ZOCK:

Outlaw manifesto of the century:

In March 1967, at the dawn of what became known as the summer of love, Otto Muehl published “ZOCK,” one of the most fanatical nihilist credos ever written. In this intense instance Otto might be compared to Sergei Nechaev–Dostoyevsky’s model for the fictional Verkhovensky in The Possessed–and his very real Catechism of the Revolutionist. Both manifestoes carried to an ultimate extreme lewdness and severity, of mystical satire in praxis. In both there are suggestions of older, shadowy millenarian uprisings, the writer depicting himself as a complete immoralist, bound to commit “any crime, any treachery, any baseness or deception” to create a New World order. The stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, even Jesus and Judas are taken not as rogue elements but implicitly as paradigms of brotherhood, of fierce love. Both Nechaev and Muehl oppose history to project the future of mankind into a primordial time when communication between heaven and earth, gods and mortals, was not merely possible, but easy and within the reach of all mankind. In both there is an unstated belief in redemption through sin. Every acute and radical Utopianism that is taken seriously tears open an abyss in which by inner necessity these antinomian tendencies and libertarian moral conceptions gain strength. — William Levy, The Exquisite Corpse Manifesto Issue