Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/332
Last week I wrote that the radical rebellious H of reason which was true from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century has now become the rationalization of the state. And the hope for the future lies with the monsters and the mystics. To wit, the seemingly irrational, for only the irrational can fuck up the progress of the state. Monsters and mystics is of course merely a way of saying psychopaths and saints.
But I wonder if the waves of psychopathy which every sensitive intellectual feels are not the generating life expressions of the only way to keep the H alive and healthy in people. In other words, psychopathy may be healthier than we think.[1] It is an expression of the H which can find its understanding only by the mirror image of the S (here is one essential difference between saints and psychopaths), and therefore psychopathy always appears as a greater or lesser monstrosity, but what is important is that at least it is an H, and even appearing as an S (all genuine artistic expression today is degraded human expression) it is undigestable by the State (although unfortunately less undigestable than it used to be—society even seeks to rehabilitate the criminal) and therefore dangerous to the plans of the State.
note
- ↑ “The White Negro,” from one perspective, can be seen as an extended commentary on this notion. For example, he states that the psychopath, or hipster, is “closer to the secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you are nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of the body.”