Some infamous wisecracks to be urgently translated into all known languages

1. Religions form where the connection to God is severed. A world of mediations pours forth from the rupturing of the state of contiguity - its magma solidifies as intercessory structures: prayer, texts, images, observances, objects and rites of passage. The operational function of religious mediations is twofold: to dissipate pent-up energies via displacement activity; and to compensate, through institutionalised investment in superstition, for the enduring loss of the sacred.

ii. Religion is a profusion of signage pointing towards where God isn't.

iii. The true believer announces, upon arrival in his black flag festooned armoured personnel carrier, God is not here but I am.

2. All organisations, and not just religion, appear at, and thus indicate the dispersal of, the energy generated by the movement which is to be captured. Social organisations interpose a rigmarole of activities, membership duties, rules, expulsions, and strategies of expansion and colonisation as a mechanism for converting otherwise unbound popular energy into a structure of mediations located at the end of enthusiasm's life-cycle. Formal organisations always mark the end, and not the beginning, of popular movements.

3. However, organisation does not simply indicate the end of a prior state of immediacy - the world does not move inexorably towards an organised condition. Things go wrong: wherever organisation is implemented, a reactive process of disorganisation is also commenced.

4. The formalisation of spontaneous phenomena does not mark the completion of social process, wherein is sealed a history of strict progressions from chaos to complexity. Social institutions, which are the sophisticated outcome of long years in the evolutionary arms race, serve as the ideal terrain for counterattack from the returning repressed in its most primitive mode. The pathogens that multiply within, and in the end destroy, their host, have been cultivated by the very form which they disrupt. It seems that even the most advanced organisations must die abjectly, but before they die they are exhausted by the forces that drive them: that which succeeds will also be succeeded.

5. Organisational instability occurs as a hormonal imbalance between certain unintended but internalised outcomes and the established structure which has generated them. Organisations are obliged, by ownership protocols, to either metabolise their own errors or expend energy in evading that responsibility. In reaction to the imbalances and internal disintegration which they have generated, organisations must compensate with a proportionate external expansion. The  greater the instability at the centre, the more violently enforced will be the external corrective.  That which expands at its edges only demonstrates the contractions at its heart.

6. All victories are achieved at the expense of internal cohesion. As it begins to expand, the organisation initiates the process of its own unravelling by means of spreading the small disruptive flaws situated at its core (its toxic debts) to all corners - this externalised shrapnel brightly reflects back and magnifies private trauma to crisis proportions.

7. An organisation's efforts to self-stabilise cause it to continually and militantly expand. But once a strategy of hostile take-over is embarked on, there can be no let up... the organisation is constrained both to continuously expand and to incorporate incompatible components into its structure; both strategies only destabilise it further. There is reached a point in this expansion where the empire becomes nothing but a name attached to a set of complicated internal relations between parts which have nothing in common except a shared bureaucracy.

8. Organisations continue to expand until they are merged into the state at which point a further layer of recursive mediation is introduced. However, the problem of metabolising the disorganised outcomes of institutional process remains. Expansion always proceeds through hostile territory: forest, swamp and most of all desert... mission fatigue clogs command lines and loss of focus seems to attach to boots on the ground.

9. Religions are no less subject to the laws governing organisational dissipation. The world's current phase, to the extent that it is defined by religious war, is characterised by the final convulsions, not the vital emergence, of the religious form.  The current wave of religion's geographical and ideological expansion expresses an internal structural crisis which unconsciously seeks to release its bound energies into a final state of non-agitation and thereby return to contiguity (albeit negative contiguity).

ii. Religions also die. At the threshold of its death, every religion desires to kill as many people as it can, but in killing people it announces its own passing from the world. Brief are the forms, and fleeting are the shapes of the world. 

10. Mouths hanging open, the non-professional cast members of Passolini movies will always perceive expansion as invasion, and transformation as calamity.  Experientially, for the peasants who cinematically raise up their eyes from their toils, war advances into their world as yet another in the list of pestilences that are to be visited upon them. In the act of planting cabbage, there is no qualitative distinction to be made between, for example, the jihad for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shām and the revolutionary war of communisation as it is advocated by crypto-leninists. 

11. For reason that there can be no such thing as a communising explosive device, both the strategy of expansive war and the tantalisingly ideal outcome of victory, must be relinquished. If the process of decomposition of organisations is to be accelerated, then we must hope that the combatants of all particularist struggles will begin to comprehend that their efforts, and the war phase to which they belong, only brings about, as much as it expresses, the historical disappearance of that to which they adhere. Will they ever grasp, as they have reached out to grasp onto their military hardware, that they are the embodied means which is destined to defeat their own end? 

12. And because this is the twelfth, we may 'imaginatively' recast Kafka's tireless imperial messenger in the role of holy apostle: Nobody may pass through here, and least of all he who carries the last words of a dead man.