Epistemic Transgression: Rejection of Lack

Existential loneliness, Buddhist insight, and the anarchic delusion of the left.

Modern culture is haunted by what Byung-Chul Han describes in Topology of Violence as the violence of positivity. It is an axiomatic rejection of all that is considered negative: structure, lack, restraint, impediment, pain. In short, it is a form of myopic hedonism. As long as there is uncertainty, ambiguity, or the suggestion of painful rupture or dissatisfaction, the sadistic denial of constraint that I depict in Epistemic Telos is undermined. Therefore, at its root, it is an attempted epistemic transgression against the negative, the impossible, that which can be displaced but never transcended: they reject structure, but paradoxically believe the unbearable chaos of rupture must never be faced. Benjamin Noys writes in The Persistence of the Negative:

The result is that any rehabilitation of negativity faces an inhospitable environment, in which it is at best condescended to as the sign of the last remnants of a paleo-Hegelianism, or at worst regarded as the endorsement of nihilistic destruction. Reifying negativity into the negative, which is treated as synonymous with what is outdated or purely destructive, these ideological mystifications serve their purpose in blocking any thinking of negativity as a practice.

Indeed, any critical threats to positivity are caricatured as “nihilistic” or “depressive”, even though as Noys assures, an acceptance of the negative does not entail an “embrace of dispersion, fragmentation or weakness” which would leave us “detached from the world, or resigned to it, with no possibility of critical purchase on the world”. As I am careful to assert in Epistemic Entropy, a recognition of cosmic futility is not equivalent to a passive apathy. Nor is a rejection of doctrinaire positivity equivalent to an embrace of what Han calls the violence of negativity: a valorisation of pain, lack, structure, repression of desire. In Epistemic Telos, I explain that our psychic stability depends on an optimism of some sort; this becomes problematic only when it turns into sadistic denial of suffering.

History

The Industrial Revolution that came with the Enlightenment drastically reorganised society. With the huge energetic surplus generated by new sources of power, there was a more varied distribution of resources, and concomitant greater potential for social mobility. Class structures became more layered and stratified. As Mark S Granovetter finds in The Strength of Weak Ties, in such an environment, tight social bonds became an economic constraint that reduced access to potentially useful novel information and interactions that could allow for class progression; thus, there was no longer a need for close, intratribal cooperation. This atomisation was also useful for capital: it allowed a more efficient modularisation of the economy, where workers could be moved or discarded as necessary. Moreover, the resulting continuous degradation of community—documented by Robert D Putnam in Bowling Alone—preserved a degree of precarity among the proletariat that could be exploited for leverage. This would later make way for the divisive political self-segregation that dominates today, as analysed by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort.

The Enlightenment ideals of liberalism narcissistically placed the individual at the centre of the universe, with the transgressive ideals of liberty and self-actualisation attaining valorisation. This was perhaps a necessary replacement for the promise of religion, since afterlife in which wholeness was supposed to be maintained could no longer relied upon, and led to the early glimmers of what Han calls the achievement-subject as a replacement for the preceding violence of negativity. He writes in Topology of Violence:

The late modern achievement-subject is subjugated by no one. It is no longer a subject in whom subjugation…is still inherent. It positivizes itself, freeing itself into a project. But the transformation from subject to project does not cause violence to disappear. Self-compulsion takes the place of outside compulsion, pretending to be freedom. This development is closely correlated with capitalist relations of production. Once a certain level of production has been reached, self-exploitation is much more efficient and productive than external exploitation because it is accompanied by a sense of freedom. The society of achievement is a society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it is completely burned out.

Self-exploitation makes power structures much harder to revolt against—or even want to revolt against—because dissent is ostensibly not punished, and there is no clear oppressor. As Christopher Lasch notes in The Culture of Narcissism, consumption becomes the passive alternative to rebellion: “It not only promises to palliate all the old unhappiness to which flesh is heir; it creates or exacerbates new forms of unhappiness—personal insecurity, status anxiety, anxiety in parents about their ability to satisfy the needs of the young.” And thus, a greater degree of autonomy and enthusiasm within capitalist structures allows for more effective, complex economic activity. Han elaborates in The Agony of Eros:

Achievement society is wholly dominated by the modal verb can—in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohibitions and deploys should. After a certain point of productivity, should reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by can. The call for motivation, initiative, and projects exploits more effectively than whips and commands.

With the focus on individualistic hedonism and the breakup of communal structures, the nuclear family became the core organising unit of society. It was supposed to provide stability in the form of an emotional reprieve from the unrelenting world of labour. In Marriage, a History, Stephanie Coontz remarks:

During the eighteenth century the spread of the market economy and the advent of the Enlightenment wrought profound changes in record time. By the end of the 1700s personal choice of partners had replaced arranged marriage as a social ideal, and individuals were encouraged to marry for love. For the first time in five thousand years, marriage came to be seen as a private relationship between two individuals rather than one link in a larger system of political and economic alliances. The measure of a successful marriage was no longer how big a financial settlement was involved, how many useful in-laws were acquired, or how many children were produced, but how well a family met the emotional needs of its individual members. Where once marriage had been seen as the fundamental unit of work and politics, it was now viewed as a place of refuge from work, politics, and community obligations.

Lasch elaborates in The Culture of Narcissism:

Families of this type arise in America not just in response to a particular member’s pathology but as a normal response to prevailing social conditions. As the world of business, jobs, and politics becomes more and more menacing, the family tries to create for itself an island of security in the surrounding disorder. It deals with internal tensions by denying their existence, desperately clinging to an illusion of normality. Yet the picture of harmonious domestic life, on which the family attempts to model itself, derives not from spontaneous feeling but from external sources, and the effort to conform to it therefore implicates the family in a charade of togetherness or “pseudo-mutuality,” as one student of schizophrenia calls it.

The twentieth century saw the acceleration of this shakeup in the Western social fabric. World War I wrought tens of millions of casualties. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires disappeared. It was the war to end all wars. The Roaring Twenties followed, during which Edward Bernays pioneered the public relations industry’s use of psychoanalysis to stoke consumer desire, as explored by Adam Curtis in The Century of the Self. The economic boom of the Twenties was unceremoniously interrupted by the Great Depression, which was quickly followed by World War II.

It cannot be overstated how much World War II destabilised the Symbolic Order. Over 70 million people died. The British Empire, which was already teetering, finally collapsed. Two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. The Holocaust struck a mortal blow to the liberal mythos of Progress. Theodor Adorno remarked: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” And further: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” Vast swathes of populations were left in an abject state of post-traumatic stress, manifesting variously as psychosis, intergenerational trauma, Cold War suspicion, and the exacerbation of what Richard Hofstadter termed the paranoid style in politics. The ghosts of the chaos that followed—the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War—still haunt the Asian psyche in the form of cultural fragmentation, generational conflict, and internecine geopolitical hostility. Moreover, while the Kim regime’s uniquely oppressive blend of totalitarianism should not be sanewashed, North Korea and the North-South divide still remain catastrophically misunderstood to this day, as underscored by A B Abrams in Immovable Object.

The Bretton Woods system, which stabilised and subjugated a ravaged and psychically torn post-war Europe, also worked to cement American hegemony. Gender roles were put into question as women worked factory jobs during the war, and then stayed as the economy expanded and required more workers. Consumerist culture picked up further to accelerate economic growth, and as Curtis demonstrates in Century of the Self, to redirect flows of desire away from militant ideologies that threatened power, such as fascism and socialism. This exemplified Žižek’s criticism in The Sublime Object of Ideology of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose: that it is not necessarily transgression that threatens the Law, but rather the implicit permission of moderate transgression—laughter, drug use, dissent—that relieves the tension of incoherence. However, the transition to explicit permission of transgression in service of capitalism doomed the Law to self-erosion.

Society became even more atomised, and in a desperate quest for stability, completed its transformation into what Lasch describes as a culture of narcissism—Han’s society of achievement, centred entirely around myopic hedonic individualism, or what Leo Strauss called “permissive egalitarianism”, turning the nuanced Other into a homogeneous Same. In the land of indistinguishability, the narcissism of small differences, as coined by Freud, was politically weaponised, as Noam Chomsky notes: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”. In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch writes:

The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands—on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the “need” is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media. Advertising, said Calvin Coolidge, “is the method by which the desire is created for better things.” The attempt to “civilize” the masses has now given rise to a society dominated by appearances—the society of the spectacle. In the period of primitive accumulation, capitalism subordinated being to having, the use value of commodities to their exchange value. Now it subordinates possession itself to appearance and measures exchange value as a commodity’s capacity to confer prestige—the illusion of prosperity and well-being. “When economic necessity yields to the necessity for limitless economic development,” writes Guy Debord, “the satisfaction of basic and generally recognized human needs gives way to an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs.”

Debord’s society of the spectacle metastasised as America aggressively exported mass media and consumerism. Growing discontent and institutional distrust exploded into the counterculture movement of the 60s, fuelled by LSD, civil rights, and revolutionary anti-war sentiment in response to the televisation of the Vietnam War. This constituted the progression from the tenuous Equanimity of the 50s in the Buddhist insight cycle—so rigorously documented by Daniel Ingram in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha—to an Arising and Passing Away, the beginning stage of narrative rupture which temporarily alleviates tension and generates a fluid, optimistic euphoria. This initial stage never lasts long: JFK and Malcolm X were assassinated. The Tet Offensive of 1968 further stoked anti-war tensions. MLK and RFK were assassinated, destroying any lingering hopes of peaceful reform, and the movement came to an apotheosis with the May 68 protests in France, where for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the government could be overthrown. With the major symbolic figures of the 60s gone, the New Left splintered—drifting away from materialist class struggle—and hippies turned inwards into New Age narcissism or ended up being absorbed into consumer capitalism.

As Chris Hedges lays out in Death of the Liberal Class, the liberal class, which once validated the symbolic authority of government by at least notionally advocating for workers and the poor, succumbed entirely to performative social justice. Instead of metabolising the post-war narrative rupture, they opted to clutch harder at Pollyannaish abstraction, allowing capital to run unchecked with impunity and leaving vast swathes of the population to be immiserated. In No Logo, Naomi Klein notes the retreat of the liberal class into a focus on “representation” and “diversity” in media:

Over time, campus identity politics became so consumed by personal politics that they all but eclipsed the rest of the world. The slogan “the personal is political” came to replace the economic as political and, in the end, the Political as political as well.

She writes further:

The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women’s and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action.

The conservative backlash to this performative transgression was taken as an affirmation that the narcissistic was revolutionary. The counterculture, which was perhaps the best chance we had at counteracting the onslaught of capitalism, fundamentally exacerbated the insidious cult of the self through a further valorisation of short-sighted hedonism and “authenticity”—which was corrupted from a wholesome honest expression into Han’s achievement-subject and the conspicuous disclosure he describes in The Transparency Society—and ultimately did little but further delegitimise stabilising institutions without generating any sufficient replacements. In The World As It Is, Hedges writes:

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed “character.” The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination, and likeability. “The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer,” Susman wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”

And of the cult of self:

This cult stresses and cultivates traits that are much the same as the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and selfimportance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.

He continues:

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant.

Nixon was elected in 1968 as a “law and order” figure partially in response to the perceived chaos of the 60s. Inevitably, the Bretton Woods system collapsed, and he debacked the dollar in 1971. The 1973 oil crisis followed. Here, we saw the US enter firmly into the Dissolution stage of the insight cycle, where one begins to flounder in the loss of the stability of the previous structuring narrative. In another blow to the narrative of exceptionalism, the US was forced to pull out of the Vietnam War. In response to untenable levels of inflation, the legendary Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker aggressively raised interest rates, with the federal funds rate fated to reach a peak of 20% in 1981. In a very real sense, a certain type of degrowth economy began here, and the per capita energy consumption in the US has continuously declined since. Carter, who earnestly appealed to the American electorate to recognise the limits to growth, ran for re-election. Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism remarks:

For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.

But alas, the Real did not irrupt. Carter was voted out in a landslide. Here, Debord’s society of the spectacle completely made way for Baudrillard’s hyperreality, where simulacrum finally replaced the real outright. Reagan responded to Carter’s timid forays into deregulation and pleas for constraint by following in Thatcher’s footsteps over in Britain with his own brand of trickle-down economics, which was constituted by an aggressive surge of deregulation, tax cuts, globalisation and union busting as the only remaining way to maintain the illusion of growth. This marked the acceleration of what Curtis has termed hypernormalisation—the mutual upholding of the illusion of normalcy that papers over a covert awareness of failure. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard noted the end of grand narratives, defining postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives”. French poststructuralists—Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard—were left to grapple with the resulting void of meaning. The violence of positivity and hyperreal performativity prevailed.

After decades of stagnation, the September 11 attacks conclusively marked the transition from Dissolution to Fear, which was followed by Misery in response to the 2008 financial crisis, and perhaps Disgust during the 2020 COVID pandemic. The 2016 election of Trump signalled a clear progression into the Desire for Deliverance, where, as in Nazi Germany, extreme, chaotic measures in the absence of stabilisation may be taken to desperately reconstitute a workable narrative. The political chaos that has followed indicates entry into the Re-observation, characterised by a constant bipolar cycle through various inchoate structures. Psychic stability and symbolic coherence must be restored for re-entry into Equanimity. During the Great Depression, despite declining religiosity, America still had a functioning liberal class, and a significantly better thermodynamic position to stabilise, preventing a violent retreat into fascism. We are not in such a privileged position today.

Hyperego

And thus, we return to now: the repressive superego of old has completed its devolution, first into what Herbert Marcuse called repressive desublimation, and finally into the modern transgressive hyperego: the tacit requirement of enjoyment, of transcending beyond constraint—but only in such a manner that is socially acceptable, that does not threaten positivity. Performative narcissism is mandatory. Hyperreality, a narcissistic inflation of the Imaginary, is used to paper over the presence of negativity. We live in an atonal, atomised culture constituted by an unholy blend of postmodern individualist pseudo-nihilism, hypernormalised belief in Progress, and the ghost of Leibniz’s Pollyannaish “best of all possible worlds” so comically derided in Voltaire’s Candide. In The Rule of Idiots, Hedges writes:

The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.

Gone are the “outdated”, rigid structures of religion, the morality of restraint, and duty to the Other. In their place, a far more dynamic, mercurial set of norms have finally prevailed, covertly mandating the affirmation of positivity—presuming, of course, an adherence to prevailing power structures. The covert oppression of the self-exploitation mandated by the transgressive hyperego is exemplified by Žižek in How to Read Lacan:

Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: ‘I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your grandma’s and behave yourself there!’ In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a ‘postmodern’ non-authoritarian father: ‘You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her—go there only if you really want to!’ Every child who is not stupid (which is to say most children) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit Grandma, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, instructing him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Emotions that we have no control over become a source of shame, a determinant of our character. Desire, jealousy, loneliness, sadness, aggression—these are all natural, unconscious responses. Lust triggered by an attractive passerby, apprehension about an encounter with a stranger, envy at another’s financial success, arousal as an automatic response to the raw stimulus of sadistic depiction, or even violent impulse in reaction to rejection—in truth, what matters is not how we feel, but how we respond to how we feel. But the hyperego cannot handle the powerlessness of not being in total control of all emotion, and thus any incapacity to maintain a “trigger-free” zone of totally safe, positive affect in accordance with dominant norms is seen as a breach of the social code. This is the insidious safetyism described by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind, as if someone killing themself after the use of a chatbot is the fault of the chatbot, and not the result of preexisting psychic instability. But in the realm of corporate safetyism, there need never be any discomfort or ambiguity, and no comfort need contradict the zeitgeist. Even playfights and tree climbing are no longer permitted in schools—to protect the children, of course. Follow the rules, and be happy doing it.

Thus, under the paradoxically permissive constraints of the hyperego, you must do what you love, but you must also work; therefore, you must love your work or you are a failure. You must follow your passion, but you must also monetise your passion, and if this kills your joy, you are a failure. To prevent failure, you should also want to take care of yourself, perhaps through meditation, diet and exercise. Every moment must be “productive”, and “utility” should be maximised. “Potential” and “talent” are fetishised, great expectations the norm. And if you’re feeling down, you should try purchasing conveniently packaged experiences: perhaps a dating app subscription, travel, or even relocation to a new country! It is the endless search for a transformational object, as termed by Christopher Bollas in The Shadow of the Object—a “soulmate”, a dream job, a baby—but of course, only a genuine shift in psychic structure can bring relief. As Han notes in The Palliative Society, our culture is characterised by algophobia, a pathological aversion to pain. He writes:

The palliative society and the performance society coincide. Pain is interpreted as a sign of weakness. It is something to be hidden or removed through self-optimization. It is not compatible with performance. The passivity of suffering has no place in an active society dominated by ability. Today, pain cannot be expressed. It is condemned to be mute. The palliative society does not permit pain to be enlivened into a passion, to be given a language.

And thus originates the obsession with filling and “optimising” time—every moment in silence is a moment where repressed anguish threatens to surface, barely held at bay by a tenuous ego. Han writes further:

The palliative society depoliticizes pain by medicalizing and privatizing it. The social dimension of pain is thus suppressed and repressed. Chronic pain, a pathological phenomenon of the burnout society, does not give rise to protest. In the neoliberal society, tiredness is apolitical. It is a tiredness-of-the-I, a symptom of the overstretching of the narcissistic subject of performance. Tiredness isolates us instead of binding us together into a We. I-tiredness must be distinguished from We-tiredness, which is the product of a community. I-tiredness is the best defence against revolution.

And finally, he speaks of what Mark Fisher also terms the privatisation of stress:

Analgesics, prescribed by the dozen, mask the social conditions that create the pain in the first place. The strictly medical and pharmacological treatment of pain prevents pain from becoming eloquent, even critical. It deprives pain of its character as an object, as something social. The palliative society immunizes itself against criticism through medically induced numbness or numbness produced through media consumption. Social media and computer games have an anaesthetic effect. Permanent social anaesthesia prevents insight and reflection; it even represses the truth.

In a world obsessed with narcissistic meaning-making, where every chaotic blip must be narrativised into self-actualising destiny, pain cannot be processed nor tolerated as it is. It is too jarring, too senseless. It can no longer be for anything but ourselves, because we no longer believe in sacrifice; nor can it be handled with equanimity as the nonsensical, inevitable thing it is, for the hyperego rejects all discomfort. Thus, pain is never allowed to just be. If it cannot be spun as necessary for some “greater good”, it can trigger only repression—positivity through negation of the negative—or abjection. The incessant shaming of anyone who dares to feel any negativity that is neither controllable nor culturally sanctioned inevitably leads to the defensive inflation of the schizoid false self illustrated by R D Laing in The Divided Self. Extremism also abounds: incels, mass murderers, and the far right are all the result of a frantic retreat into enclaves where their particular brand of trauma is acceptable, given some perverted transcendent meaning, permission to transgress. While their actions should be condemned, any one of us could have turned into them without the psychic stabilisers necessary to hold our pain. What they needed was not shame, but to be shown they were not unlovable monsters simply for feeling a certain way, the neighbourhood old guy quipping who hasn’t wanted to nuke the whole world from time to time, it just means you’re living. In The Will to Kill, James Alan Fox et al. write of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters:

In their relationship, the two boys got from one another what was otherwise missing from their lives: They felt special, they gained a sense of belonging, and they were united against the world. As Harris remarked while he and his friend made last-minute preparations to commit mass murder: “This is just a two-man war against everything else.”

The short-sighted hedonism we have embraced is in truth not even really hedonism; we can only nurture our wellbeing through the tolerance of hormetic stress, as demonstrated by Haidt and Lukianoff, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile. Taleb defines antifragility as the capacity of a system to flourish through the change in structure permitted by moderate entropic rupture. Indeed, in Epistemic Entropy, I note that any significant transition from one negentropic state to another requires an intermediary higher-entropy state, like temporary muscle pain after a workout. In other words, all significant transgression involves chaotic rupture. As Han mentions, pain can have a purifying effect, helping to mitigate deeper suffering: as the Buddhists show, as do those with pain asymbolia, pain does not necessarily entail significant suffering. I must clarify that I am not endorsing senseless agony: being raped or dismembered does not “purify” in any meaningful way. To suggest that all pain must be generative constitutes the dogma of redemption criticised by Dan P McAdams in The Redemptive Self. The redemptive self is driven by an epistemic telos of the avoidance of the pain of senseless loss, and the need to maintain an optimism bias at any cost. In short, it is an impossible epistemic transgression against negativity. McAdams writes of the origin of this myth in religion:

In The Varieties of Religious Experience…William James suggested that redemption is a core idea in all of the world’s major religions. He wrote that different religious traditions promise a “certain uniform deliverance” from an initial “sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand” to a subsequent “solution” whereby “we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.” Put simply, religions tell us that things are bad at the beginning…but that things will get better and we will be delivered to a better place.

McAdams correctly observes that the narrative stability and optimism this generates contributes to psychological—and therefore physical—health. However, he argues that this has become uniquely corrupted and universalised in American culture, linking it to a narcissistic individualism in which people obsess over their own specialness, redeemability, and moral righteousness, desperately fitting everything into a redemptive narrative. It is an evolution into Han’s achievement-subject. Robert N Bellah et al elaborate in Habits of the Heart:

Clearly, the meaning of one’s life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself…It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas. Our culture does not give us much guidance as to how to fill the contours of this autonomous, self-responsible self, but it does point to two important areas. One of these is work, the realm, par excellence, of utilitarian individualism. Traditionally men, and today women as well, are supposed to show that in the occupational world they can stand on their own two feet and be self-supporting. The other area is the lifestyle enclave, the realm, par excellence, of expressive individualism. We are supposed to be able to find a group of sympathetic people, or at least one such person, with whom we can spend our leisure time in an atmosphere of acceptance, happiness, and love.

Moving out early is glorified. “Independence” is fetishised. Shutting out those who are not of immediate interest becomes the norm. But as Bellah et al note, “individuality and society are not opposites but require each other”. The redemptive self risks justifying all sorts of alienation, aggression and harm in the name of “redemption”. What may begin as generativity—the desire to nurture the future, the next generation—progresses into myopic destruction. If anything can be justified, then it is this certitude that leads to violence. Indeed, the transgressive hyperego does not permit suffering to exist as it is, pointless, senseless, irredeemable. But we should be sad about the world; it is an insult to suggest that rape, murder, torture are redeemable; we should be heartbroken at our inevitable loss. And if we are honest, we already are, and repressing this sadness with empty affirmation doesn’t make it go away; it just forces it to boil under the surface until the effort of repression far exceeds the original pain, which as a result is never processed or downregulated through desensitisation. Indeed, sadness can in fact coexist with joy—but a dogged adherence to the hyperego can only lead to the burnout depicted by Han in The Burnout Society.

Self-harm and extreme sports are both ironic, last-ditch attempts to escape from the subconscious weight of repression—and the mountain of unintegrated emotional trauma underneath—through a reassertion of narrative control through purposeful intensity. In addition, the intense stimulus temporarily mitigates awareness of unpleasant emotion through the forced redirection of attention. Due to the impossibility of contentment under the violence of positivity, controlled, positivised negativity is used to negate unbearable negativity. This mechanism is also, as Hedges details in Empire of Illusion, behind the obsession with professional wrestling, violence, and sadomasochism, all ways of controlling negativity to access simulacra of intimacy and aliveness so that it never has to be faced in its unbearable, raw vulnerability. In BDSM, the true self need never be exposed to simulate trust through directed pain. In Limits to Medicine, Ivan Illich remarks:

Increasingly stronger stimuli are needed to provide people in an anesthetic society with any sense of being alive. Drugs, violence, and horror turn into increasingly powerful stimuli that can still elicit an experience of self.

Those who opt out of the transgressive cycle of materialist hedonism and self-congratulation—like Grigori Perelman, who on ethical grounds rejected the $1 million Millennium Prize for proving the Poincaré conjecture—are pathologised as “mentally ill”, or at best, “eccentric”. Ascetics, celibates and activists are mocked. Solitary enjoyments—masturbation, Netflix, even being childfree—are seen as pleasure without production, a deviant rejection of social relation, a failure to compete. As Bella DePaulo illustrates in Singled Out, solitude cannot be appreciated, because it threatens the illusion that there is wholeness to be found in endless distraction. It casts doubt on the promise of the transformational object that barely holds us together—if someone else has abandoned the dream, then why are we still pursuing it? Do they know something we don’t? Is it even possible? This confrontation forces us to face the emptiness when stripped of the fantasy of vain pursuit, a pain which is initially intolerable.

Deleuze

This section may be ignored if you have no interest in dense linguistic critiques.

Philosophically, the violence of positivity is replicated by what Noys critiques in The Persistence of the Negative as the dogma of affirmationism: the belief that there can ever be an undeniable whole, the completion of a system, a totally positive creation that does not negate anything else or stem from a lack. It is an obsession with productivity, actualisation, desire, pursuit. On a mathematical level, it is a foreclosure—a total psychic rejection—of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Affirmationists believe in final solutions, utopias, sublime syntheses—revolutionary communist liberation, a world without labour, an immortal AI superintelligence. This is taken to the extreme by what he describes as accelerationism: the idea that we can transcend our sorry condition through the drastic intensification of capitalist growth without the negativity of rupture, the “liberation” of the “productive” forces of desire. As he explains, much affirmationist thought draws inspiration from Nietzsche’s later thought on the übermensch (overman) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or the Dionysian “ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life” in The Will to Power—in contrast with his earlier appeal to a more measured balance between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian affirmation in The Birth of Tragedy. Noys writes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

For Deleuze and Guattari the problem of capitalism is not that it deterritorialises, but that it does not deterritorialise enough. It always runs up against its own immanent limit of deterritorialisation—the reterritorialisation of the decoded flows of desire through the ‘machine’ of the oedipal grid.

And further:

It is the figure of the schizophrenic…which instantiates this radical immersion and the coming of a new porous and collective ‘subject’ of desire. The schizophrenic is the one who ‘seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment’.

This is obviously psychotic. Deleuze’s overreliance on obfuscation through language games makes a limpid critique difficult to present, but perhaps the clearest instance of his confusion is illustrated by this passage in Difference and Repetition:

It is said that difference is negativity, that it extends or must extend to the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit. This is true only to the extent that difference is already placed on a path or along a thread laid out by identity. It is true only to the extent that it is identity that pushes it to that point. Difference is the ground, but only the ground for the demonstration of the identical.

In other words, and this is enough to make one’s head spin, according to Deleuze, the “virtual” world should be conceptualised as a field of pre-symbolic “difference” without reference to any other element. He proposes a so-called “difference-in-itself” that is purely “positive”, since it refers directly to the process of continuous change itself. But this is manifestly ridiculous, since a “change” that differs from nothing is completely incoherent. The nonsensical logical convolution required to make this argument should immediately raise suspicions of the affective telic segmentation that I describe in Epistemic Telos.

For Deleuze, the schizophrenic takes refuge in the world of the virtual, where there is never any lack, since the quality of lack requires an opposition or comparison to some other object devoid of said lack. In the realm of the virtual, there need never be any lack, since all is positive. It is the territorialisation into the “actual”—the categorisation of a fixed identity, a subject—that manifests this lack that apparently does not preexist. A concrete subject, argue Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, is what forces the buildup of repressed desire, segmenting and isolating flows of desire:

Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine.

But in fact, there is no reason repression cannot exist in a deterritorialised state. Moreover, no amount of wordplay can make desire magically “the same thing” as its object; there is clearly an object of desire that one does not possess in response to some precondition, or somehow the desire for food is not a negative response to hunger, and starvation need never be an issue. Regardless, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes that continuous, affirmative revolution is the method by which we avoid becoming stuck in the actual, the reterritorialised, reversing Hegel’s dialectic rupture:

[Revolution] never proceeds by way of the negative but by way of difference and its power of affirmation, and the war of the righteous for the conquest of the highest power, that of deciding problems by restoring them to their truth, by evaluating that truth beyond the representations of consciousness and the forms of the negative, and by acceding at last to the imperatives on which they depend.

But as Noys counters:

In an act of legerdemain…the usual qualities of negativity are passed over into affirmation. Now it is revolution which is identified with the virtual in all its power (and once again we have a relay here to Nietzsche, as well as to Bergson), and made the means to make a true qualitative leap—reversing Lenin’s materialist reading of Hegel as the philosopher of qualitative ‘Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’

The affirmationism of Deleuzian theory is akin to the metaphysical debate over “free will”, one of the motivated linguistic gestalts I describe in Epistemic Telos: the coherence of the referent is of secondary importance to the affective connotation, the assumed conclusion of relative freedom from constraint. But calling for a “continuous” flow of deterritorialisation doesn’t somehow erase the painful higher-entropy states in between, as if the pre-symbolised world is constructed entirely of minute, inconsequential differences. There is no infinitesimal qualitative continuity between a carbon atom and an oxygen atom.

Lack

Desire is not inherently “productive”. Desire is typically for a negentropic state that manifests only through the export of entropy. Unchecked desire is mathematically destructive—we need to look no further than our environment to observe this. And as Lacan understands, there is no subjectivity without lack: the subject is defined in relation to the constitutive lack it cannot paper over, the surplus of the traumatic Real that no symbolic manipulation can integrate. Or as Žižek densely elaborates in the The Sublime Object of Ideology:

The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire (ne pas céder sur son désir)—is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge a fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution.

What Lacan calls jouissance is the unbearable process of seeking but never quite attaining the object-cause of desire, the objet petit a, the fantasmatic kernel that orients our subjecthood. The “fulfilment” of desire only ever displaces it as an excess, surplus jouissance—or when too completely satisfied, as Žižek elaborates in How to Read Lacan, leaves one without any hope of completion:

It is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the phantasmatic kernel of my being: when I venture too close, what occurs is what Lacan calls the aphanisis (the self-obliteration) of the subject: the subject loses his/her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates.

In other words, the prohibitive Law prevents that which is already impossible. Jouissance is a doomed transgression against negativity, an enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle that dictates that we should seek satisfaction, for we are willing to suffer immensely to make ourselves whole. Our pathetic condition cannot be escaped—desire can only be recognised for what it is, and reoriented in what Lacan calls a sinthome, a stable maintenance of our psychic structure. The Law once protected us from this unbearable truth, but it no longer prohibits, instead encouraging transgression. A failure to thus recognise the nature of desire leads to the desperation of what Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism as depressive hedonia:

Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

He elaborates in The Privatisation of Stress:

Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by (Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist. The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car. At the risk of a laboured pun, this is a perfect example of death drive, which is defined not by the desire to die, but by being in the grip of a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death.

David Whyte writes in Consolations:

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are, in effect, always close, always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach; the step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

As Whyte understands, the condition of persistence in a perennially changing universe is a perpetual, doomed fight against entropy, transgression against transgression:

[Besieged] is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating, by creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves; and strangely, most strongly besieged by a success they have achieved through long years of endeavour.

And further:

Besieged as we are, little wonder that men and women alternate between the dream of a place apart, untouched by the world, and then wanting to be wanted again in that aloneness. Besieged or left alone, we seem to live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging, and even better, as a conversation between the two where no choice is available.

A totally defined, complete world is static, timeless, unchanging; there is nothing to do, nothing to pursue, nothing new that can manifest. In The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli conveys that it is incompletion, our ignorance that generates the meaningful passage of time:

Both the sources of blurring—quantum indeterminacy, and the fact that physical systems are composed of zillions of molecules—are at the heart of time. Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.

Indeed, as I explicate in Panpsychosis, it is at what Norman Packard calls the edge of chaos—that precarious liminality between structure and disorder—that all meaning and possibility arise. But for the accelerationist left, it is solely the constraint of desire by the oppressive norms of society that forces “excess” energy to bottle up, until it is redirected in an outpour of war and destruction. The only way to prevent this, argues Georges Bataille incorrectly, is through lavish waste, a concept he coins “the accursed share”. Of course, they neglect, as I explain in Telic Convergence, that fascism is usually the end result of economic decline and a breakdown in the Symbolic Order without sufficient stabilisation, as in the case of Nazi Germany—and that a lasting lack of structure can only lead to psychotic destruction. As Simon Pearce illustrates in Decentralization and Its Discontents, it is mathematically incoherent to propose the maintenance of a preferred negentropic state through the radical dissolution of order, which results in a massive increase in entropy. As oppressive as hierarchy may be, it must inevitably emerge due to the thermodynamic necessity of informational centralisation—a single node in a network can only connect to so many others without exhausting energetic constraints. A dogmatic rejection of structure entails the relinquishment of the capacity to shape whatever hierarchy reemerges.

The capitulation of the left to magical thinking is the philosophical manifestation of a child’s tantrum, a retreat into Peter Pan’s Neverland, where any suggestion that satisfaction and completion are structurally impossible is not taken as a realistic description, but a “reactionary” moral proscription—or even a “valorisation” of our constitutive lack. We are all sad about our incompleteness. This is not new. In many ancient cultures, we find the mythological motif of a cosmic egg from which the world emerged upon shattering. A Chinese variant of this myth holds that the creator Pangu, experiencing discomfort in being contained in a dark and stuffy egg, shattered it into pieces; the light part rose to become heaven, and the heavy part sank to become the earth. Unity gave way to separateness. Our existential loneliness, exacerbated though it may be, is not a product of modern civilisation; it is a tale as old as time. In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch elaborates:

The coexistence of advanced technology and primitive spirituality suggests that both are rooted in social conditions that make it increasingly difficult for people to accept the reality of sorrow, loss, aging, and death—to live with limits, in short. The anxieties peculiar to the modern world seem to have intensified old mechanisms of denial.

New Age spirituality, no less than technological utopianism, is rooted in primary narcissism. If the technological fantasy seeks to restore the infantile illusion of self-sufficiency, the New Age movement seeks to restore the illusion of symbiosis, a feeling of absolute oneness with the world. Instead of dreaming of the imposition of human will on the intractable world of matter, the New Age movement, which revives themes found in ancient Gnosticism, simply denies the reality of the material world. By treating matter essentially as an illusion, it removes every obstacle to the re-creation of a primary sense of wholeness and equilibrium—the return to Nirvana.

The Buddhist notion of pratītyasamutpāda—interdependent arising and passing—is often misinterpreted as the idea that separateness is an “illusion”. It is true that emphasising our connectedness can make us feel a little less lonely, and our perceived boundaries are partially arbitrary and can be significantly attenuated, alleviating attentional strain. However, we are clearly separate, our subjectivity and individual timelines completely inaccessible to the Other. Naive interpretations of Buddhism such as “there is no self” fundamentally misunderstand what Nagarjuna illustrates so eloquently in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way)—that phenomena (dhammas) are empty of a concrete, intrinsic essence (sabhāva). If there is really no self, there are also no potatoes or tomatoes. This is obviously absurd. Our perception is highly malleable, and much suffering does come from unnecessarily aversive attitudes, but there are limits even to mutability—even emptiness is empty. It might thus be said that the benefit of the realisation of emptiness (anattā/śūnyatā) is that one stops frantically seeking a concrete narrative structure as a shield from the perennial chaos of the void; indeed, if there is anything that could be designated a “true self”, it is the total and utter heartbreak of the void. The unbearable lack at the core of our being is tragic, heartrending, devastating. No one is special; no one is exempt. But that does not justify its denial. Denial is catastrophic. Denial is sadistic. Denial leads to the doomed fantasy of utopianism. As Hedges writes in When Atheism Becomes Religion:

The drive to fashion a new heaven and a new Earth through technology and science leads to wide scale human suffering and self-annihilation. This utopian vision, fed by the cult of science, served as the excuse for the Nazi and Communist sterilization programs. It was behind the genocide of Pol Pot. It was behind Hitler’s “rectification of frontiers.” And it is behind the mad pursuit of fossil fuels and the reckless emission of greenhouse gases.

Or Camus in The Rebel:

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. No man considers that his condition is free if it is not at the same time just, nor just unless it is free.

Ironically, it is not structure, but the chaotic breakdown of structure without suitable replacement in effect glorified by the left that fuels the ascendancy of fascism, as Hedges describes in Death of the Liberal Class. The despiritualised decadence of the hyperego legitimises genuinely reactionary politics—a backlash against a phantom left that transgressively refuses to engage with suffering as it is, to believe in order or sacrifice. Accelerationist destruction of structure along the lines of Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy by Lyotard and Fanged Noumena by Nick Land—whether affirmationist, negationist or otherwise—constitutes the “secular” form of magical thinking and sadistic denial of death that I describe in Epistemic Telos. Even Laing, after his early brilliance in The Divided Self, went on to embrace the psychotic lack of structure espoused by the overeager anti-psychiatry movement, along with Deleuze, Guattari and others. We need a unifying narrative, not an infinite relativism. We need a universal structure, one that rejects sadistic ideals of positivity. Even when we know it will fail. Even if only to make the decline kinder. In Relativism, Strauss writes:

[History] teaches a truth that is deadly. It shows us that culture is possible only if men are fully dedicated to principles of thought and action which they do not and cannot question, which limit their horizon and thus enable them to have a character and a style. It shows us at the same time that any principles of this kind can be questioned and even rejected. The only way out seems to be that one turn one’s back on this lesson of history, that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth.

And this myth can only be constituted through rupture. As Alenka Zupančič understands in Ethics of the Real, it is purposeful rupture—fidelity to the Real—that constitutes ethical action. Uncontrolled transgression, on the other hand, risks demolishing Chesterton’s Fence:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Indeed, Zupančič distinguishes ethical terror, which is desirable, from catastrophe:

From this perspective, we might define with greater precision the limit at which ethics is transformed into either terror, or the obscure desire for catastrophe. The latter occurs if we ‘forget’ that the Real and the Event are not in themselves ethical categories, and if we take them as a kind of substitute, as a kind of modern equivalent of the notion of supreme Good that must be realized at any price. That is to say, we fall back into terror if we understand the term ethics to refer to elaboration of a strategy destined to force the encounter with the Real, the Event, to happen; if we see it as a method for the production of the impossible.

It is often the case that the rich and famous, after having destroyed their constitutive fantasies through “fulfilment”, compensate for the abjection through the catastrophe of nihilistic transgression. After all permissible transgression has been exhausted, the Law consumes itself. In his ludicrously provocative song Heil Hitler, Ye (Kanye West) sings:

With all of the money and fame
I still don’t get to see my children
Niggas see my Twitter
But don’t see how I be feeling
So I became a Nazi
Yeah, bitch, I’m the villain

But as libertines such as Bataille and Marquis de Sade often fail to understand, morality is not totally arbitrary. There is an inconquerable, ancient part of you that knows when you have distorted the fabric of love. It is around this traumatic kernel of the Real that the Law must always be structured; our conscience is that which is beyond transgression. Note that even Ye feels the need to justify his Nazism through a victimhood narrative—his loss of custody—to maintain legibility to the Other. We can never escape our lack.

Coda

[Crisis] is unavoidable. Every human life seems to be drawn eventually, as if by some unspoken parallel, some tidal flow or underground magnetic field, toward the raw, dynamic essentials of its existence, as if everything up to that point had been a preparation for a meeting, for a confrontation in an elemental form with our essential flaw, and with what an individual could, until then, only receive stepped down, interpreted or diluted.

This experience of absolute contact with an essential hidden dynamic, now understood to be essential to our lives, often ignored but now making itself felt, where the touchable rawness of life becomes part of the fabric of the everyday, and a robust luminous vulnerability becomes shot through with the necessary, imminent and inevitable prospect of loss, has been described for centuries as the dark night of the soul: La noche oscura del alma. But perhaps this dark night could be more accurately described as the meeting of two immense storm fronts, the squally vulnerable edge between what overwhelms human beings from the inside and what overpowers them from the outside.

The waveform that overwhelms a maturing human being from the inside is the inescapable nature of their own flaws and weaknesses, their self-deceptions and their attempts to create false names and stories to place themselves in the world; the felt need to control the narrative of the story around them with no regard to outside revelation. The immense wave on the outside is the invitation to give that self up, to be borne off by the wave and renamed, revealed and re-ordered by the powerful flow.

Walking the pilgrim edge between the two, holding them together, is the hardest place to stay, to breathe of both and make a world of both and to be active in their exchange: aware of our need to be needed, our wish to be seen, our constant need for help and succour, but inhabiting a world of luminosity and intensity, subject to the wind and the weather, surrounded by the music of existence, able to be found by the living world and with a wild, self-forgetful ability to respond to its call when needed; a rehearsal, in fact, for the act of dying, a place where inside and outside can reverse and flow with no fixed form.

— Consolations, David Whyte

As understood by Adorno, Žižek, Hedges, the Buddhists, anyone who has ever dared to gaze at the void without blinking, my kindred voidwalkers, the world progresses through a series of endless transgressions, sublation, interdependent arising and passing, cyclical ruptures that refuse any telos but madness. The traumatic Real, that unbearable alterity, that Lovecraftian unknown which forever eludes capture, hacks away at our helpless, incomplete preconceptions until it invariably irrupts magnanimously into our subjecthood, etching itself into our soul like the memory of Proust’s madeleines, like a stolen glance, like a sacred wound that never heals. It is through transgression that we live; it is through transgression that we desire; and it is through transgression which we die. To glorify transgression is to glorify chaos, death and destruction. But to reject it is also to refuse life, truth and our humanity, the resolution of tension from which laughter results. The narrative order we pathetically hold together is always in the fashion of a dog chasing its own tail, a man disemboweled in war, pushing his intestines back into the place where they should be, frantic at their refusal to set. Eventually, bloated or in disrepute, it erupts into an inchoate supernova of uncertainty, the Dark Night of the Soul which has plagued aspiring voidwalkers since the dawn of time. Here, a new order must emerge. We cannot escape our symbolic structure; the malleable parts may mutate under our gaze, but there remain impenetrable epiphenomena that arise from that which cannot be transgressed. To deny this negativity is the ultimate epistemic transgression, and a doomed one.

If ever we become addicted to endless transgression, it is because we are depleted of the false hope provided by past rupture, because we do not understand that structure—ephemeral, fugacious, evanescent—is there for a reason, and because we cannot accept that there are horrors that will never subside, with which we must make peace, the sadness of death and loss, the abject meanness of it all. Without God, community or institutions, and guided only by a doctrinaire foreclosure of the negative, we believe the only replacement stabiliser left is none at all. Deleuze got his deterritorialised utopia. And since everything is totally arbitrary and relative anyway, or so we insist, we haphazardly chase liberatory narratives that permit us to pretend the nonexistence of that lovelorn hole in our heart, heartrending, heartbroken, the ego’s doomed attempt to override the id. The manic highs and lows that constitute this structureless interregnum, like a child chasing butterfly after butterfly, must inevitably set into a new subjecthood, with its own terrifying negativity. This Re-observation, perhaps the final transgression, is up to us. Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari never managed this step, foolishly believing there could ever be any psychic stability in a perennial state of anomie. Will we choose yet another structure of denial, another transgression against the Real-impossible, or will we finally learn that it is enough to love and be loved?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz9sMeC0S38

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