I have just spent an hour and a half producing a carefully argued analysis that demonstrates, beyond question, that China should now be seen as an integral part of the Western capitalist system. It was a classic. Unfortunately, the Square Space software that underpins this Blog glitched, claimed that it had saved the text and then asked me to re-log in in order to post it. 

You can guess the rest - this masterpiece is now lost and I am disinclined to pull together all the detail and spend another hour and a half in the week before Christmas in order to enlighten the world. Of course, the real lesson is that one should never, ever trust assurances given by software and always, always save as you go along.

So here is one I prepared earlier [March 2007 actually], with some judicious edits ...

Dr. Stephen Alexander of Warwick University closed his series of lectures [at Treadwells in March] on the grey zone between being human and being animal with a demanding but surprisingly lucid account of what the French philosophers D&G (Deleuze & Gattari, not, as he noted, Dolce & Gabbana) had written on the matter. Perhaps they are the only philosophers to take werewolves and vampires as a legitimate subject of enquiry.

I am not even going to try and attempt to reproduce his dense argument, especially as I hold to a more 'classically' existentialist view that a great deal of French continental philosophy represents a back door attempt to rescue essentialism rather than face, head-on, any of the tough choices that raw existence presents us with. In this case, D&G were trying to make Heraclitus, who believed that all things were in constant flux and there was no permanence, 'work'. 

But, having said this, if we see this sort of philosophy as a branch of art, weaving words to express the ineffable, making us think and provoking us, then there is no real need to get angry or irritated with it. 

It is good just to sit back and let the occasional insanities roll over you and realise that some of these culturally self-referential daftnesses can be wiser guides on how one might conduct one's life than the rational logic of grey analysts who run our lives so clumsily and inhumanely.

There was one thought that Alexander provoked, probably unintentionally, that was liberating and troubling. He explored the Nietzchean interest (expressed in literature by DH Lawrence) in reviving the animal in us - not as a silly Rousseau-esque idyll or as a reversion to barbarism and cruelty but as the construction of the 'post-human' or 'ubermensch'. 

This moves beyond the human to re-connect with our animal natures in terms of something new and beyond nature. There is a lot of daft fearful talk about the inherent fascism or Nazi element in philosophers like Nietzche or Heidegger, yet there is something very disturbing to liberal rationalists about the cold hard use of reason to privilege lives lived unreasonably or 'authentically'.

Liberal intellectuals often see the Holocaust as the fruit of these illiberal thinkers. The existentialists are more likely to see it as the epitome of rational technologism, with its camps, trains, gases and management discipline, all representative of an inhuman system that was itself based on a hypertrophied use of reason and of analysis to meet ends justified by reference to a now-discredited 'science' of eugenics. Communist 'scientific materialism' was no more intelligent in this respect.

The implication of the post-human is that, far from reverting to the natural, technology gives the human endless possibilities to go beyond nature and become (not evolve into) a new breed of animal for new conditions. 

If such technology is not commanded by persons who are stronger than it, then weak humans with all their fears, desires and prejudices intact will be taken over by the possibilities that the technology offers. And so we have death camps, nuclear weaponry, military-industrial complexes and environmental degradation. Scary stuff!

The Eastern religions were very influential on the late-Germanic branch of Western philosophy that critiqued reason through the use of reason - the paradox in this is in itself classically Eastern. Buddhist philosophical instincts continually move around concepts of nothingness, paradox, unknowability and the relative unimportance of rationality except as tool. 

American pragmatism is perhaps the only branch of traditional analytic philosophy that recognises the hole at the centre of thinking but makes this a strength by seeing 'thinking' as a tool for other purposes. 

Wittgenstein eventually ditched any claim for the use-value of language at the point that it touched the ineffable. He noted that there was that about which nothing could be said - at least not in the analytical language of 'true' statements. 

Yet, to the irritation of the analytical mind, we continue to try and say these things. To speak what analytical philosophers would call 'non-sense' and still get sense out of them 'inside' ourselves. 

This appears to be a great divide amongst us humans - that is, between those who live on either side of the boundary that Wittgenstein identified, those who deny and those who embrace this abyss where meaning ceases to be linguistic or where language becomes analytically meaningless. And this brings us back to the liminal world between the human and the animal. 

Is it possible that personal liberation does not just involve using rational tools for private and public ends? Are many of us not also engaged in a twin search for transcendance in the future (the search for nirvana or the state of post-human being) and for reproducing the one thing that animals seem to have that we do not - the ability to live briefly in the moment without past or future?

Some with rational analytical minds often seem terribly scared of the strength of emotions like desire and fear and of this loss of self in the moment. They avoid the Dionysian moment of intoxication with the 'animal'. Perhaps they fear where they might go - that Srebenica, Satanism or BDSM are just around the corner. 

They will also use their reason to argue away the big questions of Being so as not to face them directly, perhaps so as not to face the fearful fact that these questions cannot be answered except through leaps of irrational faith. Accepting even one small leap into the unknown might chip away insidiously at all liberal reason with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Often they will analyse and research moments of transcendance in others but will never really let go when they participate themselves - they will not stand up and hold a crowd in a political meeting, or lose themselves in orgasm, or space and time for a brief moment in ritual magic or religious practice and certainly never experience the  creative 'madness' that William Blake once enjoyed in a Soho street. 

Politics, sex and religion are so often subjects of such earnestness for the Western liberal middle class that they are in danger of losing all sense of joy in life. Maybe this is what being post-human will look like when the last earnest bourgeois has moved on - a final isolation of functioning reason to its rightful role as hand-maiden of the ineffable, the joyful and the irrational. Scary stuff, indeed.

And Merry Christmas, Eidh, Yule and (belatedly) Hanukah and a Happy New Year - indeed, best wishes for whatever your preferred holiday is at this time of year!