Editing Suspended Enthusiasm (section)

=== The Public Servant ===
[[File:Mayakovsky.jpg|thumb]]
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.