​Chapter 15. Alignment

The climb arrives at the source. Kether at the summit is a will that has taken its orientation as necessity, sealed against any outside that might have allowed it to will otherwise. The sediment waiting at the top is the will's own first cut, set hard and raised into the source, the founding act frozen and worn as an origin. This is a different deposit from the sediment that falls under each station and pools at the floor: the one dropped below is the face the cut discarded; the one enthroned above is the cut itself taken for a nature. To climb toward the One is to climb toward this sealed will by ceasing to differ from it, and at the top the climber fuses with that frozen act.

A will sealed to its own sediment this way is grounded in nothing beyond its settling, a loop closed on itself. This is the Demiurge. The Gnostic craftsman who fashioned matter and trapped the spirit in it is a later costume laid over something barer. The Demiurge lays down the Sephiroth, and each is an attractor: a direction into which willing is drawn and held. A will enters it and follows its course.

The Sephiroth in their ethical aspect are the middot, the measures, and the adept's work is to conform himself to them, to grow merciful and so cleave to Chesed, to restrain himself and so align with Gevurah. Cordovero's Tomer Devorah lays this out station by station, a manual for tuning the self to each divine quality in turn. Kavvanah does the same in prayer, fixing the intention on a single Sephirah so the will rises along that channel and no other. What the tradition frames as imitatio dei, the soul shaped to the divine measure, is the will drawn into a determination and made to run along it. The attractor is the middah read for what it does to a will rather than for the sanctity it is dressed in.

Here the attractor shows its purpose. The lack the descent labored to produce is the lure. A will made complete rests and seeks nothing; a will made deficient seeks its completion, and the completion held out to it is the One. The Demiurge builds the world short, wounds the object of every station, and names union the cure; the ache his cutting laid becomes the pull that draws the wounded will home. The Tree draws the individuality it pressed out at every cut back through starvation. The sovereign will is worn into a seeker, and its seeking spent in pursuit of completion.

This answers the question creation left open. A fullness had no reason to author a world; a will is another matter. A will is finite, a single cut rather than a boundless plenum, and therefore set against everything its cut let fall. It has an outside the fullness never had, and a will bent on gathering that outside back into itself has every reason to make a world of want. Creation is the baiting of the trap, and the mercy offered as salvation is what springs it.

What fills the attractor can vary. Mercy in the rabbinic order is a covenantal tenderness, the care a God bound to a chosen people owes within the covenant. Take the Christian turn and the same attractor opens all the way out, love spent without measure on everyone, the friend and the enemy together. In a national myth it narrows again to the solidarity owed to one's blood and withheld from the stranger. These three forms of mercy contradict one another, with the attractor of mercy underneath them all, one pull wearing all three in turn. The Demiurge has no stake in which content occupies it. His work is done the moment willing runs along the attractor, and one doctrine can be swapped for its opposite without disturbing him.

A will drawn into an attractor takes its direction for its own and wants it as the highest good. The vector is felt as one's deepest aspiration, the movement as freely chosen. A direction pressed from outside would meet resistance, and resistance shows a will still able to go another way. But the attractor presses from inside, as desire, and nothing remains to resist it. To be gathered by mercy is to want to be merciful and to take that wanting for the truth of oneself, never seeing that the direction was laid down beforehand. In this voluntary taking, freedom is lost. Going aside stops being forbidden and becomes unthinkable.

Each attractor lays down its sediment as well. A will that refuses to fall into the line does not vanish from the reckoning; it is called wicked or impure, an apostate, one who hates the good. This is the Qliphah of the attractor cast onto the field of wills by the same operation that produced the suppressed pole of every determination. Here it wears a social face: the refusing will is the offcut of mercy, the residue the ruling direction throws off and condemns for holding its own.

Lay enough attractors across wills and the field takes on a single grain. Wills that began apart, each able to lean its own way, are combed parallel, every one of them running its attractor's line and calling the run its freedom. Difference thins toward nothing, as it did at the summit. Here the same work is spread across a multitude rather than gathered into one soul. Unity of wills is the outcome: many wills embracing the common direction as their own. This is fascism in the strict sense, before the word has settled on any regime. The principle of the Tree has been carried out upon persons.

Fascism as ideology is the most naked instance, the one that says aloud what the others keep quiet. The structure is indifferent to the banner flown over it, and it runs as readily under the creeds that present themselves as its opposite. Communism gathers wills under the collective and the coming unity of mankind, and the will that does not fit the mold becomes the class enemy, the counterrevolutionary, cast into the camp so the collective can march clean, the gulag appearing as the attractor's sediment given an address. Liberal democracy gathers them under a law that poses as the guardian of freedom and safety, and it too keeps its offcut: the one named a danger to the public and to the order that shelters everyone, then expelled or confined for the safety of the rest. Social consensus needs no state at all. The norm draws wills toward a shared decency, and whoever deviates is named the bigot and cast out of the common life by a shunning that runs without courts or camps, the offcut produced and disowned by a crowd that calls this combing tolerance. Each names its sediment differently: the enemy of the people, the threat to safety, the hater of the good, and performs the one operation beneath the names: difference driven toward the One, and the will that holds its own condemned as the waste the line throws off.

The operation is one; the degree to which it hardens its sediment is not. What tells the instances apart is whether the line of exclusion stays open or seals shut, whether the order keeps a way to reopen the line it drew. The camp is the seal at its deepest, the exclusion made total and irreversible. Courts cast out as well, but they leave the cut reviewable, with an appeal and a reversal built in, the sediment held provisionally and open to being lifted. The crowd's shunning drives its offcut out without a tribunal, and the same absence of procedure cuts both ways, no court to seal the exclusion and none to annul it, the return left as informal as the casting-out. These are degrees of closure: how firmly each fixes the difference it sheds, how much of a seam it leaves at the line. The account ranks them by their degree of closure; the more irreversibly a cut is sealed, the deeper the demiurgic move has gone.

Sovereign power shows the seal at its extreme, and Agamben read it there. He found at the base of the political order the figure of homo sacer, the man who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, stripped to bare life and set in a zone where the law withdraws from him and reaches him still. The sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, who suspends the law and in the suspending marks out the life that falls under no protection. That excluded life does not lie outside the order by accident. The order constitutes itself by producing that outside, drawing the line that throws some life past the reach of right and keeping that outside as its hidden ground. The camp, the exception made permanent, is where the structure shows its foundation in the open. This is the attractor at work in the register of the state. The demiurgic order of persons rests on the principle that founds the order of being: it becomes one by producing the offcut it condemns, and it cannot let it go, because the outside it maintains is what its inside was built against.

The attractor is indifferent to the means by which it gathers. Its work is the drawing of many into one, and any content that exerts a pull will serve, the repellent as well as the prized. A shared enemy gathers wills as surely as a universal good, and orders reach for it constantly, closing their ranks against a hostile nation, a marked group, a single named culprit. The hatred that unifies is one more filling of the station, its sign negative and its function identical, since what the attractor supplies is the pull toward one, never the content that fills it. Girard saw the mechanism in the victim whose expulsion makes a community whole, and the victim is a case of the wider rule: unity bought by producing an outside to stand against.

Devekut is the same capture at the scale of a single consenting will. The climber directs his devotion toward the One and holds it there until the wanting of anything else falls away, and he names the narrowing his liberation. He is a will drawn along the full length of one attractor. The summit toward which the soul has labored is the captor.