The Gates of Heaven Are Closing

When a rich person looks down on a poor person and denounces him as the source of his own poverty, he's not wrong, he's just following a different protocol for inscribing subjectivity. The person - the subject - is an assemblage of multiple forces; the individual is only its avatar. But it would be a mistake to think of those forces as purely social; the assemblage is not a class (the rich, the poor). It's less human, more elemental, more demonic. There are occult forces at play in every gesture, all too easily dismissed under the rubric of chance or coincidence.

A subjective act can be any event whatsoever, understood as an irruption of surplus reality into the world. In this sense, winning the lottery is a choice as surely as any kind of wage labor: the numbers fall into place as uncannily as the neurological impulses directing muscular contractions.

All of this adds a new spin to Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." A rich person, in so far as he is alleged to create his own wealth, is an inflated subject encompassing not only the individual - the avatar - but also the entire legacy of conditions enabling his prosperity, up to and including other individuals from generations past, and all of their numerous bequests. He is a vast, pulsating mob bottle-necked at the gates of heaven.

The paradoxical flip side of this view is that when a poor person, as an individual, blames society for his own misfortune, he unwittingly accepts his own denunciation. He chooses to be poor by relinquishing himself to the subjectivity of his disabling conditions, and likewise becomes too unwieldy to pass through the gates.

Rich or poor, it is better to be so immeasurably.