Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ljubodrag Simonovi
E-mail:comrade@orion.rs
dominant form of bodily activity. The body has become part of the
consumer way of life, and it responds to the demands of consumer
civilization. The relation to the body has an instrumental character: it
ceases to be an integral part of the human being and becomes a tool for
the reproduction of the ruling order. The body is completely
commercialized as the greatest achievement of the capitalist
degeneration of man. Putatively, man is the owner of his body. In reality,
he treats his body in the same way capitalism treats him as a man: by
dehumanizing man, capitalism dehumanized man's relation to his own
body. It is a capitalistically created narcissism with an instrumental,
destructive and spectacular nature.
The capitalist totalization of the world involves the capitalist
totalization of the body, its deformation and the creation of a chronically
ill man. The prevailing rhythm is that of capitalist reproduction, which
destroys the biological rhythm of life without which there is no healthy
man. Not only is man guided by consumption as his moral challenge, but
his body cannot survive without an increasing number of devices and
substances, along with an artificial environment. Man's survival is more
and more mediated by artificial means that turn him into an invalid. The
body has lost its natural needs: it can no longer process natural food, and
it lives on and through medication. Man's entire life is in treatment,
meant ultimately to enable him to carry on in the functional harmony with
the ruling order. The devolution of the body clearly shows that a
developing standard of consumption brings on an erosion of the living
standard. Labor, livelihood, movement, bio-rhythms, diet, sleep, living
space as a modern ghetto (cities), air, water, food, tobacco, drugs, sugary
beverages (including alcohol), ways of life that destroy man's natural
being, his night life, forced pace and ways of eating - almost all life-styles
lead to man's degeneration. Cholesterol, cellulite, diabetes, cancer,
coronary diseases, neurasthenia, depression, AIDS, etc., are not modern
diseases, but are rather a capitalist form of man's physical and mental
degeneration. It is about man's transformation by capitalism, which
deprives him of his natural and human life-creating quality and turns him
into a plastic and technological being. At the same time, rather than
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food distracts the mind from crucial existential and essential issues and
affects visionary consciousness. Dreams about food (just like dreams
about luxury cars, swimming pools, houses, yachts... which constantly
feed the capitalist value horizon manifested by an increasingly aggressive
entertainment industry) replace dreams about the world of free people. At
the same time, the forms of escapism created by the entertainment
industry destroy man's need for intellectual activities. Capitalism mentally
mutilates people by destroying their need for science, philosophy, poetry,
music, enlightened conversation... There exists but one area of interest:
money and the political power it buys, concerns which ultimately serve to
rationalize the existing order that enables the accumulation of wealth
through the plundering of workers and the destruction of the environment.
The relation to his own body is man's most immediate relation to
himself. Hence, the basic form of alienation from oneself is ones
alienation from one's own body. Most people in the West experience
frustration every single day because their physical appearance does not
correspond to the prevailing (mass-marketed) model of the body as the
basis for social worth. Man experiences his body as a punishment, as
something alien, and tries to transform it through strenuous physical
exercises, treatments, plastic surgeries... It is fashionable to submit
the body to the dominant aesthetic model and thus to submit man to
the ruling order. Everything is turned upside down. To be reduced to a
dehumanized and denaturalized idiot becomes the highest moral
challenge - especially if it might bring fame and fortune.
Modeling is one of the spectacular forms of the capitalist
degeneration of man. By torturing their bodies and personalities, girls are
transformed into advertising dolls and self-destructive zombies. To walk
the runways, at the cost of destroying their authenticity and health,
becomes the highest challenge for young people, who are hypnotized by
the capitalist propaganda machinery and invalidated by the capitalist
value system. Humiliation is masked as spontaneity, just as with
prostitutes: giggling serves to conceal the truth that a girl is reduced to
flesh and as such is the object of sexual exploitation. The treatment of
models differs from the treatment of livestock exhibited at agricultural
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fairs only in that the biological rhythms of the cattle must not be
interrupted, while, on the other hand, models are forced to starve.
Moreover, cattle are not humiliated in the same way these girls are. Cattle
are not forced to deform their bodies and faces in order to fit a profile
created by the capitalist clans in the shadows and by modern slave
drivers who pass themselves off as catwalk magicians.
Physical existence in the world is not a matter of free choice. Man
as a physical being is destined to live in the existing world. Reason, by
virtue of imagination and illusions, can escape from the existing world.
The body is chained to the existing world and is a part of it. Man is a slave
of capitalism because he is a slave to his own body. To be freed from
slavery means to be freed from the body. This is the essence of suicide.
The person who commits suicide kills his body in order to free himself
from slavery in an inhuman world. Killing of the body is the final way in
which capitalism deals with man. Suicide is not the act of a free will, but
rather a way in which an inhuman world inflicts a lethal blow to man. The
man who jumps off a cliff is actually pushed off by the prevailing order. To
choose between life and death is not a matter of free will. Freedom
presupposes a choice between possible forms of life and not between life
and death. The decision to choose death is the decision of a man who has
not only lost his freedom, but also lost the need to be free.
By becoming a totalitarian destructive order, capitalism absorbs
into its existential orbit, and thus degenerates and destroys, everything
that enables man to be a human being. Capitalism has deprived man of
love, respect, family, friends, a healthy environment, a secure existence,
happiness, a future... Man is left only with his body, which, itself, is also
capitalistically mutilated. The body is man's sole retreat, the sole
otherness he can resort to at any given moment and the only thing he
owns. Capitalistically conditioned narcissism has become a pathological
obsession with the body in terms of its instrumentalization for the
purposes of achieving social status and ensuring a predictable existence.
Man, as a social being, is reduced to a physical being. Given man's
loneliness and capitalistically degenerated mutual relations, the
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