In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote that the various schools of philosophy can be reduced, in the end, to the �blind and involuntary memoire� of certain philosophers � thus, in one of the great ironies of intellectual history, surrendering the discipline to the corruptions of vulgarity. The leveling impulse, of which Nietzsche made himself the greatest foe, insinuated itself into his method at its moment of greatest acuteness. And, after all, what is this vulgarity, this personalization of the abstract, but one of the masks of nihilism?

Granting our disagreement with Nietzsche�s disingenuous equation between �the life� and �the thought�, LI thinks it has a certain pertinence, transposed to the the mystery story. A mystery, from our perspective, is nothing more than the hidden autobiography of its investigator.

And this, reader, gets us to the self-infatuated self who is writing to you here. LI has a habit, at least on this site, of transforming every text we reference into a mystery. Under every text we discern -- whether due to our paranoia or our acuteness - the hidden labyrinth in which motive, like the Minotaur, lurks. This is how we hook up with Nietzsche -- because we take that motive to be death drive of nihilism, the leveling impulse to which, eventually, all that is beautiful and alive is sacrificed. We take this personally. We know why we are alone in this culture. We know that solitude is a process of attrition. We know that LI is becoming, daily, a little more lunar.

Yet still we venture into it: the news, the think piece, the movie, the web site. Our own implication in the labyrinth is a performative act � by entering it, we co-create it. We connive at it. If we could leave it, if we weren�t continually wasted in the center, we would destroy it. If mystery is autobiography, its solution is the transcendence of the self. So far, this is not a stage we've ever achieved. Narcissism, narcissism every day.

So: these are the rules of the site. The irrepressible autobiographical impulse rules here, and the reader knows to watch for the silvery, ephemeral flash of experience, which ultimately governs the supposedly neutral instrumentation of argument.

Everything, however, depends on our ability to play this game with a modicum of competence. Lately, we have more and more reason to suspect that we have lost that ability. While our writing becomes more and more convoluted, its justification becomes more and more remote. Why are we doing this? We�ve been reminded of this by M., a friend of ours who lives in Mexico. M. is a highly intelligent, well read woman. If we have an ideal reader in mind when we write, it has to be M., or someone like her. Our last posts were written with a certain joy. We�ve become so bitter that there is a liberation in it: the acte gratuit of the court jester hanging himself. We thought M. would appreciate this, so we put together the two posts on Angola and sent it to her.

Her reply was crushing. We aren�t going to reprint the entire thing, but here is how M. begins:

�Who are the readers of your posts? Do they all have PhD's in international relations? I am afraid I'm more like the beast with the calm regard... I don't know the names, I don't know the people... I'm glad to read your posts but they send my head reeling.�

Our failures have ceased to amuse. Why are we writing this?
I can�t go on. I�ll go on.