Suspended Enthusiasm is a prose short-story in three parts by Lucas Levi-Nietz that was published on the "Universal Empire" Substack. It thematically covers the aesthetic dimension of sovereignty and it's relationship to the archetype of the Public Servant. It is difficult to place into any kind of fictional canon in the sense of a contemporary "Fandom", but it clearly relates to the general aesthetic of "Universal Empire" developed by the author and friends on Twitter.
Full Text[edit | edit source]
The Emperor[edit | edit source]
“I express my love in collaboration and agreement. I will agree with anything I love. This is the essence of Marxism-Leninism, and Christianity.” Dr. Frank paused for a moment to light a cigarette. “The way I love is Catholic - it is the only way I can retrieve peasant simplicity, the object of Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism is pure, vital, brutal, perfect devotion, pure ecstasy of reason and madness.” He stared intently at the small crowd at his feet without any discernible emotion or intent. Watching him was like watching an owl. There was something going on behind the eyes, never clear, never certain. His audience today were the youth of the Party, most of them boys, all between 12 and 16. “Picture Stalin, the boyish Emperor, laughing in his study, writing obscenities in the margins of his reports, a studious boy, 500 pages a day, precocious, intelligent. Putting tomatoes in his friends’ pockets.” The audience gazed at Dr. Frank intently, in the strange stillness of his face, the small vague eyes that gave away nothing, white hair softly radiant in the glow of halogen lamps. “I want to be like Stalin. I wish he was my friend.” He paused again to take another drag. Some of the youths at the side of his chair took cigarettes from his table and smoked with him. No-one could tell if he realised or cared. “I love Stalin so much, such a profound, total, absolute devotion and love. I want to collaborate, I want to be a Communist.” The boys smoked their cigarettes, emulating the way Dr. Frank moved, so slowly, so ungracefully. “‘Joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant.’ - J.V. Stalin. Printed on a banner 20 metres suspended above the palaces and the workshops, smokestacks, steeples, warriors spinning out into the cafes and the railways to their sweethearts, to the bookshops and the clubs and the bars.” Smoke rose above the boys and whipped sluggishly about the ceiling fan. “I love Joseph Stalin. When I look at him I want to cry. The world spirit behind his desk, writing ‘faggot’ in the margins of his reports. Wrestling his central committee, up past early, drinking, laughing, smoking, lying on the floor of the empty politburo with his friends. I feel like I could touch him, his intensity burns into me like a typewriter, flesh pierced in words, Logos, reason brands me, madness takes form, crystal, true, revealed real, and history is in me, it is me, I am Stalin’s friend, I love him so much I could cry.” Dr. Frank stubbed his cigarette out and called on the boys to leave. There was no consistency to how Dr. Frank smoked, and that irritated some of the boys. He had no grace at all. To have any kind of grace you must be consistent. Inconsistency in gesture betrays inconsistency in thought, and not in a good way. A small group of them wandered together into McDonalds, nodding politely to the world-weary security guard whose dazzling smile shone beneath black matted beard. Pleasant contemporary classical music muddled in the familiar tics and beeps of the kitchen as the boys took turns ordering from the one functioning self-service panel. They ate their food on a wall overlooking the green, bathed in LED lights, gently kicking at the brickwork as they ate, and spoke. Some of them had saved cigarettes from the meeting and were evenly sharing drags between each other so as not to leave anyone out.
The Public Servant[edit | edit source]
Dr. Frank was walking swiftly through the common area of the university, making laps with his entourage of faculty. They looked like they were going somewhere, which made them harder to catch. He continued, “the poet Mayakovsky is the model of the public servant - pushed to the very limits of dutiful expenditure, scorned, mocked, loved in equal measure - perfect service. The perfect public servant is a Eunuch, or a paederast; the perfect Emperor is a boy.” The other faculty were trying desperately to keep up with him as he seemed to accelerate with every step. He was a ghastly man, a real inhuman presence. “The public servant ought to look at the Emperor and weep, it's what he should spend most of his time doing. When the Emperor is not present he should be made present by anguish, to secure himself in sovereignty. Anguish, an aspect of joy, primal calling to fulfil man's fundamental ontological absence - this is the essence of Empire and the material premise of politics.” Some of the other professors had collapsed minutes earlier, their tired frail bodies littering the green. “The boy Emperor is the material annunciation of the total thing, the absolute, hence his sovereignty. He is disclosure of the object in poetry, in a glance and a gesture, without speaking, with his multitude of signs, his Oracles and interpreters, the Aschenbachs of his court, the public servants, who are his and his alone. He is the public, and the public love him, but they don't desire him like the public servant does, they see the faults, they see the breakdown of his total meaning, which is the public servant.” Turning around without stopping, Dr. Frank pressed on, now facing his audience without seeing them, “The Emperor is too true, too radiant and good, who are these bureaucrats, these perverts, who think they have a right to make the Emperor known to us? The highest poetry is propaganda.” He beckoned for a cigarette from one of the faculty. “Rhetoric and imagery rest upon the skin of the Emperor, defined and defiled in equal measure by the public servants, who are clothes, that which at once makes intelligible the presence of the body while maintaining its necessary obscurity, suspended centimetres above the skin like vapour on a lake, threatening to plunge down or to rise away in anguish at any moment.” Someone tried to interject, unsuccessfully. Dr. Frank probably didn’t know what was going on half the time, or he knew everything. “Only beauty and desire can permit such total acts; there is no more intense a desire than that of the public servant for his Emperor.” Abruptly changing course, Dr. Frank burst into the media department, rapidly moving from room to room, some falling behind, others joining the mobile lecture. “Propaganda brings the masses into the Emperor's dance, the madness of sovereignty, its fundamental irrationality in the communication of unspeakable signs made rational in the vulgar designs of the public servant, who commissions great portraits of the Emperor, a facsimile of his beautiful skin grafted onto every building, every office wall, every home and classroom, his words suspended in the air upon billowing silk, in the factories and workshops, and finally on the lips of the masses so they can taste the pure total brilliance of the Emperor and become his skin.” It was like he was totally uninterested in anything at all. But for those who followed him, he was all there was. “The most beautiful boy in the world, chaste, excised from activity, feels the love of the masses in their disdain for the public servant. Only such total desire can permit an assassination or a coup, which are not revolutions. Revolutions are never against the sovereign, they are for the sovereign, his heavenly mandate. Only a public servant, overwhelmed by jealousy and vanity to secure and draw in the object, to eat it, can annihilate it. At the death of the Emperor the masses and the public servants cry, but for very different reasons. Love and desire are opposed, the death of the Emperor is evidence enough. Public servants ought to heed this: become Eunuchs for the Emperor. Suspend yourself above the flesh-wrap of Eidos and never draw it in, never take it. Burn in your intensity and your desire, and never try and secure it for yourself. Your intensity is the essence of your duty, your desire is the motor of beautiful works. The public servant is the most wretched creature in the world, his service is ultimately necessary.” Dr. Frank finally disappeared behind a fire exit, leaving a trail of wounded and fatigued academics in his wake.
The Economist[edit | edit source]
"Abolish the economy and banish the economists. There is nothing playful about Islam." The Ayatollah had gathered his council, watching their bowed heads from behind a black gauze screen. "Economists are adolescent, petty, hateful creatures, lounging at desks, concocting pervert fantasies they call "models" to which all reality, even God's law, must conform. Absolutely vulgar." He gently poured a cup of tea from a copper pot, raising it with expert poise to a near half meter above the cup without spilling a drop. "Abolish the economy immediately. These boys are playing too much. They neglect prayer. They spit on God with their arrogance, the arrogance of children talking back to their teacher. Who told them they know anything at all?" The Council sat, intently listening, sweat pooling about their chests and arms, dripping from the head, their bodies shaking gently. The Ayatollah continued: "They have these certificates, I am told, and these certificates, ornate paper from ornate institutions, wrapped in gold, what is this but an idol? No, we must banish these children. They must go back to school." The walls of the chamber were bare, unattractive, modest. The men knelt, trembling in the intensity of the heat. The Ayatollah's voice was burning with volatility beneath a superficial affected calm. "They must pray, five times a day, they cannot be allowed to put their silly certificates ahead of the word of God." One in the audience took minutes for the meeting in beautiful ornate calligraphy. He was never told to do this, and some of the other councillors thought he was trying too hard, but they couldn't deny the beauty of his strokes. "We must burn down the universities at once" said the wise man, never in all his years had the fire been extinguished, "here must be an order to salt the earth of these places so nothing may grow there. No, if a university has existed anywhere at all the land it once wrested on shall never be touched again. It must be returned to God absolutely in every way. No one can go to these places anymore. One thousand years or more they shall not be touched. God willing they will be struck down." He took a brief pause to sip his tea, as hot as the chamber and absolutely without fragrance. "These boys were never disciplined. They were never told 'no'. They learned rules and deceitful spirits entered their mouths and so we're supposed to surrender ourselves to their wicked tongues. The vanity of rebels. Has there ever been any greater evidence of the necessity for strict discipline?" Now, without a noticeable change in demeanour, the room seemed to embody active hostility. The consistency with which he spoke somehow still permitted the rise and fall of tension, an ethereal transformation of atmosphere. "These are boys who never felt the righteous hand of a father. Find out who fathered these boys and have them arrested immediately. We must find out what is going on here. God willing they shall perish from the earth." The meeting ended at the exact instant of Isha, and the council prepared to pray.