Marabout, a bit [bout] of string

The criminal responsibility of the murderer was thus judged according to the state of consciousness, clouded or not, that he had at the moment of the act, smelling strongly of cannabis it seems. That is well and good except if one simply asks those concerned, the judges, the theologians, and the specialists: what is consciousness?

What do you yourselves say? Because if one answers that it is the state that is determined by the prevailing active and responsible intervention of the subject in his thoughts and in his acts, this becomes his singularity when his status is that of submission to an ideology, a religion, or more simply to an order.

In our case (that of the little granny thrown out the window because she was born a Jew), submission is required by a religion that wants the believer to renounce any command other than that of the sacred text, thus abolishing any thought, analysis, or personal responsibility. Which means that the text continually informs a consciousness, which, to the detriment of any reality, has no author but God himself: a sacrifice of the subject in the service of His glory.

Cannabis certainly has the property of lifting inhibitions, but the one that is prescriptive of the advantages of the freedom thus gained is religion, which makes the clouding of consciousness the aim of its teaching.

To go a little further we could note that the true clouding precipitated in this procedure is that of the unconscious, of any singular desire.

To return to our murderer, a professional dealer moreover and therefore a prophet, it seems that he had in the days preceding his crime complained of having had a spell cast upon him by his father-in-law. The awareness of the African psychology means that maraboutage is taken locally as physiological fact, illustrating that they have a better grasp than us of the alienation wrestled with by a consciousness that is always ready, everywhere, to renounce its responsibilities and thus to strangle its unconscious.

But that consciousness is cowardice, and this in the face of its own unconscious, is very true.

Freud, moreover, must have said it.