It is my honor to speak at the opening of the first anthropological conference after the April revolution. Just a few weeks ago, words such as “anthropology” and “humanism” were frowned upon. It was forbidden to utter the word “death.” We were allowed only to visit Hegel’s grave. Wet nurses who uttered the word “human being,” scaring children, were brought into court and accused of spreading superstition. We had to hand over all images of human beings and anthropoid apes to the vice squad. Today, we are gathered here to express our longing for materialization, the power that supports us mysteriously to the core, in short, our humanism. (Roaring applause)

The officially sanctioned spiritism tries to prove that it is both impossible and unnecessary to believe in the existence of human beings. It is absurd to think of a creature that is of the spirit and material at the same time. Spiritism postulates two dialectically opposed worlds: ours and a material one. Our world, made up of spaceless and timeless thoughts, is tasked with contemplating the things of space-time, to detach them from space and time. And we ourselves, who are nothing but pure knots of thought, exist as the only imaginable life form: life as a conversation regarding recognition and about that which has been recognized and become known. The myth according to which we emerged from human corpses appears to be a primitive attempt to localize us, and reactionary ideologies such as metempsychosis or reincarnation are to be combated as counterrevolutionary because—according to official Spiritism—they taint the purity and dignity of the Spirit. However, the Ministry for Enlightenment and Salvation, based on Decree 172/4, was compelled to distance itself a little from official spiritism and now permits anthropology. The impulse toward materialization, apparently, is stronger than all revolutionary ideologies. (Agitated heaving and weaving among the spirits present.)

What, after all, does the purity of the Spirit, praised beyond all measure, consist of? Of the fact that all thoughts, if they are correct, can be reduced to zero. Proof that thoughts are correct consists of identifying them as tautologies. Such dissolution toward zero is the kind of salvation promised to us by the Enlightenment. That is what we must fight against! (Thunderous applause.) At issue is not dancing in graveyards while reciting incantations and jumping on individual graves—as we are accused of doing by the spiritists—(loud laughter in the hall), but about providing content for our thinking and for ourselves. This is not a primitive, reactionary endeavor; it is the essence of the Spirit. I am going to try to provide evidence for this accordingly. I remind the censors present in the hall of the aforementioned Decree, and ask that they please not interrupt me.

The world of the Spirit does not consist of translating things from equations that, assuming they are correct, turn out to be tautologies; rather, it consists of adventure that becomes ever deeper and richer. Every one of us emerged from the death of a human being in order to enrich ourselves by the physical experiences and events of the deceased and to elevate them with recognition and beauty. The conversation that we exemplify clarifies that which has been gained, eliminates the slag of error and lies, and moves it toward logical and mathematical purity. Once this catharsis has ended, we dive back into the human body to learn and experience new things. At the center of this adventure is the human being who lives for us and for whom we think—and who lives in us, within whom we live. Let us pray. (Devout silence)

Far be it from me to subscribe to a materialistic humanism. Quite the contrary, we have to identify ourselves completely—as the Spirit we are—before we can think about becoming materialized. We should not fight spiritism as such, we should fight dogmatic spiritism. And I see a new epoch emerging, out of the current, postrevolutionary darkness, an epoch of self-confident humanism. (Roaring applause)

This self-confident humanism will recognize the world as a process of spiritual unfurling. At first, the Spirit was nothing more than a disposition in the program of life. It lay dormant in the structure of hydrogen atoms. Then it began to articulate in the complex structure of polymeric connections. In the process of living life, it became ever more conscious of itself until it erupted, like a butterfly from its cocoon, in the species human being. And as it erupted it started to rotate. It emerged from the dead to dive back into newborns. Thanks to this rotational motion, that is, this metempsychosis, the Spirit now truly confronts the world. The human being is the point of rupture at which the Spirit is freed to overcome the world, and then dive back into it to change it. The human being is the Alpha and Omega of the unfolding of the Spirit. Let us pray. (Devout silence)

We who have broken away from the human being and seek to dive back in are always in danger of losing contact with the experience, to dissipate, to become formal. That’s why, in our formal thinking, it is difficult for us to believe in the existence of human beings. The same is true of human beings: they are always in danger of losing contact with us, the Spirit, and to get entangled in concrete things, to become material. That’s why it is difficult for human beings, in practice, to believe in our existence. But within us surges an aspirational power that we experience as a longing for thingness, for materialization, for becoming human, and no ideology of any kind can destroy this belief. (Roaring applause) Something comparable is happening within the human being, which also longs to become Spirit, to become us. These two tendencies must, over time, merge. The cycle of the Spirit, from death to rebirth, will become increasingly conscious of itself. The realm of the Spirit and human beings will merge. An immaterial culture will develop.

That is the Utopia I wish to preach to you: the human being as the pivot point for all spirits, each spirit as a pivot point for all human beings. That is my anthropology, my humanism. All of us, ladies and gentlemen, will rotate around each human being. That’s why I counter the battle cry of the revolution “Spirits of all kinds unite!” with another one: “Spirits, scatter among human beings!” (The vice squad breaks into the hall and reduces all of those present to zero in order to correct them.)