Transcendence Act 1: Thus Ceased the Leviathan

The land shakes, and darkness rules. The thunderous breath of the Leviathan steams from its oversized nostrils as it rampages through the wilderness, through the darkness, amid the unknown. The leaves and shrubbery shake, and the stark glint of flickering torches fight the rush of air that blows passed them as they are carried at a sprinter's pace in hot pursuit of the mythical creature. Tonight, it will die. Tonight, man will dine on his own self-discovery. The creature is circled, entrenched, captured, and slain. Each man in turn looks deep into the eye of that which, until this very instance, was mystery –myth . This night security subsumes, this night the babes breath will coo in the ease of its safe-keeping, but more than this, man, the tribe, humanity, will be ever more assured that he is the truth –it is he to which all succumbs.

But what is gained by this high humanism? Is humanity ever endowed with greatness in the absence of the beasts that roam the unknown? And what place does God, the soul, or even the subject have when all bows to the reasoning power of human cognition? These complaints of the neglect of the transcendental become ever increasingly problematic when one sees that the human psyche has not necessarily killed God, but he has replaced Him with himself. So, the human subject becomes the all to end all and lights everything with the torches of the technological age. As Baudrillard has suggested, humanity has entered a period of "Integral Reality" in which the out stretch of the human subject seeks to appropriate and transgress that which separates it from the objective, creating a discourse suited and tailored to itself and creating a world that merely projects from the mind; it is a reciprocal relationship where both continually create and influence the other. This is where one might suggest that God has been slain by the bloody hand of post-enlightenment, but this is not the case. Rather, what has been slain is the transcendental or unknown aspect of human existence. The Leviathan, that which constitutes the dark and transcendent aspect of what it means to be human, lies open and dead to a humanity that depends only on that which can be manifested and manipulated in a carceral nexus of technology. What can this possibly mean? Here, it is most significant to see the processes by which the transcendental is lost.