Note: the content below is all in first draft format. It will change considerably during the time it takes for the study to be completed. I post now ‘for interest’s sake’.
Consider what Badiou (2009:11) mentioned about philosophy in light of the philosophical situation represented by the ‘smile’ on the faces of the crucified lovers (see 7.2.1.2): “What will philosophy tell us then? It will tell us that ‘we must think the event’. We must think the exception. We must know what we have to say about what is not ordinary. We must think the transformation of life.” I wish to focus here only on the final sentence: thinking the transformation of life. At the risk of over-repetition of what is at this stage of the study a common mantra, ‘mechanisms’ exist that have prevented alternatives to ACID from arising (as shown in Chapter 4); in other words, mechanisms exist that prevent the transformation of life away from the reign of the Promethean. It follows that in the realm of the Promethean, one does not ‘think the transformation of life’; furthermore, it follows that the reign of the Promethean is not a reign in which philosophy (as it has been presented by Badiou and Žižek) takes place; philosophy would have to occur in a manner whereby the dominance of the established model of humanity is, for example, under scrutiny – and this is exactly what has partly occurred in this study, namely the scrutiny of various Promethean components of humanity as it has been historically constituted. When Orphic ideas were explored in Chapter 5, and when permaculture principles were considered, they occurred against a backdrop of (potential and actual) transformation – specifically a transformative process where ideas do not dominate but arise in cooperation with a myriad of factors that constitute a given context. Permaculture principle number twelve explicitly draws attention to the idea of transformation via the use of the word change – ‘creatively use and respond to change’.