What the **** is Xagick?

Reflections inspired by an upcoming session in The Portal

Trying to find out whether or not I can believe in Xagick…

This January 15th Layman Pascal visits The Portal for an “Edge event” focused at the intersections of magic and psychoanalysis.

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Meta-shamanic figure

Layman Pascal

recently led a course at

Parallax

which inspired a new blog focused on the concept of Xagick, a playful reformulation and extension of magic(k).¹ Xagick seems to point towards a crucial distinction that needs to be made — internal to a tradition of magick that stems from the occult work of Aleister Crowley — specifically in regards to the notion of the Will.

Consider Crowley’s definition of magick as:

“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will"

In contrast to this emphasis on conforming change to will, Pascal seems to point in an opposite direction from Crowley, whom he refers to as “brilliant”, yet also “traumatised and narcissistic” (hold on to that point). To be specific, Xagick is in search of:

a healthy occult pathway that can be distinguished from a modern extractive and tactical manipulation of the world through “will.”

In highlighting this distinction between “conformity with Will” (Crowley) and a “pathway” “distinguished” from “extraction” and “manipulation” through “Will” (Pascal), I do not want to be straw-manning a negation of Crowley’s concept of magick. Consider that the often noted Crowleyian axiom “Do what thou wilt”, needs to be read in its full context (as I learned in dialogue with Owen Cox of

Dark Renaissance Radio

):²

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will."

While Crowley’s occult magick is often interpreted as “Satanistic”, when considered in this full context, his basic ideas sound remarkably Christian. Consider that both Jesus and St. Paul explicitly state that love fulfils the law of God. Consider Romans 13:8 in which St. Paul writes:

“Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Or when summarising the commandments, St. Paul quotes Leviticus 19:18:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”

What is unmistakable here, in the Christian tradition, is that loving and the law are connected, as Crowley seems to be suggesting, as well. And yet, if we read closely, there seems to be a key difference: whereas Crowley suggests “Love is law” in relation to “love under Will”; the Christian tradition seems to place “Love is law” in relation to “love under the other”. Thus we do get a minimal distinction:

1. Love = Law (Crowley/Christianity)

2. Will (Crowley) versus Other (Christianity)

This is interesting to consider for Pascal’s upcoming session at The Portal. What seems to focus my engagement with Pascal’s work involves a sort of mutual interest in figuring out the conditions of possibility for dialogue between:

1. the shamanic/occult side of theory-practice as it relates to general liminal web conversations (what Layman often describes as conversations dominated by a mixture of cognitive science and Christian mysticism), and

2. the more psychoanalytic angle of theory-practice as it relates to high level philosophical or conceptual thought (what I often describe as related to the Žižekian tradition of continental philosophy).³

Here Pascal’s wager that we need to rethink Crowley’s notion of magick on the level of will seems to me central to these very conditions of possibility at the level of shamanic/occult theory-practice and psychoanalytic/philosophical theory-practice. To demonstrate this centrality, let me first reference philosopher Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe blog, in a speculative idea he developed while teaching an Intro to Nick Land at

Theory Underground

this past fall:⁴ Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt” can be connected to Lacan’s well-known ethics of psychoanalysis: “don’t cede ground relative to desire”.⁵

Is this true?

If we go a little deeper into Lacan’s exploration on the paradoxes of psychoanalysis and ethics, we find further elaboration of Lacan’s ethics that has to do precisely with three terms:

1. The Other (law) / other (person)

2. Betrayal

3. The good (Platonic/Christian category)

The stakes for Lacan of “not ceding ground relative to desire” must go through the other — in his well-known axiom “Desire is desire for desire, the Other’s desire, as I have said, in other words, subjected to the Law”⁶ — which is always so difficult to actualise, or better, is always “frustrated” precisely “because of the “other’s” non-correspondence to one’s desires” (i.e. in the worst case scenario: potential actuality of betrayal).⁷ This dramatically complicates one’s relation to the good and the law, i.e. should one continue loving the other as the good — “love is the law” — in the condition of a betrayal? Should one forgive and love unconditionally even in betrayal that thwarts one’s desire? Does this not present us with an impossibility?: to forgive and continue loving after betrayal or to, in contrast, “not cede ground relative to desire”? But, for Lacan, desire is irreducibly bound up to the other, leading us back into the trap of a spurious infinity that can drive us into the truth of madness.

Well! What do we find in this truth of madness?

Let’s reflect with Lacan in his own (twisted) words:⁸

“Something is played out in betrayal if one tolerates it, if driven by the idea of the good — and by that I mean the good of the one who has just committed the act of betrayal — one gives ground to the point of giving up one’s own claims and says to one'self, “Well, if that’s how things are, we should abandon our position; neither of us is worth that much, and especially me, so we should just return to the common path.” You can be sure that what you find there is the structure of giving ground relative to one’s desire.

Once one has crossed that boundary where I combined in a single term contempt for the other and for oneself, there is no way back. It might be possible to do some repair work, but not to undo it. Isn’t that a fact of experience that demonstrates how psychoanalysis is capable of supplying a useful compass in the field of ethical guidance?”

Everything seems at stake here:

1. If one tolerates betrayal under the idea of the good in relation to the one who has committed the act of betrayal, one gives up ground relative to desire (and returns to the “common path”)

2. If one crosses that boundary one can do some “repair work” but not “undo it” (and this brings us to the compass of ethical guidance in psychoanalysis)

Here we cannot help but note that the aforementioned tensions between Crowley’s magick as bringing change in accordance to the will, and Christian notions of law and love as involving the other, become wrapped up in an irresolvable paradox. While Crowley might approach this situation by foreclosing the reality of the other who betrayed us for the powers of the will to bring change in conformity with it, the Christian might neurotically foreground the other and cede ground on one’s desire, towards forgiveness of betrayal, and to love the other as the law.

Can Lacan help us out of this bind? To find out, let us continue following his logic on the same topic:⁹

“I have, therefore, articulated three propositions.

First, the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.

Second, the definition of a hero: someone who may be betrayed with impunity.

Third, this is something that not everyone can achieve; it constitutes the difference between an ordinary man and a hero, and it is, therefore, more mysterious than one might think. For the ordinary man the betrayal that almost always occurs sends him back to the service of goods, but with the proviso that he will never again find that factor which restores a sense of direction to that service.”

What is fascinating here is that, to reaffirm, we cannot give ground relative to our desire (which seems to, at first, contradict the Christian position). But this is only if we do not consider the critical distinction internal to the subject, that between the “ordinary man” and the “hero”, with the hero being someone who possesses a (mysterious) capacity to withstand betrayal without punishing the other for it (which Lacan suggests is not something that everyone, the “ordinary man”, can actualise).

Here Lacan furthermore develops a fourth and final proposition on this topic:¹⁰

“There is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire”

Here we find a distinction between the “good” of the “ordinary man” — which seems to involve a type of self-degradation vis-a-vis one’s desire, leading him to lose “a sense of direction” to the service of the good — and the “good” of the “hero”, who continues to affirm his desire even in the context of betrayal, while also not punishing the other for the betrayal. Here one can easily imagine that the aforementioned paradox between Crowley and Christianity is in fact resolved on the level of subjective disposition, i.e. loving the other as law is only in contradiction with desire if one is in the mode of an “ordinary man” as opposed to the “hero”.¹¹

Thus I am brought to a different type of question: if the law is love, and love fulfils the law, what does it really mean to love the other?

Genuinely: if the other betrays us — that is certainly not in accordance with our desire — but if we are a hero — then we can certainly withstand that betrayal and continue desiring — but it leaves us with yet another ethical paradox beyond the aforementioned Crowley-Christianity paradox: what would it mean to still love that person, and so fulfill the law?

Funny enough, I find Nietzsche’s Zarathustra very helpful here, who I would like to position in the category of what Lacan is calling a “hero”.¹² Consider Zarathustra’s profound reflection from the section On the Pitying:¹³

“And if a friend does evil to you, then say: “I forgive you what you have done to me; but that you did it to yourself — how could I forgive that!”

The speaks all great love; it overcomes even forgiveness and pitying.

One should hold on firmly to one’s heart, for if one lets it go, how quickly one then loses one’s head!”

What we find here is a manoeuvre in which one recognises that, since desire is entangled with the other: when one is betrayed the other also betrays their own self in a way that is perhaps even more destructive than when viewed from the perspective of one-self. I wager this is the difference between Lacan’s “ordinary man” and the “hero”, while the ordinary man is betrayed, and suffers, but continues to love in service of the good without a real connection and service to it; the hero can be betrayed (is always-already open to its condition of possibility), may suffer through it, but continues to love in service of the good with a real connection and service to it. This means that, while the hero does not punish the other for the betrayal (i.e. can be betrayed with impunity), there are still consequences for the other which the other must wrestle with on their own time and for their own good (and this is what makes the hero’s act still an act of love that fulfils the law).

When I apply this logic to my own history and behaviour, this can still require distance between the one and the other (in the act of betrayal). Does this distance ever close? Does this distance require a type of inner perspectival shift from the one who betrayed? Does the “hero” really need that to continue fulfilling the law as love in relation to the truth of desire?

Tough questions.

Are these the types of questions towards which Xagick can be directed in a philosophical context?

One (Cadell) might wager that they are. Consider again Pascal’s wager that, while Crowley’s notion of magick is defined as:

“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will"

The approach of Xagick is in search for:

a healthy occult pathway that can be distinguished from a modern extractive and tactical manipulation of the world through “will.”

In Crowley’s framework, it seems that this causing of change to correspond to conformity of will requires removing the other from the equation. Perhaps this stems from Pascal’s suspicion that, while “brilliant”, Crowley was also “traumatised and narcissistic”. From a psychoanalytic perspective, in narcissism one invests “libido in the ego” (as opposed to the neurotic who struggles with the split between libido and ego). That means that the narcissist is certainly trying to come to terms with the split between libido and ego through controlling the world with the ego. Thus the narcissist is attempting to bring the world into correspondence with one’s own mirror image (even if, as Lacan notes, this correspondence would not resolve the fundamental frustration that the ego itself is).¹⁴ In contrast to the narcissistic state, we could posit that mode of the drive — linked to death of the ego as it is — which is how we should understand the “death” in “death drive”.

What is crucial here is that drive does not equal will. Drive does not seek a correspondence or a conformity between itself and the world. Drive enjoys the lack/gap between itself and the world, and sees in this lack/gap the conditions of possibility of its repetition.¹⁵

In that sense, perhaps what separates Lacan’s “ordinary man” from the “hero” is the difference between will and drive, which we might even be able to translate as the difference between magick and xagick. Whereas the “will of magick” seeks conformity between itself and the world (say, for example, between itself and the other who betrayed one), the “drive of xagick” seeks (to use Pascal’s words) a “performative and intersubjective invocation of wonder” that genuinely invites the mystery of joy beyond will.

This brings us to the importance of not ceding ground relative to one’s desire (as entangled with the other). The importance of not ceding ground relative to one’s desire (as entangled with the other), is that one opens the conditions of possibility to discover the source or the cause of desire as drive itself. However, if one does cede ground relative to one’s desire (as entangled with the other), one loses contact with this source or cause of desire as drive itself. What is worse, one continues to blindly labour in relation to a dead good with an other who will never be loved in the way that would actually be a love for the other’s self-realisation.

Now, in a world that has regressed towards an isolated society, producing regressive communitarian symptoms in the process, perhaps Layman Pascal is correct: if the liminal web continues to focus on intellectual discussions centred on cognitive science and Christian mysticism, that may not get the job done. Perhaps we do need a little Xagick. Perhaps the stakes of Xagick are — within the philosophical tradition inspired by psychoanalysis — the capacity to not cede ground relative to one’s desire (entangled with the other), while also maintaining the capacity to fulfill the law through love? This surprisingly unifies Crowley and Christianity in a strange way.

One further question: towards the end of the Écrits, in the famous paper “Science and Truth”, Lacan outlines a new way to think Aristotle’s four causes: material, formal, final, and efficient, not only in relation to a first cause, but also in aligning each of these forms of causation with a different field:¹⁶

• Material cause = dialectics

• Formal cause = science

• Final cause = religion

• Efficient cause = magic

• First cause = psychoanalysis

Here Lacan does not aim to deconstruct magic, which he insists is (along with religion) not “mere will-o’-the-wisps” for the “suffering subject”.¹⁷ He rather encourages us to investigate two dimension of magic:¹⁸

1. Its efficiency (its capacity to work)

2. Its demand (the “shamanic” subject that demands a certain procedure)

Here if we are to further investigate “magic and psychoanalysis”, we should first seek to understand the first cause of the subject. This brings us from the universal dimension of magic, through the particular, and into the singularity of the shaman himself (or herself): the shaman who engages in a practice oriented around an efficient cause (trying to make this or that happen).

In other words, what is the demand that a certain shaman/magician invokes in the procedures that he executes? Does he demand an end towards bringing the world in conformity with will? Or does demand an end towards treating the other as an end in themselves?

We will explore these threads, among others, in The Portal this January 15th.

1. We also hosted a discussion on my channel with Owen Cox, see: Xagick.

2. Crowley, A. 1976. The Book of the Law: Liber AL vel Legis. York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books. v. 40.

3. If one is so inclined, you can find a history of our initial dialogues on The Integral Stage: Self-Relating Negation, What Does It Mean to Say There is No Evolutionary Relationship?.

4. See: Intro to Nick Land at Theory Underground.

5. Lacan, J. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. London: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 321.

6. Lacan, J. 2005. On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.. p. 723.

7. Lacan, J. 2005. Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis and Criminology. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 116.

8. Lacan, J. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. London: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 321.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. For Hegel, this distinction between “ordinary man” and “hero” might be thought through in regards to the phenomenology of “ordinary consciousness” and “absolute knowing”.

12. Or as I taught in the Philosophy Portal course on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the idea that Zarathustra is an example of the embodiment of the state of absolute knowing.

13. Nietzsche, F. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Cambridge University Press. p. 69.

14. Lacan, J. 2005. The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 208.

15. As developed by Slavoj Žižek, see: Žižek, S. 2011. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 492.

16. Lacan, J. 2005. Science and Truth. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 740.

17. Ibid. p. 739.

18. Ibid. p. 740.