers; if a body determined by the outside suffers a limit, the Ego also suffers.

This is depersonalization, to push back anything possible in another world.

Depersonalization occurs when a body defeated by an external force reduces itself in its impotence to be subjected to the imposed limit, whereas our nothingness takes refuge in another world – in an act of rebellion or as a simple vent valve. In other words, one lives Christianity’s resentment towards life.

In its nature, the redemptive Cell is absence of distraction from oneself.

This is the big oxymoron that presents itself in the redemptive cell: on the one hand, to be revealed – openness; on the other hand to escape from it – closure.

The difference with the outside is this. In the Cell there’s no hope to cling to if not in the abyss of one’s own Ego.

Can one’s own Ego live without external relations? Does it feed itself or does it eat the relations it represents to itself? These questions, however, refer to other speculations, which perhaps we will examine in other texts.

Silence is the surrounding form.

In that very Silence the echo of the Ego occurs.

Is it the vision as a way of escape from the existent or is it the other world that is revealed?

They may say that we are ‘mad’, we embraced madness in an amoral embrace and found ourselves wrapped in an irrepressible enjoyment of ourselves.