Living history against the grain. Understanding the world as a manifestation of divine nothingness. Knowing immanence itself as an inverse of a lost transcendence.
Sure, the world is meaninglessness, for both Gnosticism and nihilism. But nihilism is secular. It’s atheistic. It says God is dead. And Gnosticism – well, it’s obviously religious.
Look, Gnosticism is what religiosity becomes after the death of God. The death of God has a religious meaning. Because God never was anything – never, despite all the religious traditions. God was always nothing – closer to death than to life: that’s what shows itself when those traditions lose their authority. It was always about the void of God. About the nothingness of revelation, which is the revelation of nothingness.
It’s about an antinomian investment in the world … that actively opposes its immanent logic. Its law. Gnosticism rejects immanent lawfulness. But it does so by emphasising the otherness of the true God, the real God.
Transcendence is empty. Gnostic transcendence can only be described negatively. God is unrecognisable, unnameable, incomprehensible, without form, without bonds.
So what are you supposed to do if you’re Gnostic? What do you sign up to?
Gnostics are fucked. You might think that immanence is depraved, inferior, evil; you might dream of an escape to the transcendent, but you’re still here. You still have to live in this world that you want to negate.
So what do you do?
Live in the world, but live against it. Live in it, but as though you weren’t living in it. You can revolt, if you like. Engage in sabotage or subversion. But you have to know that nothing positive can be accomplished in this world. That the only action is to invert it – to overturn its laws.
Work in Progress 