Dimitri F. Crooijmans · Actual Spirit

Trauma

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do we work through symptoms arising from trauma? Which is more effective, the talking cure, or bodywork?

I’ll give it away at once, my dear reader: traumas cannot be worked through, we simply cannot get at them. This is structural. Traumas, in fact, are not experiences. One does not experience a trauma, for the very reason that a trauma is the tipping point at which experience turns into the unexperienceable. This means that a trauma is the point at which reality breaks down. A trauma cannot be registered; something happens that we cannot grasp as an experience. A trauma does not merely occur because something unexperienceable happens, it is this unexperience itself.

To flesh out this claim, I will set the talking cure and bodywork against one another. By the talking cure I mean the speaking-out of the unexperience; bodywork attempts to relive the unexperience. Therefore, both are impossible. They complement each other’s failure.

The impossibility of the talking cure must be lived out in the body, that is, to be embodied. Conversely, the impossibility of bodywork must be spoken out with the talking cure.

Such a stance short-circuits the discussion of which of the two is more effective: the wavering question of whether we must get out of our heads in order to be embodied, or whether we ought to deploy our intellect by speaking from uncertainty (in order to think through the causes and consequences of the trauma). Put this way, it should come as no surprise that the inclination toward the body is preferred over working-through by way of abstract thought.

This inclination remains stuck in our inherent disembodiment, or more precisely: it does not know what to do with the core of the subject, its inextricable un-incorporatedness. This, we are to understand in the etymological sense of “making into a body”, from the Latin incorporo. Incorporation means including the subject into the larger whole of embodied reality.

The order into which, according to this inclination, we are to incorporate ourselves is the spontaneous, self-returned and balanced body. A promise that becomes ever more burdensome the more we hold ourselves to it, precisely because un-incorporatedness is framed as a confession of guilt, an individual deficiency that a full incorporation would sweep away. The subject will never succeed to keep this promise.

Hence, the promise of embodiment fails us, and not the other way around. The subject escapes its procrustean bed, its incorporation. The hysteria of the body, in the old-fashioned Freudian sense, is the result of an overwhelming event that cannot be registered as an ordinary experience. This impossibility leads to hysterical symptoms that repeatedly bring forth, in the body, this ‘remaining stuck in impossibility.’ The form taken by this unconscious compulsion to repeat is called the symptom.

Since this impossibility is unregistered — that is, unconscious — the subject cannot formulate an adequate response to either the trauma or the hysterical symptoms. Out of this muteness, the body abreacts. This bodily symptom, the abreaction, repeats itself until it is traced back to the actual response to the trauma, and this response is undone. Because this response has never taken place, the hysteric falls back on abreaction. The cathartic method reproduces the abreaction in order to trace the cause and undo the symptom. This means that the cause of the symptom must be put into words with the full weight of its distressing emotional charge. Indifferently speaking about the trauma without the false memory producing distress is not effective. The hysteric will return to the impossible memory in order to abreact it. The early Freud, in the foundational work of psychoanalysis, Studies on Hysteria (1895), is modest enough to note that this treatment is symptomatic and does not remove all the pathological effects of the trauma. It does, however, in his view, bring about new conditions for the healing process. During these formative years of psychoanalysis, Freud claimed that only the symptoms he had analyzed in their entirety could be permanently resolved, never the trauma itself.

Bodywork, with its promise, can indeed reduce the symptoms, and that is precisely what we do not want if the aim is to remedy the trauma. Depending on circumstances, it may be necessary to blunt the symptoms, but this takes us further from home — that is, from the trauma — and is not sustainable. The hysterical symptoms are mute, but they do say something and they are not deaf. Hence, there are also forms of bodywork that channel the libido (erotically charged anxiety) of the symptoms in a contained way, so that within that frame it can freely take its course and bring about a renewed incorporation.

The climax of this type of bodywork is reached in the most disembodied limit-experiences. However ecstatic these may be, they feed the promise of embodiment just the same — the dream that sustains the remaining stuck in impossibility.¹

The abreaction of the body, whether we diminish or intensify it through bodywork; the subject’s powerlessness over her body; the distance she experiences with herself; the strangeness of her own selfhood — this is where the talking cure comes in. As long as the impossible experience of bodywork sustains its own promise by repeating itself, we miss the transition to the talking cure and are rendered mute.

Here, bodywork touches upon the talking cure; in the incongruity of both.

Touch

Through bodywork the body comes into contact with the impossible. This touch is also at once not a touch. Bodywork does not embrace the wound but is the re-cutting of its scar.

Trauma comes from the Greek τραῦμα, meaning wound. This is derived from τιτρώσκω, which — poetically enough — means to pierce. This etymological connection is reflected in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal:

“[D]ie Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug.”

[“Only the spear that struck the wound can close it.”]

The piercing makes the wound, is the wound itself, and is the only thing that closes that wound.²

The unexperience brought about by bodywork is that spear. It carves into the damaged tissue, so that the closing leaves behind a different scar, without erasing the traces of the old one, though these do take on a different meaning. The surface is not smoothed over or made even. We cannot un-live our traumas. The tissue nonetheless heals. Traumas get re-traumatized.

And what of the talking cure, the speaking-out of impossibility? Trauma is unspeakable; it speaks of its own accord in symptoms that are roundabout riddles. Because the trauma cannot be interpreted as though it were part of reality, it falls outside of it. The constitution of reality, however, is constituted by that which falls outside it: fantasy. Fantasy is beyond the limit of reality. There is nothing outside reality. This limit is not a fence over which we can step to see what it encloses. The fence merely makes it seem as though something falls outside. The function of fantasy is to support the coherence of reality from without. An example: language fails to fully map reality. There is always a remainder that slips away from linguistic mapping. Not because we have not yet mapped everything, but because the making-linguistic, the translating into language, is itself a symptom of the impossible. Language, then, does not fail formlessly; it fails in a particular way, in how it translates the non-linguistic. This form of translation is phantasmatic and is what makes reality cohere.

Fantasy gives reality shape as an order within which desire does its work. Desire is not out to attain fantasy. Fantasy, rather, is what gives shape to desire. Desire keeps the trauma at a distance by repeating its effects.

The subject’s speech approaching fantasy does not merely bring about resistance as a side effect. The very aim of the talking cure is to arouse this resistance, the resistance that makes the talking cure impossible. The unconscious resists being enclosed, resists incorporation into the register of consciousness. This means that the unconscious is the reverse side of conscious speech, its unspoken truth. The coherence of speech operates on the basis of repression.

Naming or exposing resistance is endless. Laying bare that it occurs, and that it is deceptive, is pointless. The judgment that, from the outside, claims that another subject is concealing her negativity does not know its own concealment of negativity, because it keeps at a distance the very manner in which this concealment takes place. But it is precisely this form of concealment in which the secret of the trauma lies.

The hysterical abreaction of the body and the resistance of speech stem from the same trauma. The roundabout riddles, the symptoms formed by fantasy, cannot be reduced to psychology because they revolve around an ontological impossibility. The unconscious is not mine; it is not my subjective interiority that I must live through or speak out in order to lay bare my symptoms and rid them of their grip. I must relive and re-speak the impossibility from which they originate, so as to let the relation that reality has to me be overturned through its traumatic reshaping.

Disavowal

Trauma is concealed in various ways. None of them can be distinguished from the trauma itself. In more technical terms, this concealment is called repression. Here we should not think of the suppression of emotions, but rather of the repression of the thinking of the irreconcilable idea, this impossibility that shapes our life-experience. The repressed returns as and in symptoms.

One can simply deny it: “I am not traumatized at all.” Through the talking cure, and above all through the unconscious slips of the tongue that occur within it, this denial is undermined, which produces resistance. The denial, its undermining, and the resistance are all effects of trauma.

Disavowal is a form of repression that does not deny the trauma and its consequences. Rather, it claims to have taken account of them. Disavowal assumes that the unknowable Other side exerts its influence. It presents itself as indifferent and consequently need not deny anything. The formula of disavowal is: “I know that I am traumatized and that I live in the wake of trauma, but because I accept this, I do not need to work on it, and I let it simply run its course through me. I know better than I need to know what leads me.”

Disavowal is the ‘reasonable’ form of repression, ‘conscious’ of traumas, symptoms, the subject’s fundamental powerlessness, and the un-incorporatedness of her existence. In the words of disavowal:

“I am fully aware of the negative consequences of my symptoms, that they conceal a trauma, and yet I do not let that awareness have any real impact. It’s all the same to me.”

Disavowal ‘takes account of’ all the facts, precisely so as not to have to grant them any meaning. For disavowal, there is no difference that makes a difference. In her unpublished dissertation manuscript titled Sexual Subjectivity: The Politics of Desire, Dutch philosopher Veerle van Wijngaarden puts it concisely as follows:

“A fact is disavowed when it is acknowledged and simultaneously rendered meaningless for the subject’s actions and self-understanding.”³

Repression can be disrupted by letting speech, through the talking cure, run up against slips that break up what speaks for itself, where this speech goes beyond itself and runs into a contradiction that it keeps repeating all the way to the unexperienceable. There, despair takes the upper hand. The I loses itself in non-being, in fantasy. The Other takes over. The repression that kept reality managable and bearable ceases to function. Repression guards the subject against approaching boundless loss of self. On the relation between anxiety and repression, Alenka Zupančič writes the following in her book Disavowal:

“Unlike some psychological theories which associate anxiety with uncertainty, the Lacanian perspective conceives of anxiety not as a reaction or a defence against (unpleasant) uncertainty but as a form of ‘awful certainty’, a ‘signal’ of the real, a feeling ‘that does not deceive’; anxiety is the outside of doubt, le hors de doute. The certainty at stake here, however, is not the certainty of being but, rather, the certainty of thinking that goes on out there, where I am not, and in this sense the certainty of non-being. One might say that anxiety — which is different from fear — is the closest we can get to the experience of the lack-of-being without repression or disavowal. Anxiety-as-certainty could be called an affect of the lack-of-being. This is why anxiety plays an important role in psychoanalysis: it can be used to orient us in analysis, and it needs to be administered in the right dosages, as Lacan puts it.”⁴

Anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive; it is an awful certainty. The forced decision to call a halt to this unconscious thought-process (the certainty of non-being) closes off this dissolved, timeless and spaceless beinglessness, and casts the trauma in a different light.

Disavowal, however, already presupposes in advance that there is a fundamental self-alienation, that the subject is not identical to herself, that we are traumatized beings who unconsciously exhibit pathological symptoms. Here is Zupančič on the distinction between repression and disavowal:

“So, disavowal doesn’t make something disappear; rather, it changes, affects the nature and meaning of this something. We could say that it derealizes it. It affects its character of the real, as real — that is, as an extra-ordinary, surprising, shattering bit of our reality. When you perceive or learn about something and disavow it, it is because this something has the capacity to change reality for you; it is not just ‘any stupid thing’ from this reality. The same could be said for repression, of course. But whereas repression preserves the extra-ordinary character of that thing by pushing it out of our ordinary reality, disavowal keeps it as part of reality, yet changes its character. We could thus say that disavowal consists in making — what is for me, and perhaps not only for me — an extraordinary, ‘game-changing’ fact, an ordinary fact — but still a fact. What is disavowed is its shattering, game-changing dimension and not simply its fact, or its occurring. Perhaps it is this that we like to refer to as a post-factual world: not that there are no more facts — on the contrary, there are only facts around — yet they are ‘just facts’ and no longer carry any weight of the real.”⁵

Disavowal sustains a belief by proclaiming knowledge of its opposite. Disavowal is a form of repression that thus lets the repressed in, reduces it to ‘just a fact,’ and thereby manages to render it harmless. In ordinary repression, the repressed no longer forms part of reality, that is, until anxiety annihilates the I in the enjoyment of fantasy.

The consequence of disavowal is that even the most drastic changes are not registered as such. They are equated with insignificant facts, part of the unbudging and ordinary run of things.

The two main forms of disavowal are neurotic and perverse. Perverse disavowal has externalized its fetish into objectivity, and therefore need only state ‘I know very well,’ without the ‘but still I don’t do it.’ For neurotics, the knot lies in the second part. Their whole lives, they believe, against their better judgment, what is not true, and this ‘but still I don’t do it’ is what they repeatedly reinterpret, translate, and justify.

Let it be clear that an increase in knowledge is powerless against disavowal, because no fact needs to be denied.

So, back to our question: the talking cure or bodywork? Both forms of working-through disavow the belief they sustain, the promise that trauma as such can be worked through.

“I know very well that the talking cure and bodywork will not resolve my trauma once and for all, but still I must do my best to get as close as possible, with as much self-insight as possible, in order to grow.”

The Self-Evident Man and the Ambiguous Woman

Both bodywork and the talking cure are futile. Is that my conclusion? Why would we not prefer personal growth over melancholic despondency? We would deny the truth of both if we claimed that their impossibility is simply fruitless.

The crux lies in the far-reaching nature of the fantasy aroused by both, fanned by the anxiety that leads us toward their impossibility. Take, for example, personal growth, which is generally understood as an increase in consciousness. Things I would not have seen before, the symptoms of others, are now transparent. So, one has become more conscious. Can that be denied? Yet, in this stance that proclaims progress, aimed at a fully-grown state, lurks once again the being-affirmation of the I. This is grasped as mastery, power, or the illusion that self-understanding is what leads our lives. Here, then, we also find a form-effect inseparable from the trauma, where beinglessness is the rule without exception.

We are self-conscious to the extent that there is a form of knowledge that does not know itself — the unconscious, where thinking is because we are not. I am self-conscious because the blind spot that guarantees it is ineradicable, detectable only when glanced at obliquely, at the point where reality breaks down and in how I avoid that break. Take curiosity for instance: this ‘will to know’ is secondary, since it stems from the will not to know something, the trauma.

This break-down is experienced as an objective fate that runs counter to the affirmation of one’s being. At the same time, we derive our identity from it. Our own share in it is disavowed, if not denied outright. This form of fatalism sees the reconciling of impossibility with itself as something that comes at the cost of a flawless being-affirmation. The subject owes this fate a penance. She surrenders and attempts to submit herself. At this, she fails too.

Trauma disrupts the natural course of life and diverts it. The name for the repetition that forms itself out of this is the death drive, the compulsive return to lifelessness that produces its own disruption. The primacy thus lies with the lifeless, faltering repetition, not with the resistance to it in the name of a meaningful life. The natural course of life turns out to be a fantasy of neutrality that presupposes a trauma-free life. The choice of repression ascribes a meaning to lifelessness in order to preserve the consistency of one’s being-affirmation. The repression of beinglessness enables a stance one takes up in reality, the relation of the I to the Other.

This relation is split, that is, sexuated between masculine and feminine subjectivity. Jacques Lacan holds that woman is the symptom of man. Here, man stands for the being-affirmation that refers to itself (that speaks for itself), and woman for that which both supports and disrupts his being-affirmation. Woman throws man out of joint.

In sexuation, life loses its self-conscious, self-evident and neutral character. This split within relational reality, and its disruption, is ambiguous. Meaning is not identical to itself but is unstable. Insofar as the man (res cogitans) speaks self-evidently, says what speaks for itself, he denies himself his non-being by repressing the woman’s ambiguity within his definite being-affirmation.

According to Wijngaarden, that the man cannot recognize woman without allowing himself (his being-affirmation) to be undermined is structural. He deploys disavowal to sustain his fantasy at her expense:

“[The woman’s] ability to inhabit the ambiguity of being both subject and object is precisely what [the man] disavows, because recognising it would destabilise the fantasy of sovereignty that structures his sexual subjectivity.”⁶

The woman’s ambiguity dislocates the being-affirmation of the masculine I, not in order to flee his sovereign speaks-for-itselfness, which reduces her to an object, but — and here I paraphrase Wijngaarden — in order to articulate, within that very structure, a space for being-affirmation.⁷

The necessity of resolving the trauma (itself an effect of trauma), the ‘conscious’ choice of repression, presents itself as neutral, often as human, or even as life-affirming. Because this choice is supposedly neutral, its meaning becomes undeniably objective and rational. Consciousness sustains its neutrality by way of repression, until it shows itself, in anxiety that is absolutely certain, in its groundless bias. At that tipping point, the I collapses in the nullity of the Other. The Other — this symbolic entity that guarantees meaning — falters in the ambiguity of woman.

The I originates in trauma, is the repeated bearing-out of its effects, and loses itself therein. Every meaning we derive from this fact is its repression, and thus an effect of trauma. The choice, then, is not neutral, even though the fact presents itself as such. It is itself a one-sided effect of what it represses. Bodywork and the talking cure are creative forms for entering into a relation with fantasies of this kind, for developing them creatively to their completion.

“Creativity does not, of course, resolve traumas, but it is a way of dealing with them.” Since I assume you are a sharp reader, I know you will see that these quotation marks are there to show that this sentence has the structure of the formula of disavowal. And what if we cannot be creative at all? Then we would not even need to reject creativity.

Suppose, for instance, that our creative potential were held back by not yet having reached the right stage, a stage that, deferred to the future, is inaccessible. Whichever way we choose to argue for creativity as such, a being-affirmation is here posited as a final stage. A not-yet-attained state of fullness expresses itself in the being-affirmation of the I. Is every being-affirmation, then, to be rejected? Is the I’s deception thereby exposed? Of course not! As if that choice had not always already been made necessary on the basis of the reality we share! For the not-yet-attained fullness has, in fact, already been accomplished in how it repeatedly bears itself out in being-affirmation. It does not merely drive us on but sustains itself through its own disruptions, at least, so long as the compulsive re-enactment of the impossible is repressed. Put differently, the truth of potential creativity lies in its obstacle, not in whatever would supposedly become possible if the way were cleared from it.

Partial Drives, Death Drive

Obstacles sustain the being-affirmation by disrupting it. The partial drives circle around these obstacles and, in their escalation, are traced back to their origin: the death drive. Put differently, the partial drives are one and the same simple faltering rotation. Being faithful to this repetition — and not to any one particular partial drive — neutralizes the neutrality of the partial drives clinging to their respective obstacles. Nevertheless, each obstacle is an ineradicable stain, the subject itself, which falls out of reality in order to ground it, making total submission to reality, that is, incorporation into it, impossible.

The death drive brings about an irrevocable change of course that does not let the past be the past. It draws precisely on the past in order to rewrite it (through that which remains unwritten, namely she, the real subject herself).

A life without inward self-killing is indistinguishable from lifelessness. Therein, the death drive does not change course; the same trauma keeps repeating itself in the same effects. The temptation to set life against lifelessness rests on the dream, the presupposition, that consciousness and the unconscious will coincide in a total openness: the fantasy of a lifelong flow-state, constant creative change. To sustain this fantasy, one immediately adds that this ultimate final stage is impossible. This clears the way for taking it as the starting point of desire — so as to live, as often as possible, as close as possible to this state of flow. The being-affirmation thus continues to repeat itself, faltering.

Having rewritten a mode of repression is experienced as liberating because the unconscious is cut off and discarded for the sake of the certainty of a difference-making being-affirmation.

The Ethics of Trauma

Life is a game that plays us, until the weight grows so great that we can do nothing but raise an objection that we refuse to keep playing along. This withdrawing objection expresses itself as depression — the refusal to be played, because being-played is omnipresent. Then let it be my own game instead: an allusion to what I desire most of all, that which I have lost for good and will therefore never let go of.

Between the body’s screaming pain and the heaviness of the mind lies the cogito; it is what we are aiming at as we keep circling endlessly around it, until it exposes itself in the choice of repression that discards it.

The revolution of this whirlpool converts itself into a resolute anxiety that externalizes itself. It is like picking up a knife and turning the thick, meaningless fog of being-played back on itself, the disembodiment turned outward. Bodywork is the unspeakability that expresses itself in self-mortification, all the way to non-being, the traumatic zero-point. The talking cure is the summoning-up of the most stubborn, most deeply entrenched weakness, a slip that is not even mine, a failed promise of what should have been. Speaking runs up against mis-speaking, speaking beyond yourself, beyond what you say and mean.⁸ This mis-speaking is the proof of a thinking that has no agency, the non-I. That is despair spoken out in absolute certainty, provided the illusion of a listener is present who welcomes this exposure. The certainty of anxiety is an indubitable state aimed at the total erasure of self-consciousness, all the way into its neutralization, the fantasy in which the I is no longer present. The death drive neutralizes the meaning of the forced choice that results from it. The disruption forces a new decision from a nonsensical nullification that has no objective cause of its own, except the cause that is retroactively attributed to it by the decision.

We cannot not choose meaning; the meaninglessness of the form-giving nothing is inaccessible. Only by neutralizing the I in fantasy, that is, by undermining meaning by siding with its neutrality, can we destroy this meaning through the partial drives. The completion of meaning, its destruction, is traumatic madness, the freedom of the subject.

Unleashed in the death drive, we kill our dreams which turn out to be nightmares that repeat the same terrifying deadlock in the guise of its solution.

The dream and the reality within which this dream was pursued are both destroyed. A relationship is over the moment we realize that the way we dreamed within it is a maddening nightmare that has had its day. What might still have been is no longer desirable. The shared fantasy comes to an end. This means that what made the relationship bearable ceases to exist. In turn, it then becomes apparent that there was, in the first place, no shared fantasy at all, only the fantasy that something like shared-ness existed. This realization demands a symbolic suicide to obliterate the melancholy sustained by mourning.

“There is no way to face the trauma directly,” writes Zupančič,

“and that is what makes it a trauma — something that consumes us and is indistinguishable from the effect it has on us. The more traumatic it is, the more numb we tend to become. We need to wake up — not to forget it and shore up our defences by ‘rational means’ but, rather, to pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality.”⁹

Ruthlessly faithful to trauma — an absurd and bizarre prospect. To pursue the trauma while knowing that direct confrontation is ruled out. Shall we pursue it, then, as best we can… even though we cannot? That is how disavowal relates to it.

The compulsion to repeat of the partial drives ends in the unleashing of the certainty of non-being, which is then closed off in the forced choice of being where I stop thinking.

Silvia & Maria

“Selbstporträt mit Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith und ich” (Maria Lassnig, 1972)

The painter Maria Lassnig chose two titles for this painting. Before the slash, her own name is omitted; in the second title, she habitually places her friend’s name before her own. The self is merely a representation of the subject, here in the form of a self-portrait. It then shifts one place over, and the other comes first, before it attaches itself behind her.

This painting depicts Cartesian modernity on canvas. Or so it seems. The blue canvas is framed on a white surface, the actual canvas. The painting is thus an appearance within the painting. It merely appears to appear. The painting differs from itself; it is not what it is. The painting contains a single element, and that is the painting — the blue canvas, to which it is not equal — and the empty space, which does not let the painting be itself. It is barely noticeable that the frame has fallen into what it enframes.

Silvia’s eyes look straight at us. Her dark dress with its bright red patterns immediately catches the eye. It contrasts with her modest bearing, which radiates resignation. Her face is just as caring as her left hand. Something unnatural clings to both — the hand especially betrays that this care carries something cold and distant within it. It is not a warm, spontaneous embrace. She has clearly prepared herself for this moment. She is alert and composed. She is undisturbed by the strange object she is in contact with, and in which her best friend sits. She takes her friend into account as though she were her equal, though she can also subtly suggest that she is more conscious than her. Silvia is res cogitans.

Maria’s upper body is bare. So, we see that her body is an artificial suit, res extensa. She slumbers dreamily in the ether. Maria represents the cogito, the unconscious. Hence we feel the pull to turn toward Silvia, the little other who is partly in contact with the suit of the cogito. Silvia’s gaze is cast upon us, the big Other.

The little other’s touch upon the res extensa links the cogito to the big Other. Maria touches nothing; she herself is not even present. The two asymmetrical little books against her cheeks seal off her ears; between that difference is where she sits, the split subject. What is written in the books is irrelevant. What matters here is the contentless difference of form, the fleeting thought-determination between her pre- and post-history. The two friends — as can be seen from the difference in how the light falls on each of them — are not in the same world.

And all this while the fine-looking friend effortlessly draws our attention, so that the flighty Maria remains, numbed, outside of our sight.

Silvia is, Maria thinks.

Is our conception of bodywork here not too cerebral, too serious? What if we start over and give it a new word “body-dance-love” [lijfdansliefde], for instance. Body-dance-love liberates the body from under the yoke of mental heaviness. Dance, love, free the body free!

This rewording clearly takes the side of bodywork, and thus of its promise. As described above, this promise is the flip side of the individual confession of guilt of un-incorporatedness. ↩
In the same spirit we also cite Freud’s analogy for his psychoanalytic talking cure: “I have often in my own mind compared cathartic psychotherapy with surgical intervention. I have described my treatments as psychotherapeutic operations; and I have brought out their analogy with the opening up of a cavity filled with pus, the scraping out of a carious region, etc. An analogy of this kind finds its justification not so much in the removal of what is pathological as in the establishment of conditions that are more likely to lead the course of the process in the direction of recovery.” Freud, Sigmund. 1955. Studies on Hysteria. Translated by James Strachey. Hogarth Press. p. 271. ↩
Wijngaarden, Veerle van. “Disavowing Objecthood: Towards a Sexual Ethics of Ambiguity.” Chapter in Sexual Subjectivity: The Politics of Desire. Unpublished dissertation manuscript, University of Amsterdam. ↩
Zupančič, Alenka. 2024. Disavowal. Polity Press. p. 42. ↩
Ibid., p. 15. ↩
Wijngaarden, Veerle van. “Disavowing Objecthood: Towards a Sexual Ethics of Ambiguity.” Chapter in Sexual Subjectivity: The Politics of Desire. Unpublished dissertation manuscript, University of Amsterdam. ↩
“Jane’s agency does not consist in escaping objecthood, but in articulating a space for agency within it.” Ibid. ↩
In German, mis-speaking is versprechen. Versprechen ist fernsprechen (mis-speaking is far-speaking). ↩
Zupančič, Alenka. 2024. Disavowal. Polity Press. p. 76. ↩

A Missed Encounter

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There she sat in the crowded Central Station of Vienna, awaiting her meal. I walked by and chose the same Vietnamese place.

“Fried rice mit chicken, bitte.”

I walked up to her table.

”Is this spot free?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

I sat down facing her. Being tired and hangry from this trip, I didn’t open up a conversation. My eyes fell on her stylish tattoo and I considered complimenting her on it. I didn’t. Being hungry always makes me feel asocial and turned inward.

Ding ding

She went to the counter to grab her food.

Looking at the screen with orders, I saw it wouldn’t take much time for mine to be ready.

Ding ding

“Number 56,” says the Vietnamese lady at the counter.

“Ja, that’s mine. Danke.” I grabbed my meal and sat down facing her again.

Being excited by the steamy fried rice, I exclaimed “Bon appetit!”

“Are you from here?” I asked, my bad mood being evaporated by the food in front of me.

As she told me, I dug into my meal. We continued to chat.

“What is your instagram?” She asked.

“Here, I’ll put it in.”

“Good, nice to meet you! Viel Spaß noch beim Reisen!”

“Danke. Tschüß!”

Wondering if and how we would meet again, I watched her walk off.

In a state of excited fatigue, I packed my food, forgot to take it with me and rolled a cigarette to smoke outside. There’s plenty of time, I thought, lighting my cigarette and seeing that I had five minutes left for the train to depart. Not knowing what platform to take, I took three drags and went inside.

Looking around on the platform, I didn’t see her. She most likely took a different train, it seemed. I stepped on board.

My sleepless two weeks through Germany and Austria were soon to be over. My initial plan was to stay in another town for one more day. I had considered booking a night in Salzburg, but my extended stay in Vienna was enough, I told myself. Glad to finally sit in a still place, I laid down my phone as I dozed off.

My capacity to comprehend and produce German plummets when I’m tired. So I wasn’t sure if I remembered correctly if she said she’d get off at Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, a station I passed on the way to München.

I pressed Send Message on her profile and texted her.

*Have I understood correctly that you return to Salzburg today
or was that my lack of sleep?

Hahaha
yes you heard correctly!*

Smiling to myself, it looked like we might see each other again sooner than later. The thought that she might be in the same train left my mind as soon as it entered. Looking at the clock on my phone, and then at the changing scenery to my left, I felt like I had more than enough time to respond. I closed my eyes and dozed off again.

As I googled Salzburg, looking at pictures of the town, as well as spots on google maps, I became aware of the time pressing.

Then let’s have a drink there, I arrive at 5 o’clock at the Central Station.

Unfortunately today is already fully planned out for me.

Can you not call it off? I’m gone in no time.
Why not, let’s do it.

Unfortunately it really is not possible to cancel.

Aaah, that’s fine.

What a boring ending! It looked like she was sincere though. No Salzburg for me this trip. Perhaps another time. I wondered what time she would’ve arrived in Salzburg, it didn’t matter now anyway I thought. I dozed off.

When I woke up, I realized the odds of her not being on the same train were miniscule.

That meant I couldn’t allow it to end like it seemed it did. I had to give it my own proper twist, so I decided to write her a poem. Whether she was on this same train was irrelevant. In the case that she wasn’t I would just send her a photo of it. Either way, I couldn’t ask her before I finished writing.

Ten minutes before we arrived in Salzburg I grabbed my pen and notebook. The idea of a poem inspired me enough to get it going. An English poem would not have taken so much time, but she’s Austrian and I was here for German.

I was convinced I’d make it, though I knew every minute was precious now. I struggled especially with what case to use in the second line (because accusative makes sense for the verb begegnen but can’t be right and dative makes no sense but is correct I thought I remembered). Then, writing down the poem without a final sentence, the situation called to mind the lyrics of one of my favorite rap songs by Ansu:

Träum’ von ‘nem Leben woanders
Kopf in den Wolken, schon immer verpeilt (Yeah)
Ich hab’ ‘n anderes Tempo
Ich hab’ mich noch nie beeilt (Noch nie)
…
Am besten irgendwohin, wo die Leute nicht stressen (Aha)
Irgendwohin, wo wir alles vergessen (Aha)
Irgendwo, wo wir nur uns beide hätten

Irgendwo in another life. Close, but it needs to rhyme with sie. I had no time. Everything but the final sentence was on the paper. I figured a half rhyme would do.

Two minutes before we arrived, I finished it.

Zu gut um wahr zu sein
Ein mädel aus Salzburg begegnet ihm
Und er dachte, es wäre schön
Wenn ich heute Abend mit ihr verbringe
Natürlich könnte es nicht gelingen

Tut mir leid, sagt sie
Er fährt weiter, und denkt
Wir sehen uns noch irgendwie

*Too good to be true
A girl from Salzburg meets him
And he thinks, it would be pleasant
If I could spend this evening with her
Of course it did not work out

I am sorry, she says
He drives on, and thinks
We will see each other anyhow*

The train slowed down and the driver announced that we are about to arrive in Salzburg.

Exhausted and feeling like I squeezed all the German I had left out of me, I switched to English for efficiency’s sake.

I was in train compartment 22. As I stood up, I saw people lining up to get ready to step off the train. I left my stuff behind. With the envelope in my hand, I hurried towards her. I forced myself through the crowds.

Entschuldiging!

Entschuldige mich…

I walked through compartment after compartment.

Entschuldiging!

“Das ist nicht die richtige Zeit dafür!” An annoyed Austrian says.

“Ich weiß.”

I walk and walk. When I’m at 26 the door to the next compartment is closed. After waiting far too long for everyone in front of me to get out, I step outside and see the crowds but not her.

I looked to my right. Hold up, there is no carriage after this one. It’s the final compartment, that’s why I couldn’t go through that door. Fuck, she’s all the way on the other side. I walked in the wrong direction.

I step back on the train and head back to the compartment I was at. As I walk back half-defeated, I look through the windows to see if she’s still there. Seeing everyone but her, I have no one but her on my mind. Between compartments, I exit the door to check. Then, out of a sense of futility, I sent her a picture of the envelope with her name on it.

To add insult to injury, assuming she won’t come back since she was in a rush to get her bus, I sent the poem.

My train was at a stand-still as if in a limbo. We texted back and forth.

Of course her bus was late! Sitting in my compartment, it seemed like now everything would finally work out. Looking over my shoulder on the screen, I checked how much time the train had left before leaving.

Standing up and exiting the train, there was no one on the platform but the train conductor and me. His Austrian frown left me unmoved. I looked to the stairs of the platform and knew she’d walk up any second now for me to hand her the letter. Then, the worst case scenario occurred.

The beeping door and disdainful look of the conductor forced me to jump back into the train. As I walk back to my compartment, I look through the windows. No one passes by.

Then, I get a text.

She came back. Imprisoned in my compartment, I looked to my right and saw her walk up to me. She looked cute as she stomped her feet on the ground in frustrated dissapointment.

The train slowly started moving and I was gone.

As the train accelerated I saw the old buildings of this town I would have visited.

Having nothing left to say and too jarred to doze off, the scenes of everything that did, and did not happen kept replaying themselves in my head.

I still have the poem with me.

Introduction to The Parallax View

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Parallax View

Published in 2006, The Parallax View was described by Žižek as his opus magnum. Just like A Voice and Nothing More (2006) and The Odd One In (2008), this book is in the Short-Circuit series.

The term parallax, which goes back to ‘alteration’ in Ancient Greek is defined the following way according to Wiktionary:

Parallax

An apparent shift in the position of two stationary objects relative to each other as viewed by an observer, due to a change in observer position.¹

The difference between this colloquial definition and Žižek’s term is that the latter simply gets rid of the word ‘apparent’ in the description above. For Žižek, the parallax does therefore shift objective phenomena itself by virtue of the change in the observer’s perspective. So, in contrast to the colloquial parallax which simply stays on the level of epistemology, the Žižekian parallax is about the antagonism of truth in the mutually exclusive ontologies and their respective epistemologies.

A political example: each attempt at objectively demarcating what constitutes right versus the left wing ends up in either one of these camps. There is no third synthesis that would somehow get beyond this parallax, that is, from a leftist view-point. Because, going beyond the right and left wing opposition necessarily falls on the side of the right wing. Žižek has gotten rid of the word ‘apparent’ because the belief in a solid objectivity with a consistent meaning that hides behind our perspectives obfuscates the parallax at work. The parallax is therefore not only a shift in observer positions, but a shift in the guarantee of symbolic universes itself, what Lacan calls the Big Other. Instead of a neutral common ground to connect these disparate levels, we find a parralactic gap between perspectives that mutually exclude each other’s objectivities:

“In a first approach, such a notion of parallax gap cannot but appear as a kind of Kantian revenge over Hegel: is not “parallax” yet another name for a fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically “mediated/sublated” into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground, between the two levels? It is the wager of this book that, far from posing an irreducible obstacle to dialectics, the notion of the parallax gap provides the key which enables us to discern its subversive core. To theorize this parallax gap properly is the necessary first step in the rehabilitation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Here we encounter a basic paradox: while many of today’s sciences spontaneously practice materialist dialectic, philosophically they oscillate between mechanical materialism and idealist obscurantism.”²

The importance of the parallax gap for Žižek lies in his resurrection of the philosophy of dialectical materialism. But then again, why dialectics? And why materialism?

To do away with the misconception that the unity of opposities is about two positive entities clashing, or being harmonious, which is its other side (since they both presuppose a neutral objective background), Žižek presents the self-repelling One as the cornerstone of dialectics:

“The key problem here is that the basic “law” of dialectical materialism, the struggle of opposites, was colonized/obfuscated by the New Age notion of the polarity of opposites (yin-yang, and so on).The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent “tension,” gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself. This book is based on a strategic politico-philosophical decision to designate this gap which separates the One from itself with the term parallax.”³

There is no prior One which splits into two, nor is there a One which, in the background, in the ‘grand scheme of things’ can diffuse any parallactic antagonism. This constitutes the ‘dialectical’ part of the term. As for the ‘materialism’ part, this how the dialectical antagonism of the gap of the One is concretized regarding the relationship between subject and object. If idealism is conceived of as idea over matter, Žižek’s materialism is not merely matter over idea. In dialectical materialism, there is no fully constituted matter to begin with, which is why it is also referred to as a materialism without matter. The gap in the One could very much be an idealist notion, if this ‘lack’ would be understood as an engulfing void which the subject is too limited to cognize, as it extents itself out indefinitely (and thus being left undefined, without difference). Instead, the material existence of the subject, is its only object, which is its support in fantasy. The material object is always partial to the subject, a mere part, the subject itself as a part, as well as a definite side. We are not part of this reality, but this reality is partial in our self-constitution of it. Žižek neatly formulates it here:

“Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me—it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” Materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole”—not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.”⁴

This stance of the subject as both outside and inside is material because unconscious fantasy is the inverse of the subject, the cause of its desire, i.e. the subject in the guise of an external object.

The point is to dialecticize the dualism between mechanical materialism and obscurantist idealism to develop a critical grasp of these ontologies and their parallax gap.

Parallax in Philosophy, Science and Politics

After Žižek establishes the centrality of the parallax gap for dialectical materialism, the book essentially consists of three parts:

Philosophy → ontological difference.
Science → irreducible gap between phenomenal reality and scientific account (reaches its apogee in cognitivism’s endeavor to provide third-person neurobiological account for our first-person experience).
Politics → social antagonism that allows for no common ground between conflicting agents.

“In each of the three parts, the same formal operation is discerned and deployed, each time at a different level: a gap is asserted as irreducible and insurmountable, a gap which posits a limit to the field of reality. Philosophy revolves around ontological difference, the gap between ontological horizon and “objective” ontic reality; the cognitivist brain sciences revolve around the gap between the subject’s phenomenal self-relating and the biophysical reality of the brain; political struggle revolves around the gap between antagonisms proper and socioeconomic reality.“⁵

So, it is a matter of detecting the gap in each of these domains, but not staying at that point. To emphasize again, we lose out on materialism if we simply stay with positing the unsurpassable gap as given. The difference between conceptual domains and the parallax gap (its distance to reality) is only thought in a materialist fashion once we transpose the gap into these domains themselves instead of reifying the concept as a failure to grasp external objectivity. Paradoxically, materialism ‘dematerializes’ external reality by reducing it to a secondary fiction stemming from ontological difference.

Dialectical materalism is therefore concerned with the production of fantasy. Regarding these three domains, we basically want to undermine substantialist reductions that leave idealist reifications in place. In the words of Žižek:

“This triad, of course, is that of the Universal-Particular-Singular: universal philosophy, particular science, the singularity of the political. In all three cases, the problem is how to think this gap in a materialist way, which means: it is not enough merely to insist on the fact that the ontological horizon cannot be reduced to an effect of ontic occurrences; that phenomenal self-awareness cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon of “objective” brain processes; that social antagonism (“class struggle”) cannot be reduced to an effect of objective socioeconomic forces. We should take a step further and reach beneath this dualism itself, into a “minimal difference” (the noncoincidence of the One with itself) that generates it.”⁶

Dialectical materialism is not merely non-reductionistic in these three domains because it sets the fictions that sustain these fields aside. To neutralize the hold that the fetish of ‘external reality out there’ has on the concept, we simply have to run with the answer it provides in its attempt to mask the minimal difference at work; to follow its own logic and unearth the paradoxes it gets stuck on.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parallax ↩
Žižek, S. 2006. The Parallax View. MIT Press. p. 4. ↩
Ibid., p. 7. ↩
Ibid., p. 17. ↩
Ibid., p. 10. ↩
Ibid., p. 10-11. ↩

Communisation in Absolute Capitalism

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since before the dawn of my intellectual activities I’ve always read texts out of context. And far from being a bug that prevents me from reaching the true core of a theoretical edifice, it is a feature that comes with going for real speculations. It’s self-evident that Hegel did not mean his Phenomenology of Spirit with its stages to be superimposed on the development of “a lineage of thought that runs from Richard Dawkins’ reason, through Sam Harris’s spirituality, and Jordan B. Peterson’s religiosity.”¹ But this is exactly what Cadell Last has done in his latest book:

“This popular intellectual lineage outlines the way the zeitgeist of our culture in the 21st century is literally attempting to re-process the phenomenological struggle embedded in Hegel’s Phenomenology (specifically: reason, spirit, religion). The conclusion offers what I think is the most important theopolitical framework for exiting that culture war, and entering into a new 21st century struggle for a socialist politics: Christian Atheism.”²

To recapitulate:

Reason → Richard Dawkins’ anti-fundamentalist New Atheism
Spirit → Sam Harris’ scientifically informed Eastern-like Spirituality
Religion → Jordan B. Peterson’s psychological-aesthetic Cultural Christianity

As Cadell Last convincingly shows, each of these figures embodies a certain spiritual form that constitutes itself in the gap of the other. Questions of spirituality emerge from the gap of lifeless or soulless reason, and questions of religion emerge from the gap of the solitary and affective nature of spirituality.

Besides their differences, he draws our attention to what unites all these figures, namely their opposition to woke. As a result, these three figures are blind to “the most important theopolitical framework,” which situates itself in an immanent critique of the left.

Last speaks about the fact that Dawkins has not changed much since his rise to fame (originating in 9/11). Ever since, Dawkins has understood himself as a cultural Christian, meaning that he does not attribute any deeper metaphysical meaning to the Christian tradition, but that he still appreciates the aesthetic beauty of its works such as cathedrals and hymns. Even though Jordan B. Peterson may appear to be a devout religious man staunchly against Dawkins’ atheism, he actually identifies with that very same term. Peterson merely argues that not the belief in God, but to act as if God exists is necessary for maintaining a value-hierarchy without which society self-destructs in undifferentiated chaos. Last writes:

“[These are the] two different variants of “Cultural Christianity”: the Dawkins form and the Peterson form:

1. the Dawkins form of “Cultural Christianity” attempts to emphasise the importance of modern liberal social morality without the need for an absolute or a supernatural dimension; and

2. the Peterson form of “Cultural Christianity” emphasises a social morality with support from traditional myths of the absolute or a supernatural dimension (their “psychological significance”).”³

Unlike Dawkins’ crude affirmation of secular reason, Peterson acknowledges the horrific results of secular post-enlightenment forms of social morality. Based on that, Peterson recoils from anything associated with it, including the immanent self-critique of post-enlightenment movements that have emerged alongside them, the foremost name of which is Marxism. Instead of a head-on thinking with the mess of our theopolitical-economic situation — exemplified by the current wars which Slavoj Žižek is constantly writing about — Peterson asserts a traditionalist form of Christian nationalism. While framing himself as a protector of family values, he ignores the very basis of what constitutes it: relative socioeconomic dignity conducive to child-rearing, which is increasingly waning. Far from being a bulwark against the profanity of market dynamics, Petersonian traditionalism serves the incessant self-revolutionising of capitalism in the name of its opposite, traditional religion ensuring stability.

Here, we shouldn’t fail to mention that Russia, profiling itself as a Christian conservative country defending itself against woke satanism, as well as the Israeli state, whose leaders are legitimising their Greater Israel project with scriptures from the old testament, are totally aligned with a type of Petersonian justification of the status quo in service to the invasion of Ukraine, and the genocide of the Palestinians respectively. Putin’s regime as well as the IDF both frame themselves as supported by God in a holy war against evil.

If these three figures, despite their differences, are against woke and communism, then, from the Marxist viewpoint we can see that the unity of these figures and woke are on the side of capital, our one true God. And, crucially, from the Christian Atheist viewpoint, we know that we cannot help but serve this God. The religious saying that our belief in God is irrelevant insofar as we have no choice but to serve, love and be subjected to him has its truth here:

“Capital can effectively appear as a new embodiment of the Hegelian Spirit, an abstract monster which moves and mediates itself, parasitising the activity of actual, really existing individuals.”⁴ (Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing)

Following Hegel, Christianity is special according to Žižek and Last because atheism inheres in its core, as its truth. The cross symbolises God not being one with himself. Marxism then, points to the cross of capital. Not only at the hand of capital itself, but by the self-abolition of the proletariat. Chris Cutrone writes:

“The politically strategic vision of Marxism was that, to break the repetitive cycle of capitalist crisis and destruction, the wage-laborers would need to abolish wage labor — the laborers would need to abolish labor. It was not enough that the capitalists destroyed capitalism — that capitalism destroyed capital. The very basis for the reproduction of capital — labor — must be overcome.”⁵

Last’s Real Speculations is to be understood within his larger project to think our historical moment as a political act, holding the immanent contemporary antagonisms visible in the dialectical historicity of New Atheism, as well as pointing beyond them by uncovering what is necessarily repressed and disavowed in their edifices. Last again:

“If there is a fundamental service that “real speculations” is trying to guide, stated very simply it is this: the sublation of the Petersonian moment of religion which leaves us in a psychological wrestling with traditional myths (and fails to engage modern philosophy on its own terms and towards its own aims); and the speculative affirmation of the Zizekian moment of absolute knowing, which forces us to re-think a socialist spirit for a renewed theopolitical-economy.”⁶

During the talk Cadell Last and I had at the recent Wake festival (May 1st 2025) someone in the audience stood up and accused us of not being humble. Prima facie, Last’s style and mine might seem to make scathing generalisations, to lack complexity and nuance. Rather, this is how the materialist dialectic necessarily appears in its immediacy. But it’s not that Cadell’s real speculations aren’t non-complex or simply linear in a progressive, teleological sense. In passing, I want to mention the chapter on The Field of Nietzschean Interpretation, which is a fantastic analysis of thinkers orbiting Nietzsche’s thought. This text is a great philosophical feat, clarifying how Nietzsche is situated in the history of philosophy.

But apart from that, the lesson of speculative thought is that all multi-faceted mediations, circle of circles, or triad of triads, lapse back into the abstract immediacy of the I. One thing that I have always found special about Last’s philosophical performativity is the lack of fixity to adherence of the theoretical edifices of modern philosophy (in the sense of strict obedience to abstractly universal terminology) along with a keen eye to the personalisation of these dense theories without losing out on rigorous fidelity. It’s that simple and determined style of his that appears as a closure to the type of thought that guards itself against the truth that differentiation has its origin in singularity.

Back to the topic of reading out of context. Can we really equate all these pop intellectuals and the development of the zeitgeist of the last decades with the last three stages of Hegel’s Phenomenology? Should we?

How to handle such a question? Let’s start by transposing the form of this question to a different content and then apply it to Hegel himself. How does Hegel ground these stages in his Phenomenology, or, better yet, how does Hegel ground his mature system as such? For Hegelians, Hegel’s system of thought, what he calls his encyclopedic system of philosophical sciences, is what it is. God has three modes (logic, nature and spirit). Each of these modes are further differentiated into their triads, of which each element consists of a triad and so on and so on. For example, God’s mode of logic consists of the triad being, essence and concept. The third moment of God’s mode spirit is absolute spirit which is made up of art, religion and philosophy. Objective Spirit has ethical life for its third moment, which is made up of the family, society and the state. One of the reasons Hegel’s philosophy helps one to think creatively is because one is compelled to think the dialectical interrelations of these triads, to speculate with them. For example, by superimposing the logical structure on the spiritual structure, which shows that art is on the level of the logic of being, or that nature is the opposite of God within himself, just like Christ is the opposite of the Father, without whom there would be no Holy Spirit, which is what God is beyond one-sided transcendence or one-sided immanence.

Yet, this is all besides the point. My point is that this whole system consists of Hegel’s contingent decisions. In a sense, Hegel never really finished the Science of Logic (and hence his system). Up until the end of his career, he kept coming back to it, changing the order of categorisation, adding remarks and so on, repetitiously grounding new decisions. So what is at stake here? Whereas Hegel’s system seems to be a closed totality made up of necessary moments that are starkly in their proper place, this totality seems to fall apart if we take into account the process of Hegel as an active thinker who kept editing his work. It is only after the fact (and especially after his death) that we see his thought-system as the necessary, final and definitive foundation from which thought can speculate (if we decide to take him up). But, as a matter of fact, it is very strange for Hegel to say that his speculative philosophy is a combination of mysticism and science. It is also very strange that Hegel would say that he is a Lutheran, when his system of God has these triadic modes of which the second moment of nature can be equated with Spinoza’s God. One can argue that Hegel’s eclecticism is preposterous, evidently self-contradictory and contingent. An orthodox Hegelian could come along and explain that it is all necessary after all, that each moment has to be contextualized within his system. And he would not be wrong. Yet, besides that, to paraphrase Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose regarding fiction writing: the character one writes has nothing to do with oneself. The choice to make a character do something that the author himself would never do is up to the author himself in the obvious sense, but only within the self-moving real of the fiction to which the author must submit by setting himself aside. The prerequisite for good fiction hinges upon the successful avoidance of the author to impose himself on the story. Here, I’m not saying that good philosophy and good story-telling are the same. The main idea is that we should be careful to not paper over the fact that the site of the vanishing mediation, the singularising function of the subject, erases itself in the process of bringing about a result by virtue of which (seemingly independent) necessity is presupposed.

Marx’s response to Hegel founds a similar necessity that is taken for granted, meaning that the subjective decision that lies at its basis is forgotten, disavowed, repressed, lost.⁷ Similarly, this is how we’re to understand the following quote by Žižek who is thinking this logic apropos the Russian revolution and Lenin:

“A positively existing social system is nothing but a form in which the negativity of a radically contingent decision assumes positive, determinate existence.”⁸

So, not only theoretical edifices but also social systems are of this retroactive nature. Referral to the leader or author can be explicitly pointed out, but this does not at all guarantee that the dimension of the subject as vanishing mediation is recognised. It could even strengthen the obfuscation of the act (or decision) of contingent subjectivity at the foundation. Take Stalinism, which legitimises itself by portraying itself as the continuation of Lenin’s project, turning him into a messianic figure and disavowing the fact that Lenin’s political deeds couldn’t rely on any objective necessity that’d function as a guarantee whatsoever.

Back to Real Speculations. Cadell Last’s history of 21th century spirit that looks at popular intellectuals and superimposes the structure of the Phenomenology could function as the ground for such new necessity as described above. Every external, universal history of thought is unavoidably reflexive. It reveals what singular thought is made up of. Last’s materialist dialectic is undoubtedly singular, i.e. could only be done from the standpoint of a subject. Yet, now that the intrinsic link between these historical figures has been laid bare, we cannot unsee it. Last has erased himself from the picture, but not despite, but because of including the subject(s) within his thought. Hence, the universal history of thought as New Atheist Historicity is grounded in that very paradox of the contingent decision of the reflexive subject which retroactively establishes necessity.

Too often we find thought-inhibiting knee-jerk reactions to Dawkins, Peterson, etc., that aim to downplay their influence and role in the contemporary zeitgeist. Last has succeeded in showing that the role of philosophy is foreign to such condemnations. In that sense, he’s staying true to the philosophical impulse and work that we also find in the contingency of Hegel’s decisions repeated into necessity; the necessarily eclectic nature of speculation. To read out of context, like Last is doing with Hegel and New Atheist historicity is precisely the decision that makes his analysis so powerful. It is ground-breaking by virtue of breaking apart the coordinates of what we assume the context to allow for. To enact real speculations is to write out of context.

But Real Speculations is solely one book on the theoretical side of Last’s project, on the side of praxis, of subjects in a social system, there is Philosophy Portal. This latter being an indispensable part of the systematic social work, the work of the concept, the work of freeing speech grounded in the collective reading of foundational primary sources of modern philosophy, as well as continual exposure to contemporary thinkers, communities and networks.

Both are constituted in Last’s repetitious — backwards circular — decision-making over the years, coming forth from his Christian Atheist service, i.e. his kenotic drive.

Together, Real Speculations and Philosophy Portal are astonishingly invigorating and pioneering projects that show how theory and practice can relate today. These ongoing projects, crystallised in a plethora of medial forms (like conferences and anthologies), show us that we can avoid the trap of theoretical obscurity, while not succumbing to the superego injunction to act (because we can’t bear to sit with our powerlessness and think). Our volatile and suffocating political climate is in desperate need of these projects. While being alert to the trap of growth, especially as it goes into overdrive in our digital realm (in the unsaid name of capital), I do believe that this theory and social interfacing can be impactful and inspirational to culture and society at large. Such projects are beacons of hope against the ubiquitous outsourcing of our subjectivity to AI, which is activelyrobbing us of the chance to sit and think with our anxiety.

Still, it would be wrong to see Real Speculations as a prescription on what to think or how to act. A glance at the cover of the book reveals it all. The book is meant to be taken in, digested, and flushed down the toilet.

If we can’t bring ourselves up to read out of context, we’ll surely fail to write — I mean shit — out of context. We can be glad that Last is not constipated. What follows now is an attempt of mine to enact some much needed Hegelian shitting.

I am reminded of an anecdote from a friend of mine who visited Russia during the economic crises right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During his visit in Nizhny Novgorod, he visited the largest library in the city located on Victory Square. My friend bought a ticket to go to the toilet, but when he entered there was no toilet paper to be found… Until he laid his eyes on the sill. There it was: Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He opened the book and saw that pages had been torn from it. Could it be? A stack of the same books lay beside it, ready for use. He tore the pages and helped himself with Lenin’s bold analyses. Later on, the lady at the counter informed him that indeed, there was an excess of books by Lenin, but a shortage of toilet paper. She did not laugh.⁹

We can only hope that if communism is our future, it is destined to collapse, so that a similar fate awaits Real Speculations.

Communisation

In the spirit of Real Speculations we’ll attempt to rethink the notion of communisation. But first, what is the status of speculation today? As Last notes in the preface, the word speculation gets a bad rap. He decides to salvage the term:

“To make speculations real, one cannot simply represent an external antagonism and mobilise it towards one’s own interests; rather, one has to embed oneself as self-repelling singularity in the real of antagonism itself, and live out these antagonisms to discover the result in their inner logic.”¹⁰

If we could oppose real speculations to anything, in a conceptual manner, it would be the bad infinity that merely asserts outward endlessness in an abstract line. Perhaps in the form of linear progress, a teleology which functions because the goal is forever out of reach, and toward which we are forever condemned to progress. Real speculations are truly infinite because the finite determinations that an author like Last makes are immanent to the disorientation of our epoch without the promise of an abstract beyond. Real speculations have dropped the fantasy of asymptotic motion, the idea that at the end of the day — at the falling of dusk — we have no choice but to strive to unreachable horizons. Real speculations do not impose an abstract universal from without, but run with the immanent antagonism to bring their logic to an end in the singular, like Last has done with New Atheist historicity.

If our political-economic situation is immanently theological and unconscious, if all the figures of New Atheist historicity are all but ideological symptoms of capital as God, what do we make of this God regarding speculation? In his paper on real abstraction, Mladen Dolar takes a stab at the issue. He thinks capital’s infinity in terms of bad speculation:

“The Hegelian speculation was precisely a move that transcended the bad infinity, while the speculation pertaining to capital is like the infinitization of the bad infinity, perhaps not a bad name for the nightmare of our times. Bad infinity raised to the level of bad speculation, the seemingly most speculative moment as the straying away from speculation.”¹¹

I want to propose communisation as a term that doesn’t represent the mobilisation of external antagonisms towards my interest, but as an effort to bring the inner logic of capital as the infinitisation of bad infinity to an end. I do this without the pretension to give an answer or solution to external antagonisms. Inspired by Sic, the now defunct International Journal for Communisation, I hold that the minimal approach of communisation exposes a problematic.¹²

Communisation is a notion that emerged during the crises of the late 60s and early 70s, originating in the left communist critique of the communist movement. Instead of conceiving of communism as the stage that requires the traversal through the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism, communisation already exists as the real movement of the liberation of value. Giles Dauvé defines it the following way:

”Communism is not an ideal to be realised: it already exists, not as alternative lifestyles, autonomous zones or counter-communities that would grow within this society and ultimately change it into another one, but as an effort, a task to prepare for. It is the movement which tries to abolish the conditions of life determined by wage-labour, and it will abolish them only by revolution.”¹³

According to communisers, Marx’s critique of the value-form had practically never been taken up by the communist movement. Democracy in the workplace (e.g. council communism), as well as centralised planning (e.g. really existing socialism) both leave the capitalist mode of production untouched.

More concretely, this notion was an alternative to Marxism-Leninism (e.g. the dominance of the Soviet Union and the European communist parties) and Maoism. Besides that, it was a response to capitalist restructuring:

“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a whole historical period entered into crisis and came to an end – the period in which the revolution was conceived in different ways, both theoretically and practically, as the affirmation of the proletariat, its elevation to the position of ruling class, the liberation of labour, and the institution of a period of transition. The concept of communisation appeared in the midst of this crisis.”¹⁴

The concept of the proletarian agent enacting the sublation of capitalism through its self-affirmation by political conquest of the state was put into question. The proletariat put itself into question. Consequently, the classic communist conception that a proletarian dictatorship would be the ground from which socialism and communism would be constructed was neutralised.

Value-form

To get to the heart of communisation, we have to understand what Marx means by capitalism. We commence with the value-form because he says the following in Capital vol. 1:

“The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character.”¹⁵

The term ‘form’ is crucial here. Marx was critical of political economists who took the form of value for granted and went straight to its content, which is labour. Marx was concerned about the form, what it does to the content, or how labour and its products take the form of quantifiable expressions, like commodities and money, which are both prerequisites for the capital-form. Because I’m condensing a gargantuan topic into an extremely condensed article, we’ll start with a simple triad:

Value in-itself (commodity-form)
1. A product of labor is useful. It has a qualitative use-value. A commodity is a product of labor that also has an exchange-value, which is quantitative. This is the dual character of the commodity.
2. Exchange-value is not the property of the commodity itself, but is relative to the exchange-value of other commodities. Analogous to gravity, each rock has a measurable weight, but not each rock contains the property of gravity in itself but is gravitational in relation to other entities which have weight. In the same way the commodity does not have exchange-value inside of it, but has an exchange-value in relation to other commodities. The exchange-value of the commodity is an instance of the relations between commodities as carriers of a discrete magnitude.
Value for-itself (money-form)
1. The abstract (exchange-)value of commodities can only be related to each other by being constituted in a world of commodities through a single expression of an exchange value that is itself not a mere commodity: the money-form.
2. The commodity-form and its instances (all the commodities) need an external measure in light of which each magnitude of exchange-value is expressed as such. To compare two commodities as carriers of different magnitudes of exchange-value, there must be the quality of exchange-value itself, which logically precedes quantification, this is expressed as money. Money is not the commodity-form that contains both exchange-value and use-value in the same entity (on different planes) but the embodiment of exchange-value as its own use-value.
3. Hence, the abstract value of commodities is constituted by the money-form, the universal equivalent. The commodity-form of value (in-itself) cannot exist without (i.e. presupposes) the money-form of value.
Value in-and-for-itself (capital-form)
1. The money-form qua value for-itself ceases to endure on its own accord if it does not ground itself in itself. It is not for-itself insofar as it’s grounded in the in-itself of the commodity and functions to sustain it through circulatory exchange.
2. Money must become the self-driving force, self-moving value. Capital is the money-form that turns its function of having its use-value in the realm of exchange-value, to its use-value being the redoubled self-serving expansion of itself.
3. The money-form becomes the capital-form when the use-value of the universal equivalent, the sole quality of value-form expressed in a magnitude of exchange-value redoubles itself. The capital-form has gone from being a means of exchange as money-form to the goal of the circulation of exchanges. Once this inversion sets off, the capital-form subordinates the commodity-form and the money-form to moments of its accumulation.

The Marxian formula for exchange circulation as the movement of value in-itself (commodity) and value for-itself (money) is:

Commodity — money — commodity (C — M — C)

With capital, value ceases to be a mere means of exchange but is the end of circulation, exchange-value qua universal equivalent becomes not only the use-value for exchange, but its accumulation is its use-value, value in-and-for-itself:

Money — commodity — more money (M — C — M’)

Now, we grasp the triad of the value-form. Still, the source of value is totally obscure. How does capital’s self-propelling wheel keep turning? In other words: what does its self-driving mechanism presuppose to accumulate itself with? Capital’s presupposition is that it can valorise the content into form. This content is the material world of production itself, namely the domain of humans and nature. Once the shift to abstract labour (quantifiable as value) takes place, capital assumes that it can continue to subsume production for its end. Nevertheless, the formal mechanism of capital is indifferent and blind to the transition from content to form.

Once this process from C-M-C to M-C-M’ is kick-started, it must keep the circulation of value in motion, it must keep exchanging the commodity-form for the money-form and vice versa for its goal: the accumulation of value as capital-form. The alternative is to cease being the end of circulation, which results in a reversion back to C - M - C, or the abolition of the value-form as such. This is how Marx explains the difference between the two formulas:

“The simple circulation of commodities — selling in order to buy — is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.”¹⁶

Capital, as its own end, comes to itself (M’) to expand itself, which is its end. This exposition of capital as value in-and-for-itself, this abstract self-movement is formal precisely because it is indifferent to the content for its self-continuation. The content of the value-form is labour, which is subsumed by self-driving value in its capital-form.

The question of communism is: how do we go beyond capital as mode of production given that the immediate danger is that we regress to social organisation based on direct domination? What is the alternative to valorising labour with capital as its driving force? The notion of communisation tackles this seemingly unovercomable self-valorisation process. Instead of relegating this issue to the future (after the installment of the dictatorship of the proletariat) it asserts that there must be an immediate shift that abolishes the mode of production based on the value-form and its social relations. In communism, we cease to constitute the value-form because it ceases to constitute us.

Communisation is a process of breaks. It consists of a series of enacting communist measures which are themselves the production of communism. There is a strong link between left communist theoreticians of communisation and Žižek’s rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even though Žižek never mentions communisation, I argue that we can see him as a communiser. For starters, in the following quote in his his Surplus-Enjoyment:

“Instead of trying to include everything that contributes to wealth in the domain of value, we should strive to liberate more and more spheres from the domain of value.”¹⁷

This is communisation, the striving to liberate spheres from the domain of value. Increasingly including more spheres into the domain of value is to support the subsumption of production by the capital-form. If this proposal might seem abstract, the debate on how to recognise forms like domestic work in the household, economically, i.e. value-wise, has been on-going and is still very much alive. Marxism, of course, rejects this route: it rejects the invasion of the capital-form into the family institution.

Let us now for a moment allow ourselves to ignore the political dimension of communism as the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat by violent means. Perhaps Marxism could have not accounted for our contemporary situation with all our digital technology spanning the globe, maybe we already have immanent communisation on the level of our global technological civilisation? Maybe Marx was totally correct for his day and age, but what if our technological progress has inaugurated a paradigm breaking shift in the mode of industrial and digital production that Marx and the 20th century communists could not foresee?

Production between value and non-value

Most computers in the world, whether running Android, MacOS or Linux are using free software by GNU, which is supported and closely tied to the Free Software Foundation (hereafter FSF).¹⁸ The FSF was founded with the explicit political promise of freedom. In the GNU manifesto, we find a relic of techno-optimism written by Richard Stallman in 1985. According to the GNU project:

“Free software means that the software’s users have freedom. (The issue is not about price.) We developed the GNU operating system so that users can have freedom in their computing.

Specifically, free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.”¹⁹

Back in the day, this sounded both promising and feasible. And it was. It was so viable in fact that even nowadays, GNU still makes up an essential part of a large share of computers. In this sense, the project has been a tremendous success. To ensure the emancipatory goal of the project, Richard Stallman, the main founder of the FSF and creator of GNU says:

“My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

That’s the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft.”²⁰

Are GNU and the FSF not great examples of liberating spheres from valorisation? Are they not communising projects that make the need for political revolution superfluous? Is this movement not a great example of communisation without being explicitly named as such? The answer is, of course, no. At the end of the GNU manifesto, Richard Stallman admits that programmers will earn less by not being able to sell their software. But, he assures that this compromise is worth it for the future promise. He explains that there’s two main practical reasons to accept this cumbersome fact of a lower salary. First, Stallman argues that sacrificing a high salary in the short-term will yield many rewarding effects for the creativity and freedom of the project, the work is its own reward. In the long term, on the level of the state, a Software Tax can be implemented. This Software Tax would fund the Free Software Foundation and other projects that build our digital commons. He says that this Software Tax might eventually be replaced by a selective voluntary donation. Instead of being taxed by the state and having distribution of the funds based on the current government, one could choose to donate the projects that one supports oneself, which one can legally take credit for as an alternative to the involuntary tax.

The last two paragraphs of the document contain his grand vision. It’s not far-fetched to see it as a version of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. He views the GNU project and the FSF as a step towards post-scarcity society. The beautiful vision reveals thoroughly ideological obfuscation of the political force of capital. Like beer without alcohol, we get communism without revolution.

However, the truth of the FSF does not end there. As is often the case with historical movements intended for emancipation, we find a universalised truth in their betrayal. The universality grounded in the betrayal of the FSF had to pass through it to come into being, but only to subsequently detach itself from it. The new necessity established by the betrayal needed the zealous and ardent activity of the FSF and GNU as the mediation destined to vanish. The word of the murder of free software is open source. This well known term originates in a political disagreement with the principles of the FSF:

“In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.””²¹

The reason to split off from the FSF was that the name open source is a politically pacified term that can be brought in line with the circulation of capital without scaring off investors, share-holders and the like. Free software’s aim is diametrically opposed to capital subsumption. It is based on the political principle of freedom on the side of production, distribution and the social relations embedded in them. The digital commons were supposed to liberate us. To give an example of the result of the open source software project, let’s take a look at the website of Mozilla Firefox, which is a popular open source browser. On it, they proudly proclaim to be “billionaire-free for 20+ years”. And even though Firefox is considered to be both open source as well as free software, in the terms of its license, it is not at all free from Big Tech. The reason they exist at all is because: “[S]ince 2005, Google’s contributed roughly 89% of Mozilla’s overall income.”²² There are multiple reasons for Google to invest in Firefox, the main one is to protect its monopoly on browser programs. Even though Firefox is both open source as well as free software, it is one of many examples of a FOSS (free and open source software) project completely subsumed by the valorisation process spearheaded by tech giants. More generally, the paradox of FOSS and non-valorised work show that capital doesn’t only rely on valorisation of production but also on maintaining a dependence on non-valorised labour. In the case of FOSS, it is often at the forefront of digital innovation, and is more often than not eventually subsumed by capital.

There are countless examples of the subsumption of open source projects. It goes both ways: on the one hand, there are initiatives which start out open source and are bought by corporations that close their source code in the process to transition to a proprietary model or discontinue the project;²³ on the other hand, there is massive lay-offs within companies which at the same time move initially proprietary model to an open source model, all while making huge profits.²⁴ The reason a company would open source their products is that centralised pieces of software, if they have a large user base, will be maintained by labour that doesn’t fall under the company’s pay-roll, improving the production while reducing the costs. The major difference between the mid-80s and now is that the FSF and the free software movement was not supported by Big Tech. Today, the industry has changed. From Canonical to FUTO, there are serious attempts at breaking up the monopolised space of digital platforms.²⁵ And these initiatives too are led by billionaires. In the case of FUTO, their mission is to reintroduce tech competition based on bringing out high quality products without a hidden agenda. With investment and in-house software development, while setting profit as the primary goal aside, they aim to liberate the tech industry from its current form, the centralised rent-extraction based oligopoly. A noble sounding goal that is welcome because it may have positive consequences for our digital social relations.

In the FOSS movement, there are plenty of examples of developers working on passion projects that are unsupported by billionaires and also without regard for profit. At first glance free software might look like a tremendous communising success of the liberation of human labour from capital valorisation, freeing the means of production. But as should be clear by now, spheres that are ‘liberated’ from value can constitute the other side of the system that keeps value in motion, which doesn’t mean that FOSS, Copyleft or even projects by renegade tech billionaires haven’t achieved positive results or have no emancipatory potential.

The labour required for building and maintaining the code bases that underlie our digital infrastructure is to a large extent socialised and happens on a global scale, while profits or rather cloud rents are privatised. Control and ownership of these means of digital production (called cloud capital) is a decisive factor in the contemporary logic of capital-labour and its class struggle. The digital networks are determinative for our everyday identity, how we act and think, and what we know and don’t know.

In terms of the coming decades, all facts point to political tensions rising and the inevitable increase of censorship along with it. Generally, we are not prepared for an exodus from Big Tech platforms, or, as Yanis Varoufakis calls them: digital fiefdoms owned by technofeudal lords.

A Word on Technofeudalism

Will capitalism ever end? This is a senseless question according to Varoufakis given that it is already in the process of being replaced. However, what has surely not come to an end is the fundamental divide that capitalism relies on, namely the separation between valorised and non-valorised work, which is succinctly formulated here:

”The capitalist drive to produce surplus value is paradoxically both the drive to exploit labour-power and, simultaneously, to expel it from the production process. Capital is impelled by its own dynamic, mediated through the competition between capitals, to reduce necessary labour to a minimum, yet necessary labour is the basis on which it is able to pump out surplus labour. Necessary labour is always both too much and too little for capital.”²⁶

We have already seen that the capital-form as its own end subsumes the labour process. But, crucially, it is also that which distinguishes between itself and its other. Capital posits itself retroactively in a self-differentiated manner containing what it needs to expel within its accumulative motion.²⁷

In his Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis staunchly upholds his claim that capitalism has already been killed. If we take his word on it, can we say that the capital and proletariat logic has reached its apogee? Varoufakis shows that through the mediation of finance capital, and especially since the crisis of 2008, a process responding to the low rate of profit in the world has pushed the development of technofeudalism. The origin of technofeudalism is in the enclosures of the digital commons by corporations which accumulate cloud capital through the extraction of cloud rent, turning its prod-users into cloud serfs. In these fiefdoms owned technofeudal lords, profit is subordinated to a secondary and almost negligible status. Cloud rent is now primary, grounded in the monopoly of digital commons. Instead of corporations monopolising markets, tech fiefdoms replace the markets themselves and emulate them, extracting cloud rent from both profit driven companies which sell the products on the platform, as well as their consumers. AI — I mean sophisticated machine-learning algorithms — are in service of sustaining this technofeudal structure which parasitises on capitalism. Technofeudal fiefdoms were and are still fueled by the way the financial sector and governments respond to capitalist crises. Since 2008, central banks all over the world are continuously printing trillions (the euphemism for which is quantitative easing). Where is all this money going?

“The only serious investment of the central bank’s poisoned money during this time [from 2008 to 2020] went into the accumulation of cloud capital. By 2020, cloud rents accruing to cloud capital accounted for much of the developed world’s aggregate net income. That in brief is how cloud rent gained the upper hand and profit retreated.” (Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis)²⁸

It’s notable that the democratic technosocialist model that Varoufakis proposes to struggle against technofeudalism looks awfully similar to a type of corporate anarcho-syndicalism which he is intimately acquainted with. For a short period, Varoufakis worked for Valve Software, owners of the biggest PC gaming fiefdom Steam, and a Big Tech company which works with a comparable model. Of course, unlike his micro-economic advisory job at Valve regarding the Steam Community Market (neither a market nor a community but fiefdom), Varoufakis is proposing macro-economic reform. He wants the state to command the structures and mechanisms of an economy made up of democratic digital corporations. He is calling for a new overarching technostructure. The problem with Varoufakis’ book is not its vigorous imagination beyond the dystopian technofeudalism that we currently live in, it is also not the fact that he adamantly argues against those who scoff at the thesis and claim technofeudalism is yet another moment of capitalism’s self-revolutionising. The problem in Varoufakis’ stellar book — which I take to be an important contribution to the conversation of communist critique of the left — is his democratism. As Žižek puts it in his Surplus-Enjoyment:

“Badiou’s thesis, which is “scandalous” for liberals, is more current than ever: “Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy.” What, today, prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely the belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism.”²⁹

The petrifying fetish of democracy is the foremost way to keep critique of capitalism at bay. One example of the falsity of democratism (and anarcho-syndicalism): take Valve, even though it’s not explicitly anarcho-syndicalist, this is how its organisational structure is generally (sometimes jokingly) described. Yet, if there’s any one figure in the world PC gaming corporations that stands out from the rest, it’s Valve’s founder and president Gabe Newell, who has constant praise and memes orbiting him. In a podcast where he talks about Valve, Varoufakis says that the open and egalitarian company culture has not had to face economic down-turns resulting in sacrificial lay-offs, which would be the true stress-test of its model.³⁰ Anyhow, what we see in all the GabeN memes is a return of the repressed, namely of the necessity of singular — non-democratic — leadership. Paradoxically, we might describe Valve’s model as organic centralism. There’s the centralism of Newell’s incontestable leadership, which grounds the relatively free and organic cooperation at the company. Anarcho-syndicalism, democratic technosocialism or variants of the democratic workplace don’t oppose or undermine capitalism. What such proposals do is occlude the role of singularity, the key role leaders play in political and social transformation. Without rejecting democratic technosocialism outright, it has to be said that there is no intrinsic value of democracy as a principle.

Moreover, we non-democratic communists should not shy away from critiquing the rampant collectivism at work in the revolutionary left that does not come to terms with the inherent limits of the 20th century movements. Time and time again, collectivism results in a disavowal of singularity, turning the real movement into a realisation of a messianic fantasy led by some figure of a dead father (e.g. Lenin) along with his interpreter (e.g. Stalin) validating, and validated by the letter of People’s History. Analogously, Kirsty Rosenstock has recently portrayed the reversal in the insightful manner shown below. From dictatorship of the proletariat to…

Kirsty Rosenstock, 2025

The disavowal of singularity turns into a collectivism of the one. The difference between matador Stalin and his proletarian bull is that the former is aware of the spectacle. Nevertheless, it is done on the behalf of People’s History. “Do not let the bull’s mistreatment be in vain!” those in the crowd tell us. And they are right: only with a matador can the spectacle of collectivism sustain itself.

At the same time, communists have been susceptible to bourgeois individuality which rests on the presupposed possibility of direct free relationality, like monads in a vacuum. But maybe this is only possible in communism outside of the exploitative and oppressive structures of capitalism?

No thanks, we don’t have to choose between collectivism and individualism. And more importantly, the opposition is not symmetrical. Chris Cutrone has pointed out that the popular leftist motto “none is free until all are free,” this red colored bourgeois slogan is the opposite of what Marx says. For him, the liberation of the individual precedes the liberation of the collective. Along this line, I claim that the passage through singular proletarisation is the critical zero-point to which we can respond to either with socialisation or communisation. The former has a plethora of forms on which it can rest to justify itself, like democratic socialism, i.e. worker’s management and redistribution of capital; the latter is the impossible act repeated in distinct communist measures, revolutionary not despite, but because we can’t imagine it. Our horizon is the product of the current mode of production that precludes such an act. Given that there is no gradual transition to abolish the capitalist mode of production — it comes in discontinuous breaks — we can say that each measure will set off from a groundless free fall. Apart from speculating on the weakest and vital links in the chain of world capitalism, we can’t can’t propose specific communist measures because we have no predetermined knowledge of the form of crises to which they will respond, immanently. There’s no standard from which we can measure their impact beforehand. A communist measure might turn out to merely have socialised capital, but it might also be a moment of the production of communism.

Whether or not technofeudalism is the end of capitalism or another metamorphosis of it, Varoufakis has set out the course for possible routes to socialise the digital commons. The question of communising technofeudal relations won’t be democratic, and will also not result in free individuals relating. If anything, they will be voluntarist acts carried out by radical singularities of their own accord. Through singular repetition, grounded in nothing, the universal necessity will be disclosed after the fact.

Can we consider the passage from the capitalist socialisation of (and in service to) technofeudal fiefdoms to communism?

Communisation is…

Communisers like the original left commmunists and Žižek are well aware of the problem that the capital-form relies on non-valorised labour and hinders proposing simplistic solutions for abolishing the value-form. Yet, it should not resign us to either pole of the classical communist antinomy between decentralised worker’s democracy and top-down centralised planning, which are both leaving the role of the value-form intact and unsaid. Are we hopelessly condemned to the all-engulfing valorisation of more and more domains of production and its opposite in service to it? Communisation doesn’t allow for resigning oneself to the temptation to ignore the role of value by throwing it over yonder far out in that hazy future where capitalism will be overdetermined by the political power of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialisation, to be fair, has emancipatory potential and can make an invaluable difference to the concrete lives of people, but it can also be — and most likely is — an obstinate foreclosure of communisation as revolution: a sclerotic reaction, counter-revolution.

What problem does communisation have with the dictatorship of the proletariat as the result of the political revolution, as the necessary safeguard against capitalist forces and the precondition to the social revolution that transforms capitalism step by step? If the FSF (like many techno-optimists) want communism without revolution, we can critique contemporary advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat for wanting revolution without communism. Choose one… and lose both.

Communising measures as iterations of the revolutionary production of communism are not deeds satisfying the demands of labour. That is the job socialising programs. Communisation is not a demands-based struggle resting on the affirmation of the political power of the working class. This affirmation is indistinguishable from an affirmation of capital, the political revolution of the working class is its own inherent limit. It implies counter-revolution at once, working against the production of communism.

Moreover, communisation rejects the progressive approach to communism inspired by Marx’s texts like the Communist Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Program. But, it also doesn’t succumb to the temptation to depoliticise, or apolitically localise communism in alternative communities or forms of non-valorised production and distribution. So what remains of communism as communisation?

“The work of TC suggests that the radical “way out” implied by value-form theory may be determined by the historical evolution of the capital-labour relation itself, rather than being the product of an ahistorically correct consciousness, free-floating scientific point of view or perspective of critique. The historical perspective on the class relation complements value-form theory. And the sophisticated analysis of capitalist social relations in systematic dialectic and value-form theory can inform the perspective of communisation by offering an elaboration of what exactly this class relation is, and how the particular social relations of capitalist society are form-determined as such.”³¹

According to the theory of communisation, the dictatorship of the proletariat has no basis because there’s no ahistorical class-consciousness to legitimise its rule on. Instead, we are not the master in our own house, reduced to a perspective without the possibility to raise itself above its historicity. Now, this reflexivity is not reducible to relativism, historicism or defeatism. It is a necessary zero-point. We must assume that for us there are no exceptions outside of the subsumption of the capital-form. There are no external resistances to capitalism that we can resort to. These are the stakes of real speculations tarrying with the bad speculation of capital.

Communisation is informed by the real speculations immanent to the social relations of capitalist society. Instead of the same old regurgitated need for an ‘objective’ class analysis concomitant with the search for a subject-supposed-to revolt, Žižek is an excellent resource on the class relation and the status of the proletariat. What remains of the proletariat once we discard class consciousness and the dictatorship of the proletariat? Žižek writes:

”On this point at least, Marx was right in his critique of Hegel, since he was here more Hegelian than Hegel himself — as is well known, this is the starting point of the Marxian analysis: the “proletariat” designates such an “irrational” element of the “rational” social totality, its unaccountable “part of no‐part,” the element systematically generated by it and, simultaneously, denied the basic rights that define this totality; as such, the proletariat stands for the dimension of universality, for its emancipation is only possible in/through the universal emancipation. In a way, every act is proletarian: “There is only one social symptom: every individual is effectively proletarian, that is to say, he does not dispose of a discourse by means of which he could establish a social link.” (Lacan) It is only from such a “proletarian” position of being deprived of a discourse (of occupying the place of the “part of no‐part” within the existing social body) that an act can emerge.”³²

To clarify, the quasi imperceptible shift, to come to know the absolute not only as substance but also as subject — that is proletarisation. The proletariat is no positive pole over against capital qua substance, but its inherently invisible counterpart that can’t affirm an identity in capitalist social relations. Here is what Marx says on the proletariat. It is

”a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; … a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.”³³

To invoke a metaphor: to proletarise is to short-circuit bourgeois ideology. As this quote shows, the result of this short-circuit is not to be in the safe outside of ideology. To the contrary, as we see above, it brings Marx to an affirmation of bourgeois humanism. Here, he reproduces the capitalist fantasy of non-alienation, which itself must be proletarised. You can see the kind of whirling that is engendered. Psychoanalysis rules out that there could be a return to the human after the abolition of the proletariat, but maybe there is the winning of a non-class, non-proletarian subjectivity?

It’s hard to say. Nevertheless, in Hegel’s philosophy there is no such thing as everlasting peace. Civilisation is bound up with its seeming other, i.e. war. So what happened to Marxism, which is more often than not associated with utopianism? In his Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, Last rightly relates this discussion to the infamous relationship between Hegel and Marx:

“[T]he perhaps unintended result of Marx inverting Hegel’s phenomenology and logic like this on the basis of Hegel’s politics, is that those who do not seriously tarry with Hegel’s phenomenology and logic (either because it is too difficult, or because of Marxist presuppositions about it being bourgeois ideology) end up being unable to work on the level of the working class from the perspective of self-relating negativity. Here we have the negative tendency in Marxism towards the self-utopianisation of the working class as capable of realising a non-alienated state of being, instead of seeing the working class as capable of realising itself as the becoming-other of alienation itself.”³⁴

In psychoanalysis, self-related negativity is radicalised to the notion of the death drive. When Žižek claims that we must go through Lacan to be a Marxist today, in my view, it means that our choice is to betray Marxism in two ways. Either, we do what Marx said in the above quote and state that communism will be a return to the exuberant vitality of the human, a renewed basis for the uninhibited flourishing of creative labour. Or, we take serious Marx’s saying that in communism, work/production is “not only a means of life but life’s prime want”.³⁵ In other words, we double down on the death drive on the level of political economy (work as want), meaning that think the knots of the capital-form’s production, as the opening to a mode of production in which desire’s shift towards the drive are produced or facilitated by communist measures. Whereas means and want are separated in desire (striving at a distance from its goal), they are unified in the drive (the end is to circle around the missed goal). At worst, socialisation functions as the stop-gap to proletarisation. Solely from repetitious retreats to the proletarian non-position can communist measures be enacted. Proletarisation calls forth the revolutionary act; it calls forth the impossible. For Žižek, this is the Leninist approach needed more than ever today, exemplified by Lenin’s text On Ascending a High Mountain:

“[Communists] who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).”³⁶

There’s no positive identity of the proletariat, there’s no way to oppose it to other objectively existing classes. Rather, the proletariat is a symptom. In my recent presentation called The Truth of Communism, I’ve tried to express this by stating that there is a non-class society.³⁷ Bourgeois ideology obfuscates class struggle, that is true. It argues that there is no such thing as a class society but a society of free individuals that by rational self-interest choose to enter into egalitarian economic contracts. One is not a communist by calling out the fantasy on which capital relies, the presupposition of infinite growth/expansion. What a communist does is call out the most concrete contradiction between capital and proletariat. Yet, value-form is not something that a communist can distance himself from practically: we don’t exit capitalist relations by calling out the illusion that drives it. The first thing ideology claims is that it is outside of ideology. Our ideology is in what we do, how we relate and are produced by capital. As a good old left communist puts it regarding the bourgeois ideology assigning the primacy of labour over against capital:

”While it seems true and politically effective to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital.”³⁸

And to paraphrase Žižek: precisely this assertion of political effectiveness and labour’s primacy over capital is the capitalist fantasy par excellence. It is a bourgeois capitalist fantasy in the form of a communist heresy. Regardless of whether we point out that there is or is not a class society, we act as if there is not. Capitalism not only alienates us, but also sustains itself with the illusion that we can liberate ourselves from symbolic alienation, that we can be in control of our symbolic universe. Nonetheless, just like we must take responsibility for the unconscious, we are to take responsibility for our capitalist alienation… In past historical movements, it has taken the form of attempts at the management of capitalist economies in the name of the working class and its vanguard party. The history of the communist project has shown that communists can either be very effective at facilitating capital and its industrial modernisation… or not, which is a classic left communist point:

“Marxism as ideology served the non-Marxian practice of transforming Russia into a modern capitalist state.”³⁹ (Paul Mattick, 1962)

So do I claim that Marx’s purely theoretical insights have nothing to do with Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism? Not at all. Marx himself was tremendously ambiguous on what to do politically, especially regarding his insights on the value-form. His politically prescriptive remarks, like in the Critique of the Gotha program, seem to lend themselves to a view that gives up on the criticality of the value-form in the communist movement. In a personal communication, Chris Cutrone pushed back on me on this point, arguing that a proletariat which manages capital is the first step to take responsibility for it.

To understand what type of role the proletariat has in relation to capital, let’s take the following quote by this left communist author:

“For the proletariat to recognise itself as a class will not be its ‘return to itself’ but rather a total extroversion (a self-externalisation) as it recognises itself as a category of the capitalist mode of production. What we are as a class is immediately nothing other than our relation to capital. For the proletariat, this ‘recognition’ will in fact consist in a practical cognition, in conflict, not of itself for itself, but of capital.”⁴⁰

To use Hegel’s words: proletarian subjectivity is “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness.”⁴¹ It is recognition of capital’s conflict with itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the affirmation of the worker’s state, is thus primarily grounded in facing that the proletariat is responsible for something it is not in control of, the capital-form as M-C-M’. That is why Cutrone explains that there are two steps to be made here: two steps in overcoming the ‘double fetish’ of capital. To use an old example, labour vouchers can bring us to the recognition that socially necessary labour time is a quantification made possible by the dual character of the commodity in line with M-C-M’. Second, once we have brought out commodity fetishism by making it explicit with such socialising policies (making everyone a worker in a system with democratic workplaces while the state takes over central command of capital), the discrepancy between the bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production manifesting in the division between capital and labour will become apparent in a way that has not been possible prior to the worker’s state. In short, we go from capitalism through socialism to communism, facilitated by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, at the moment of ascending to power, merely takes hold of the capitalist mode of production. What is wrong with this?

As we can learn from history, the dictatorship of the proletariat can mean prohibiting worker’s strikes, crushing them if necessary. Here, I’m not saying that historical examples (like the tragedy of the Kronstadt Rebellion) are evidence of the Bolshevik’s authoritarian falsity, but to the contrary, an exemplary case of the explosive negativity inevitable in a struggling ‘worker’s state’. So instead of rallying against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it is here that we should return from Marx to Hegel… Perhaps here we should juxtapose communisation to the dictatorship of the proletariat on the level of Hegel’s triad of the ethical system. As Last notes in Lacanese, Marx’s reversal of Hegel in his Critique of the Philosophy of Right claims the state is imaginary whereas the family (as first moment of the ethical system) is real:

“Marx wants to force philosophy into a practical politics that centres the material conditions of Real man, and specifically the Family and Community (or civil society). Of course, in this forcing, he is not asking us to consider the material conditions of any Family or Community, but as mentioned above, the Families and Communities that comprise the “working class”, or the “proletariat”, which he sees as the material basis for a new civil society which re-organises the principle of society itself. This proletarian Family and Community is not exactly equal to the peasantry of pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society, but rather is actively produced by capitalist and industrial conditions[.]”⁴²

The state is imaginary whereas the family is real, for both Hegel and Marx community, is reserved for the symbolic. Are we skipping over the family and community if we take the capital-labour logic to be a problem relegated to the socialist construction in the dictatorship of the proletariat? Has Marxism properly thought its relation to Hegel’s ethical system and its triadic partitions?

Where do we start? Hasn’t capital taken hold of each moment of Hegel’s ethical system?

I’m proposing to think the role of the big Other and jouissance in the real of capitalist socialisation, proletarised to the point of calling us upon the act of the communist measure in all three facets of the system. Can the social revolution come before, or coincide with the political revolution? And if we have an answer to that question, what is the nature of the question to which we are responding? In other words, whatever the answer is, in regards to which moment of the triad are we thinking it? Without having to disregard the painfully intractable problem of the state that the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ points to, we can’t and shouldn’t return to it as it as a stop-gap which, in favour of collective self-affirmation, risks to forego the equally — if not more — intractable problem of family and community. That is what proletarised communisation might help us to think. The singularity of the act; the contingency of the communist measure; the opacity of our symbolic alienation; the proletarian family; these are all questions which proletarisation discloses for communisation to address.

Revolution as communisation doesn’t resolve these issues, as of now, that is what capital does, destroying itself in its wake. Communisation is the production of communism within and against the capital-form, immanent to its crises and class struggles. Communist measures, as simple measures by the proletariat within the class struggle produce the class belonging as an external constraint, a conflict of capital, which is what it abolishes. It does this not as momentary, territorial gains, but the production of communism as the struggle against capital: the struggle of the proletariat against its own constitution as class that is not a class. It’s own class character is capital, it is the limit of its action. The communist measure turns the proletariat against itself. The revolution is universal abolition of the proletariat. Revolution brings about its own counter-revolution. Is proletarisation of capital the struggle of communisation as communism? If that would be the case, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish communism from capitalism.

The simultaneity of communism’s production resides in the fact that communisation is not a promise that is yet to be realised, not a possibility that we are getting closer and closer to but dissipates as soon as we clasp it, but the real movement that doesn’t even seem to exist. Because perhaps it doesn’t. Regardless, we can’t simply assume that it does. Communism is not an abstract standard against which we measure the capital-labour relation, it is the impossible call which the proletarian subject decides to heed by virtue of its inexistence as a fully constituted class in capitalism. Communism does not complete the proletariat as a class, but terminates its spectral constitution as a non-class by universal abolition of the valorisation of labour and the divide between classes as such.

In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx delivers scathing critique of the labour as the source of value (capital circulation) and other tenets put forth by the program. He proposes the continuation of bourgeois right after the revolution through the use of labor vouchers, a wage without the deduction of surplus by capital. He says that:

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”⁴³

Marx never published this text during his life. Today, it leaves the most important questions open at best, and leaves us fixated with orthodoxy at worst. Instead of relegating the issue of the immediacy of the communist measure as the act of the transition from value-form to its abolition to the future, communisation faces up against the immanence of the logic of capital-labour by having its zero-point in proletarised subjectivity. Throughout the 20th century, from early on up till now the left communist current pointed to something that merits to be repeated today:

“Today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias.”⁴⁴ (Karl Korsch, 1950)

There is a non-class society.⁴⁵ This is what dogmatic Marxisms disavow. Lodging the problem into the future, appealing to the notion of class-consciousness and the dictatorship of the proletariat is part of the problem that point to a return back from Marx to Hegel. Usually, dogmatic forms of communism reproduce the fantasy of the imaginary mastery over our fate with a non-alienated horizon.

With proletarisation as a type of subjective destitution toward the unconscious qua self-related negativity, I’m attempting to think the shift from forms of intentional and explicit communist identity, to a mode of jouissance that is not reducible to a language and can withstand a multiplicity of differentiated identities because they rendered irrelevant in the singular act of communisation. Proletarian subjectivity is the non-dialectical core, the zero-point of the drive. That is the heart which constitutes communisation, the production of communism through the establishment of communist measures in conflict with capital. Or, to put it metaphysically: communisation is the repetition of radically contingent decisions by subjects repeated into universal necessity.

Proletarising Marxism means letting go of the ‘ahistorically correct consciousness’. Class consciousness, this imaginary figment upon which political activity tends to be based, is reactionary because it lends itself to the refusal to pass through the necessity of capital’s total subsumption. The working class is not the exception to capital. We start off from the totalisation of capital and its points of immanent failure outside of which there is nothing. There we find the proletariat which in its self-abolition might — we can’t be certain — produce communism.

Far from being a way to retract into obscurity, it is the fixation on the right (meaning imaginary) ahistorical insight in the name of ‘class consciousness’ and the dictatorship of the proletariat that leaves aside questions of the immediate abolition of the value-form in the act of communisation.

So, communism without revolution, or revolution without communism? To paraphrase our favourite Stalinist Žižek, they are both worse. Both are markers of capitalist alienation and the fetishisation of supposedly impending non-alienation. Both must make way for a ruthless proletarisation of all that exists. In the words of Paul Mattick, from whom this notion is inspired:

“For Korsch, all the imperfections of Marx’s revolutionary theory which, in retrospect, are explainable by the circumstances out of which it arose, do not alter the fact that Marxism remains superior to all other social theories even today, despite its apparent failure as a social movement. It is this failure which demands not the rejection of Marxism but a Marxian critique of Marxism, that is, the further proletarisation of the concept of social revolution.”⁴⁶ (Paul Mattick, 1962)

Marxism today requires a merciless and thorough betrayal of its own thought and political action — that is proletarisation. The immanence of our theopolitical-economic situation is already imposing radical measures for the perpetuation of the capital-form, especially on the level of fictitious capital and cloud capital. The deadlock expressed in proletarised subjectivity calls for its response by communist measures. Here, before heading deeper into the weeds of the value-form, let me clear up the basic gap from which I’m operating. It is situated in the assumption of communist theories (about communisation or else) which, like Žižek puts it, don’t enact the return from the idealist Marx to the materialist Hegel:

”[I]n a way, Hegel was closer to the mark than Marx, the twentieth‐century attempts to enact the Aufhebung of the rage of the disenfranchised masses into the will of the proletarian agent to resolve the social antagonisms ultimately failed, the “anachronistic” Hegel is more our contemporary than Marx.”⁴⁷ (Žižek, Less Than Nothing)

Even though I’m tremendously appreciative of the left communist speculations, time and time again — without exception as far as I’ve seen — I keep coming up against the motive that communism is non-alienated. It’s mainly visible in the form of humanism and gender abolition which function as stop-gaps to think the concrete rituals of community and family, which psychoanalysis works through with concepts such as unconscious enjoyment, the big Other, and sexuation.

No communism without psychoanalysis means that we can no longer afford to think its production without proletarisation as symbolic castration, which is not merely human or dialectical, but silent in the repetition of the drive.

Žižek’s concept of communism differentiates itself in these two aspects: (1) the return from Marx to Hegel, and (2) a Marxism that has thought through the consequences of the psychoanalytic paradigm. To simplify to the utmost: the former is exemplified by war communism, the latter by the death drive.

The Non-All of Absolute Capitalism

Just after Žižek’s above-quoted passage proposing the liberation from value, he turns around and writes:

“However, this in no way implies that we should simply exclude more and more domains from the sphere of valorization. Valorization could and should also be exploded “from within,” by way of exploiting the paradoxes and unexpected results of the inclusion of new spheres in the process of capitalist valuation.”⁴⁸

What does this mean? To unpack this jarring reversal by Žižek, I will invoke the notion of absolute capitalism. The reason I’m making use of this term here is twofold:

If capitalism has already been replaced by technofeudalism, it had to pass through the conceptual peak of total subsumption, which is what absolute capitalism denotes;
If this is not the case and technofeudalism is a mere moment of capitalism — I won’t give a definitive answer in this article — then, it is not simply capitalism, but capitalism that is caught up in its own loop of total subsumption (explained below).

Besides, the speculative connotation of the Hegelian term ‘absolute’ points to both the zenith of a concept, as well as its letting go, or release; its comprehension as well as absolution. Communisation is to be thought within the paradox of absolute capitalism. As we have seen, the logic of capital-labour precludes the endorsement of proletarian autonomy as a site of positive resistance. Or, taken in a more general sense, it precludes the search for a subject-supposed-to-revolt-for-us, whether that is the working class, Palestinians or LGBTQ+. We pass from Lacan’s masculine logic of the All (capital) and its Exception (resisting identities and collectives) to the feminine logic of the non-All, as indicated here by Žižek:

“A nice example of Hegel’s insight into how the Absolute always involves self-splitting and is in this sense non-All: with the production of the workforce itself as a field of capital investment, the subsumption under capital becomes total – but, precisely as such, it becomes non-All, it cannot be totalized, the self-referential element of the workforce itself as a capital investment introduces a gap which introduces imbalance into the entire field.”⁴⁹

To reiterate, the proletariat is a symptomatic knot of the class struggle of the logic of capital-labour. The proletariat is not a positive sociological category, but the expression of the fundamental cut in the social edifice regarding the logic of capital-labour. In other words, there is no ‘proletarian exception’, no fully constituted working class identity over against capital. The proletarised subject merely takes cognisance of capital’s antagonism and its actual forms. Proletarisation is hystericisation. Communisation, then, haunts us in the interruptions of the compulsion of capital. In what follows, I will show that with total subsumption, the hystericisation of capital’s self-conflict is brought to its extreme, to what Lacan calls the logic of the non-all without exception.

Formal, Real and Total Subsumption

The logic of the non-All of absolute capitalism can be illustrated with the triad of subsumption. Subsumption is the operation by which capitalism takes hold of pre-capitalist modes of production, bringing them in line with capital accumulation, which becomes its determinative form. When Marx introduces this term, he distinguishes two forms: formal subsumption and real subsumption. In short, the former is the subsumption of labour by the domination of capital, the latter radically transforms the nature of the labour process itself. Capital accumulation as the form-determining factor of the labour process (as a social practice) is the production of surplus value. To specify how the shift from formal to real subsumption comes about, Marx distinguishes between two types of surplus value:

“Just as the production of absolute surplus value can be regarded as the material expression of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, so the production of relative surplus value can be regarded as that of the real subsumption of labour under capital.”⁵⁰

Viewed with a historical lens, in these first two phases (or forms) of capitalist subsumption, the working class was driven to assert itself against capital, to unite itself in a political will that served the interest of labour. In absolute capitalism, total subsumption rules out the self-affirmation of the working class while at the same time strengthening the disavowal of the class struggle.

As a triad it looks as follows:

Formal subsumption & absolute surplus value
1. Capital externally dominates the labour process, making its accumulation the decisive purpose of labour’s products.
2. Capital extracts surplus value by prolonging labour time.
Real subsumption & relative surplus value
1. Capital internally form-determines the labour process.
2. Capital extracts surplus value by revolutionising its compulsion, radically transforming labour’s social practice, productivity and social relations making them adequate to the needs of capital.
Total subsumption & redoubled surplus value
1. The distinction between external domination and internally formed concrete labour breaks down. Labour as social practice ceases to be asserted independently from capital.
2. Capital extracts surplus value by investing in the commodity that produces surplus value, i.e. labour power. Fictitious capital and the function of debt and credit are critical in this reproduction of labour power for its own sake, which is neither a mere commodity, nor simply a surplus value producing commodity, but a commodity totally subsumed by capitalist investment.

To concretise this mind-bending logic, let’s take the following example by Marx. As we’ll see, he uses it to explain the transition from pre-capitalist production to capitalist production. The reason I’m bringing it to attention is because it can also be read as the opposite, i.e. as the result of total subsumption. What Marx viewed as a pre-capitalist remnant emerges as the effect of total subsumption:

“Firstly: Some of the labour which produces commodities in capitalist production is performed in a manner which belongs to earlier modes of production, where the relation of capital and wage labour does not yet exist in practice, and therefore the category of productive and unproductive labour, which corresponds to the capitalist standpoint, is entirely inapplicable. But in accordance with the ruling mode of production even those relations which have not yet been subsumed under it in fact are subsumed under it notionally. The self-employed labourer, for example, is his own wage labourer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage labourer. Anomalies of this type then offer a favourable field for outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labour.”⁵¹

How does this distinction between productive and unproductive labour take shape? As Marx explains, these are fetishistic categories viewed from the standpoint of the capitalist. Productive labour accumulates capital whereas unproductive labour does not. Selling one’s wage as such is not necessarily productive for capital, but if it is done in order to make money, it is. Marx correctly points out that this distinction only comes about because of formal and real subsumption.

What Marx called the ‘anomaly’ of the self-employed labourer today has become the norm of the self-entrepreneur. And if not the norm factually, it is the norm notionally. According to a survey, 36% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials consider themselves to be entrepreneurs.⁵² This seemingly pre-capitalist anomaly shows that the non-all of total subsumption expresses itself in the break-down of fundamental capitalist presuppositions. The self-conception of wage labourers as capitalists, as self-entrepreneurs, is also visible in the massive investments in education and healthcare. These sectors take up considerable chunks of the economy, attracting huge investments in the workforce itself. Because Marx was confined to his epoch, he could necessarily not conceive of the reversal of real subsumption to total subsumption. Having said that, it undermines these two following points by him:

“The worker too buys services with his money, which is a kind of expenditure, but no way to convert money into capital.

No one buys medical or legal “services” as a means of converting the money expended in this way into capital.”⁵³

Because the workforce’s self-conception is capital, it does convert these services into capital — into itself. The principle differs only in terms of quantity, of how much is invested, whether it is young cloud serfs investing hundreds of dollars in performance enhancing drugs and basic medical care or billionaire entrepreneurs investing in R&D on human augmentation and brain-computer interfaces.

Marx understood real subsumption to be the basis for the introduction of formal subsumption in new branches of production across the globe. Total subsumption, in contrast, is the introduction of redoubled surplus value which distinguishes itself from normal (both relative and absolute) surplus value by virtue of its reversal: from workforce for production (formal subsumption); to production for production (real subsumption); to reproduction of the workforce as the site of the capitalist investment conditioned by the bad speculation of fictitious capital (total subsumption). One of the results (and drivers) of total subsumption are the massive investments in Big Tech. In technofeudal fiefdoms, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour does not hold because curating and publicising our most intimate and personal identities is the most important work we do for cloud capital.

Weirdly enough, we can also invert the triad of subsumption. Instead of taking production and the labour process as being form-determined by capital, we can also see the effects of total subsumption if we hone in on reproduction and consumption.

Traditionally, the video game industry made products to be sold on the market for consumption. Starting around the mid 2000s, the free-to play (and pay-to-win) model was introduced. Instead of buying the game, it was distributed for free, with the caveat that you had to buy in-game items or a subscription to enjoy the full product. In the first example, the game industry had to create more and better games for the production of surplus value, in the second example, games themselves were changed, form-determined by capital. Today, we are submerged in the third phase.

Deadlock is a third-person MOBA shooter game developed by Valve Software. As of writing, it is unreleased and in its alpha phase. The game itself is free-to-play and has a player base in the tens of thousands. Valve has chosen to distribute this game to a select few through its cloud fiefdom Steam. To acquire the game, one has to receive an invite by someone who already owns the game.

What is the point of this? Through these personal invites, Valve pre-selects for a player base that is made up of people that are generally more involved in the culture. Of course, if one is lucky enough to get an invite, it is hard not to try the game out. And, by freely distributing the game in a selective process, Valve is ensuring that the game gets more than enough play-testing before the release. Once it releases, there will be a market for aesthetically pleasing in-game items made by, and for the community, similar to their game Team Fortress 2.

Once this game becomes popular, only a small percentage of its players need to buy in-game items to keep it profitable. History shows that usually a tiny percentage spends the majority of money in these types of games. But in technofeudal structures, not only buying the product, but also consuming the product itself generates value. Buying an in-game item is, for example, part of the game, not merely a means to acquire the game. And, playing the game sends out data that Valve can use to improve the game. Such games aren’t simply about being bought and played. There is a whole ecology embedded in them: E-Sports, live-streaming, in-game markets, expanding the game’s lore by creating films and series based on it, etc. Such games cement a whole cultural ecology conditioning its consumers, turning them into producers in the process — what Varoufakis calls prod-users.⁵⁴

Whereas total subsumption on the side of labour entailed the collapse of the distinction between workforce and capital, we can also see the technofeudal consequence on the side of consumption. Through a combination of non-valorised labour (prod-using the game yields value) as well as valorised labour (Valve employees), Valve creates a product of labour (game qua commodity) that generates capital. The consumption of the product is indistinguishable from labour that valorises the product. The very game itself is a tech fiefdom experienced as leisure time away from real subsumption of the extraction of normal surplus value. It is not only based on cloud rents (although it is) but also on binding people together in a centralised digital interface that mediates their libidinal economy through gamified dynamics embedded in a captivating aesthetic universe.

Where is the redoubled surplus value here? The distribution of the game for free redoubles surplus value since it is an investment that collapses the mode of production (and consumption). Both the user base as well as the technofeudal owners invest varying degrees into the game. Labour is not simply form-determined by capital by extracting relative surplus value from Valve employees by the production of commodities. Labour begets capital, but this capital begets itself because its usage is indistinguishable from the labour process. The consumer base is the workforce itself, which is at once self-valorising capital.

The non-All persistently points to aporias of capital’s compulsion. The identity of the self-entrepreneur encapsulates both the wage labourer as well as capitalist. In the digital context, this is underpinned by the reinscription of forms of domination that simultaneously appear as pre-capitalist as well as post-capitalist. Hence, the poignant and ambiguous term technofeudalism, which reflects the strange collapse of the feudal past and the techno-future in the capitalist present. Perhaps that also relates to the popularity of countless books, films, series, books and games bifurcated between the genres of fantasy and science fiction.

Anyhow, the self-entrepreneur as it takes shape in the digital economy is a cloud serf. So even though cloud capital is just that, a form of capital (a certain concretisation of labour) it also points us to the seeming beyond of capitalism. In this either or, it is the subject that lies at the intersection which is driven by both surplus value as well as cloud rent and redoubled surplus value. The non-orientability of the boundaries of capitalism and its shift into other forms of life is the site of its non-all where no point of orientation can entrench an All against which an Exception can be constituted. Technofeudalism is one expression given to the excesses of the total subsumption of capital.

The processes of total subsumption only function because of the key role fictitious capital has taken in regards to real subsumption. Žižek writes:

“Since valorization of the workforce is the key aspect of capitalist reproduction, we should never forget that in the sphere of fictitious capital no longer demands personal freedom and autonomy: direct interpersonal relations of subordination and domination return in it. It may appear that this reasoning is too formal, but one can elaborate this in a more precise way: fictitious capital involves debt, and being indebted limits personal freedom; for the workers, debt is involved in the (re)production of their workforce itself, and this debt limits their freedom to bargain for a work contract.”⁵⁵

The production of redoubled surplus value brings capitalism to its truth, collapsing it into non-capitalist relations that are vital for capital. Absolute capitalism needs total subsumption facilitated by fictitious capital for the growth of real capital and cloud capital. In this absolute capitalism, the reproduction of the species — libidinal economy manifesting as creation of families — sustained by the barrier between work and life is acutely in danger. As Balibar puts it:

“No form of life as agency, activity and passivity, even suffering, even dying, can be lived outside a commodity form and a value-form that is in fact a moment in the valorization process of capital. This is not a reduction of the individual’s life to ‘bare life’ as Agamben calls it. In a sense it is just the opposite: the denaturalization of life, or the production of a ‘second nature’ – albeit not in any form (since every human culture is a ‘second nature’), but in purely capitalist form.”⁵⁶

If this might seem overly dramatic, let me bring a fitting technofeudal example. More and more we are starting to see family vlogs, videos of children playing and acting in front of the camera, earning money for their parents while contributing to the accumulation of cloud capital. There’s cases of mothers ‘pranking’ their children by telling them that their grandparents died, bringing the children to tears, just to shout “it’s a prank!”, laughing at them and confusing the horrified child. Of course, the parents don’t shy away from shamelessly portraying the child’s shock in the thumbnails. There are instances of children crying and begging not to be filmed, but how would their intimate family life sustain itself if it weren’t for the audience and YouTube revenues? One might also be familiar with the tasteless TikToks wherein people film themselves grieving the death of their loved ones. It’s not for us to blame them for not knowing any other way to work through that loss. Moreover, viewed from a fetishistic capitalist sense, these are all highly productive forms of labour.

Capitalist Discourses and Communist Leadership

Welcome to the total subsumption of absolute capitalism and its technofeudal excesses. The thorough hollowing out of the natural substance of capitalism in real subsumption has radicalised to the point of shattering the illusion that we’ll decouple ourselves from the compulsion of the capital drive by becoming natural humans again. It makes place for total subsumption and its disavowal of the gap between the human drive and the capital drive, short-circuited in proletarisation and calling us to enact communist measures that produce a non-capitalist second nature.

The plethora of technofeudal perversions (in personal entertainment and family) are just some examples that point to the civilisational stakes of thinking the subject’s ritualistic libidinal economy.

Figures of supposed traditional authority like Peterson and Tate are attractive because they install new boundaries to which their followers can measure themselves. To separate the excessive enjoyment (porn, gaming, drugs) from what actually matters for a man’s purpose, e.g. conquering women to guarantee offspring, religion, sports, money and legacy. These faux-traditional authorities aim to counteract the abyssal hellscape of addiction in digital capitalism.⁵⁷

Opposed to this is the communist leader who functions as an analytic master. He short-circuits capital’s university discourse (democratic materialism as constituted by free individuals without master) and the hysterical discourse as self-revolutionising activity reintegrated by capital. Hystericising the perversion of the Master (who may appear in the guise of university discourse) is not a guaranteed act of resistance but an indispensable moment taken up by the capital-form. Last formulates the problem thus:

“[P]erversion is about the non-reproductive repetition of libidinal enjoyment internal to intersubjectivity. This is the truth we need to hystericise, not necessarily to instantiate a traditional reproductive constraint reducing repetition to reproduction (neurotic society), but rather to actually think about how we would like to repeat inclusive of reproduction (drive society).”⁵⁸

The truth of the re-emergence of religious zealotry attempting to re-deploy neurotic structures for the reproduction of the species is in how it addresses the dissatisfaction with the neutral university discourse. What is expressed in the popularity of these figures is the demand to bind desire to an edifice that keeps excessive enjoyment at bay. Especially the Other’s enjoyment epitomised by sexual liberation and its twin, ice-cold codification of sexuality in gender pronouns and suffocating explicit rules supplanting traditional gender roles grounded in the patriarchal family. The pacification of hysteria by neurotic reproduction and its mirror in the perverted drive of capital differentiates the figure of traditional authority on the level of religion, from the communist leader on the level of absolute knowing. The latter, the analytic master, doesn’t pacify or channel the hysteria back toward neurosis or perversion, but relentlessly yet tactfully forces us to our freedom to think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the end all be all of our forms of life. In the words of Žižek:

“A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly – to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside since our “natural state” is one of inert hedonism, of what Badiou called “human animal.” The underlying paradox is here that the more we live as “free individuals with no Master,” the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities – we have to be pushed/disturbed into freedom by a Master.”⁵⁹

So, beyond the crude affirmations of Master discourse against capitalism (traditionalism), the Hysterical discourse against capitalism (lapsing back into perverted capital-drive) and the University discourse (the capital-master in guise of neutrality), there is the Analytical discourse which doesn’t serve any master-signifier like democracy or freedom, but undermines their edifying functions.

Whereas the University discourse is the Master discourse in the guise of neutrality, the Hysteric points this out, driving them to master figures (Peterson, Tate etc.). As Marx oftentimes emphasises, capital doesn’t dominate because it is owned by masters qua capitalists, but these masters themselves are mere embodiments of the impersonal movement of capital. Capital’s domination shape shifts, oscillates between Master and University discourse, whereby the hysteric takes place of this oscillation, torn between the need for a master and the excess stemming from the failure to function properly within capital.

How do we distinguish between hysteria that relapses into the capitalist oscillation of university discourse and master discourse, and hysteria that falls towards the analyst’s emancipatory discourse? Instead of asserting the analyst’s discourse, or the figure of the analytic master as the exception to capital, we have to go all the way and rid ourselves of the illusion that there’s any special type of discourse that is not capitalist discourse. Here, we see the consequence of total subsumption, of absolute capitalism:

“The final result is the capitalist version of the analyst’s discourse, with surplus-enjoyment/value in the commanding post.”⁶⁰

Instead of fetishising the ubiquity and all-engulfing power of the capital-form, we can uncover the mechanisms at play which drive it. But why would we be communists if there is nothing outside of absolute capitalism, if the call to communism is hopelessly self-defeating? Is it not better to resign and accommodate ourselves to the impossibility of overcoming capital? That is an attractive solution, one which is taken up by progressivism in the framework of liberal democracy. It claims that we must do a better job at striving to improve capitalism, instead of acknowledging that it is this ideology as a variant of capital’s university discourse which leads straight back to the return of the master discourse in figures like Trump et al.

So, there is no doubt that as communists we have to affirm our complete determinism by capital. We have to go all the way because dispelling the masculine logic (All/Exception) — this disenchantment with the Cause — is the return to its origin, to the proletarian zero-point, the point from which communism is produced.

Analytic mastery (as opposed to university-hysteria) undercuts the repression, disavowal and foreclosure of capital, closing us in on its non-All.

In the diagram below, we can see that capital’s domination starts from the imposition of a master discourse, which splits into the formally neutral university discourse and its hysterical dissatisfaction. The analytical discourse resolves this split of the two by addressing the subject, intervening at its symptom with the goal of dissecting and neutralising its unconscious desire for a master that would constrain its drive and bind it to a neurotic edifice. Because the analyst’s discourse frustrates this solution, the subject is pushed to its own freedom, to its own indestructible core.

The Four Capitalist Discourses

How exactly does surplus value command us? Let me elucidate it with the psychoanalytic concept of the symptom, the site where the Real is stitched up, the scar where analytic mastery makes its incision. One of the critiques Žižek has of Marx, is that his communism was symptomatic in the sense that Marx thought that the self-bootstrapping nature of capitalism could be transposed to communism without negatively affecting incessant production, which would be curbed to human needs. Instead of capitalism which has its impetus in its obstacle, i.e. crises as the driver of its movement; in communism we would only have the impetus of production without its excesses. In communism, we can have our cake and eat it too: that is the shortest possible description of the symptom in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. But what would Marx say to Žižek?

The idea that we can retain the good sides of capitalism while subduing its destructive sides is at least as old as capitalism itself. In the early 20th century, the German so-called Centre Marxists believed capitalism could do without imperialism. They claimed that in the long run war is not in the rational self-interests of the capitalist class. According to Rosa Luxemburg,

“the essence of this position [of the Centre Marxists] is the attempt to persuade the bourgeoisie that imperialism and militarism are damaging to itself even from the point of view of their own capitalist interests. It is hoped that by this manoeuvre the alleged handful of people who profit from imperialism will be isolated and that it will be possible to form a bloc consisting of the proletariat together with large sections of the bourgeoisie. This bloc will then be able to ‘tame’ imperialism and ‘remove its sting’! Liberalism in decline directs its appeal away from the badly informed monarchy and towards a monarchy that is to be better informed. In the same way the ‘Marxist Centre’ appeals over the heads of a misguided bourgeoisie to one which is to be better instructed.”⁶¹

But no, these contradictions of imperialist war are capital’s conflict with itself. They necessitate communism without guaranteeing it. Likewise, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx critiqued Proudhon for wanting to keep the good side of capital while eliminating the bad.

“What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”⁶²

That is perhaps how Marx would reply to Žižek, showing that he was indeed aware of this ideological trap. Still, Žižek is correct to point out this symptom of communist theory which returns throughout the centuries in many different forms, to which Marx was not immune. Contemporary examples abound too, both Marxist and non-Marxist. Post-labour economics holds that the inevitability of the current automation of labour calls for replacing our system with a type of decentralised capitalism where everyone owns shares and assets to invest in projects like AI and robots, leaving us humans with meaningful work instead. Post-labour economics concerns itself with the day after the (political) revolution, ignoring the necessity and ramifications of the upheaval. As David Shapiro explains in his lecture series, the minimal precondition for this system of post-labour economics is a reorganisation of property relations.⁶³ Just like the Centre Marxists, he forgets that capital doesn’t give up its concentration and accumulation just like that. The capitalist class will do anything in their power to not give away what is theirs. Capital would rather destroy capital with war than sublate liberalism to the truth that its enlightenment ideals point to. In other words, capitalists will do anything in their power to keep property relations unchanged. The whole lecture series rests on ignoring this violent political dimension without which he cannot ascertain the post-labour economy as a way of life where we all benefit from a system of robots and AI accumulating capital for us. But there’s a more pressing, second problem. Even if we grant him leniency and ignore the violence of revolution, his vision arouses analytic suspicion because there are no losers to be found in it.

What is missing from such visions is that they get rid of the obstacle while retaining the impetus, the unity of which is the dimension of surplus-jouissance. In capitalism, one of the ways it manifests is as surplus value. To explain the invisibility of surplus value, let us take the video game Doom 2016. This game’s story takes place in the late 21th century. The Union Aerospace Corporation discovers an ancient stone which it uses to build mining technology to produce a virtually unlimited supply of clean renewable energy. The citizens of earth believe that the corporation is extracting its energy by mining Mars. But in actual fact, Mars is a place just far enough to hide that a portal opening the gates of hell, where this energy is sourced from. The corporation converts a plasma found in hell into infinite energy. This conversion from demonic plasma (surplus-jouissance) into energy used for capital accumulation is the production of surplus value. The limitless energy is extracted from an invisible hellscape far from earth.

It’s significant that we find three places in the allegory: earth, where the positive energy is enjoyed, whose consumers believe it is mined on Mars, and its portal to hell, where the true source lies. Whereas earth stands for capital’s needs, Mars stands for the fetish that labour is the source of value. Hell stands for the bottomless pit where we don’t go, the invisible extraction which is transmuted into energy for the earth, which is insatiable enough to consume the vast fruits of hell. From rare earth mines in the third world, to modern day slavery in Qatar, to parallel societies made up of labour migrants in the west: these are all invisible sources of the endless positivity of capital’s self-bootstrapping accumulation. In Doom, The corporation successfully kept the real conversion a secret for the public. From the moment of discovering this new clean energy, all other energy sources were made redundant. For two decades humanity flourished thanks to the UAC and its endless supply of Argent Energy. That is, until being overrun by demonic invasions on both Mars and Earth, making them virtually indistinguishable from hell. This part of the allegory too is relevant for us. It shows us that the production of surplus value (conversion-extraction from inhuman life processes for capital) is indeed endless, until it stops and we are overrun by what it was supposed to channel, namely the subject’s circulation of surplus-jouissance. Since our default trajectory looks comparable to Doom, we might want to ask ourselves whether we can have new forms of life with communist rituals that don’t subsume surplus-jouissance for capital.

Or are we condemned to constrain this excess? The result of such attempts consistently turns them into their opposite. It manifests as the figure of the obscene master authorising himself as the voice of common sense while giving free reign to the sadistic superego enacted by his followers.⁶⁴ Reactionary ideologies obfuscate the tragic dimension of the necessity of hell for the functioning of earth by either blinding us to it if not justifying it.

Communisation, in contrast, calls us to the meaninglessness of these surpluses. Lack is expressed in excess, the bottomless pits of hell are expressed in charged, volatile demonic plasma, converted into clean positivity by sleek high-tech for the unquenchable thirst of abstract capital. Dissimilar from demons, we humans do not spawn out of the blue. Unlike them, our reproduction hinges on the discontinuation of capital. Redoubled surplus value is a crucial operator in this mess.

Now, we can concretise the triad of subsumption in different terms:

Pre-capitalist modes of production and its products are commodified in line with the capital-form: imaginary.
Once production is dominated by the production of surplus value (accumulation of capital), the labour process becomes internally form-determined: symbolic.
Production of surplus value is subsumed as a self-referential loop whereby it becomes the product of surplus value: real.

As we have seen, at this third stage, we have the undead/monstrous figure of the capitalist proletarian. This is the stage of capital with the production of what we can call extra surplus value, or redoubled surplus value. As Žižek specifies:

“So it’s not just about making the workforce more productive; it is to conceive of the workforce itself directly as another ﬁeld of capitalist investment: all aspects of its “subjective” life itself (health, education, sexual life, psychic state . . .) are considered not only as important for the productivity of the workers themselves but as ﬁelds of investment which can generate additional surplus value. Health services do not just serve the interests of capital by way of making workers more productive; they are themselves an incredibly powerful ﬁeld of investment, not only for capital (health services are the single strongest branch of the US economy, much stronger than defense), but for the workers themselves (who treat paying health insurance as an investment in their future).”⁶⁵

The commodity which produces surplus value is invested in that which produces surplus value. We experience our decision to go into higher education as an investment, a prerequisite to enter civil society and its open market of free individuals as property owners. But, it comes attached with a foreclosure on the future, the ownership of the lender on your future for whom you have to labour to pay off one’s debt.

That the workforce is not simply a commodity as labour power, but capital itself, is, of course, a capitalist fetish. And nonetheless it functions.

So if it may look like a liberation, a final ‘stage’ of capitalism, we should understand that total subsumption might or might not be the locus of communisation. It might be, and also, it is not implausible to see that the knots of the closure of its non-all continue to lay the foundations for something that is much worse, like technofeudalism.

Absolute capitalism and its non-All in total subsumption doesn’t provide us the target of attack, or the point which we must resist or accelerate. It is the logic of the limits of the compulsion of the capital-form. Which doesn’t mean that these limits entail the beyond of capitalism necessarily, although they do point to it by showing how capitalism has already been replaced. The volatile points, knots and paradoxes of absolute capitalism don’t permit us to envision returns to humanist conceptions of nature, but necessitate the cultivation of a ‘second nature’ incommensurable with the compulsion of capital. Communist measures might liberate us from value, or bring the commanding primacy of surplus value to a halt, but only by virtue of making use of total subsumption, breaking it down into extra-capitalist moments of capital where communist leaders face explosions of proletarised surplus-jouissance. These self-limits call for the immanent production of a communist second nature within absolute capitalism itself.

However, we cannot derive communism from the immanent logic of absolute capitalism, we can only intimate its primary contradictions informed by real speculations for communist measures to address. Communism is both the means and the end of communisation. The communist measure is not the last resort of the struggle against capital, we are not naturally brought to communisation by ridding ourselves of the illusions that capital has us act out in repetition. Communisation stems from the complete closure of capital’s total subsumption, instead of reproducing capital’s conflict by attempting to evade it with returns to harmonious totalities (traditionalism), as well as multiplicity of free singularities in democratic networks (liberal democracy). Both sides mirror the same non-orientable surface, the same real abstraction of capital’s logic. The perverse drive of capital threatens us on a civilisational level as well as in our own personal lives, not because we have something left to save, but because reproduction of (bourgeois) society and the declining reproduction of the species is headed towards collective suicide. Communism calls us to the absolute negativity that unites all the different bourgeois formations that obfuscate it. To radicalise the leftist critique of politics Last says, we need

“a truly psychoanalytically inspired theopolitical approach, we need to think how the repetition compulsion can be recoupled to species-level reproduction via the drive (which, as Lacan infamously claimed, accomplishes satisfaction without repression). To be clear: this means that repetition cannot be reduced to reproduction (which can result in a type of neurotic deadening), but rather reproduction must be stabilised internal to repetition itself. Or said in a different way: repetition itself must be the term that we reconcile with if we are to lift reproduction to a stable level or a new equilibrium.”⁶⁶

Repetition must sever from its capitalist drive to relink to reproduction. The domination of capital, in the guise of the master or the university discourse hystericises us. The function of the communist leader is an analytic mastery that undoes the desire for a Master of the hysteric, not by pacifying it with technical knowledge, but by bringing it to its conclusion in the drive and its surplus. Because capital as a function is self-serving, its place of the master becomes obscure to us, leaving us with impersonal authority and the hysteric’s desire for a master. Without the intervention of the communising analytic master, there are no communist measures and communising rituals because the return to the obscene Master will re-assert itself again, setting the stage for new structures of impersonal power that, in turn, hystericise the increasingly hollowed out, perverted subject of capital.

Bram E. Gieben’s approach in The Darkest Timeline echoes the importance of unconditional proletarisation:

“How do we imagine ourselves out of, not just the end of the world, but the end of capitalism? I believe we must begin with a full and frank engagement with the worst case scenarios that could proceed from our precarious present.”⁶⁷

Hysteria is not the answer, it is not the privileged subjective stance, although it all starts from engaging with it. Being horrified, petrified, captivated or mesmerised by the excessive madness of everything that we’re constantly bombarded with on tech fiefdoms stop us in our tracks to stop capital. Activism, hyper-activity, feelings of indignation and moral condemnations too align very well with the needs of capital.

What comes to mind when thinking about the worst case scenario is the repetition of what Friedrich Engels long ago foreshadowed and what communists are well acquainted with: the unity of progressive liberalism and its fundamentalist reaction in the name of democracy against the communist revolution.

In our epoch, the form that it will take is as a “sanitised tech-terror [which is] the bedrock of technofeudalism.”⁶⁸

Universal Political Mobilisation

Communisation is not a concept that seeks to fulfill needs or satisfy demands. Proletarisation discloses the gap between Marxism and politics. It’s nothing but coming to know that we are not addressed in bourgeois society because its drive is the compulsive closure of that gap, the production of capital. This failure, or falling out of the picture, is what communisation responds to because it takes responsibility for it. To proletarise is to assume responsibility for that which one is not in control of, namely the compulsion of capital.

It is guaranteed that our future is capitalism. We are constituted by the full determinism of capital. The communist measure springs forth from the gaps in capital’s total subsumption. Not because of an affirmation of the proletarian class, but in the loss of it; the loss of not only its particular formations (like the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party, etc.) but of its desire to assert itself as a class over against capital, of its desire to assert its autonomy and mastery over the causal determinism of capital.

Communisation is not the promise of the negation of the proletariat (and classes) after its affirmation in the autonomous seizure of power as a dictatorship resulting from a political revolution. Communisation operates as the repetition of the gap between the production of communism and the struggle against capital. Affirmative class based action, revolutionary working class activity against capital is capital’s self-limitation.

Today, as Žižek has said, the task is to reverse Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Thinking is thepolitical act: to make real speculations is the political act.

Communisation is politically as well as socially revolutionary because it pushes us back to our own freedom.

For Hegel there is no end of war, and it is singing that the soldiers march into their slaughter. War closes the gap because it fixes it in absolute certitude, it is the constitutive moment that grounds the state, not merely the political state, but the state as the ethical system of civilisation. Communisation as the immanentisation of war communism is the pressing necessity to avert our default — suicidal — trajectory.

The problematic of communisation forces us to put our existence as a class into question and hence our ground as ethical subjects in our families, in civil society and the state.

Total subsumption and redoubled surplus value as they operate in AI-driven tech fiefdoms do not only reconfigure and interpellate us on the level of behaviour which is modified to align with the necessity of capital, but produce us as subjects of the capital drive.

Communisation doesn’t compel us to obey the struggle against capital by proclaiming positive prescriptions. Communisation doesn’t claim that we must enjoy a collective obedience as the ground for mutual recognition that promises to fulfill needs by satisfying demands.

No, it is the other side of proletarisation, communist production originating in the disclosure of capitalism’s non-all. The fidelity to the communist cause hinges on proletarisation, which is the fidelity to subjectivity. Mladen Dolar States:

“If one wants to become a subject, recognition and obedience are never quite enough; in addition to and apart from these, one has to respond to the “mere voice” which is just an opening, a pure enunciation compelling a response, an act, a dislocation of the imposing voices of domination. If in the first case one turns into a subject precisely by assuming the form of the autonomous “I,” disavowing its heteronomic origin, so that the ideological domination and autonomous subjectivity work hand in hand, as Althusser has forcefully shown, then in the second case one becomes a subject only by fidelity to the “foreign kernel” of the voice which cannot be appropriated by the self, thus by following precisely the heteronomic break in which one cannot recognize oneself. The ideological interpellation can never quite silence this other voice, and the distance between the two voices opens the space of the political.”⁶⁹

Far from being a temporary deficiency that will be remedied by future knowledge, it is the gap between communism and politics which is the political. Communisation is a response to that gap.

If there is a desire to grip the masses with theory for them to become a political force, communisation is that which politicises what is disavowed in their revolution, i.e. what that desire leaves non-political and must be suspended by imposing the communist measures. Here, the communist measure is not the negation of the proletariat after its affirmation over against capital, but the negation of the negation of the proletariat as nothing but the struggle of capital pushing us to the brink of war and its spectral other of world communism.

Hence, the communist measure is revolutionary because solely from within capital does it impose itself as a suspension of its presupposed coordinates:

“The religious dimension of a radical political act is founded in a very precise fact: the triumph of a revolution is the moment when we step out of the existing economic and social order by way of suspending its main written and unwritten rules – we (try to) do what, within this order, appears impossible.”⁷⁰ (Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment)

Imagining the act (as the end of capitalism), or the failure to do so (as the end of the world) are secondary. To passively take notice of one’s compulsion, one’s alignment with capital, to scan the whole world and fail to find freedom in anything, this is the genesis of subjectivity that prompts the production of communism.

Lastly, there is the rift between communism as the real movement, i.e. war communism, and world communism. Neither the dictatorship of the proletariat, nor eternal global peace are on the horizon.

The passage from revolutionary communist measures as war communism to world communism is necessitated by the following:

“The actual metabolism of our life process is thus subordinated to the artiﬁcial “life” of the reproduction of capital, there is a rift between the two, and the ultimate goal of the Communist revolution is not so much to abolish exploitation as to abolish this rift by way of abolishing the valorization of labor.”⁷¹ (Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment)

Proletarian subjectivity in its inability to ground itself in positive statements has its other part of its being part of no part in the cause, the first cause of the subject, the silent call of communism.

If nature is not natural, but inherently unbalanced like the human, then what of capital? Communism is truly a specter in the sense that history is replete with holographic counterfactuals that we are haunted by in the aftermath of the defeat of the left. Should we lament or celebrate the collapse of its 20th century projects? Was Lenin wrong to betray Marx and to have been the opportunist that he was or did he succeed to show the inherent limits already present in Marx?

These are questions we must repeat to remember and work through.

Rehabilitating communism necessitates a revolutionary betrayal of our present and past history.

The political space will continually prompt us to enact communist measures against all odds.

Inevitable retreats to the proletarised zero-point are our only universal guarantee.

Necessity is grounded in the repetition of socio-political, communising acts which point to the ultimate goal of communist revolution on a global scale.

”The same goes for class struggle: we do not simply have two classes; there is—as Marx himself put it—only one class “as such,” the bourgeoisie; classes prior to the bourgeoisie (feudal lords, clergy, etc.) are not yet classes in the full sense of the term, their class identity is covered up by other hierarchical determinations (castes, estates…); after the bourgeoisie, there is the proletariat, which is a non‐class in the guise of a class and, as such, the Other not only for the bourgeoisie but in and for itself.” (Žižek, Less Than Nothing (2011))

Cadell Last, Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, drive myths, social analysis (2025), 45. ↩
Ibid., 2. ↩
Ibid., 294. ↩
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2011), 245. ↩
Chris Cutrone, Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory 2006–2024 (2024), 671-2. ↩
Last, Real Speculations (2025), 4. ↩
It has surprised me how little attention has been paid to Spinoza’s relationship to Descartes, whose impersonal metaphysics are grounded in the indubitably personal patricide of his predecessor. ↩
Slavoj Žižek, Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four? (1991). ↩
Roel Van Duijn, Schoonvader van Poetins geheim agent: Tien jaar oorlog en liefde (2024). ↩
Last, Real Speculations (2025), 1. ↩
Mladen Dolar, “Who baptized Marx, Hegel or Kant?” On Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Beyond (2022). ↩
Editorial (2024): https://files.libcom.org/files/2024-08/Sic%201.pdf ↩
Gilles Dauvé, “Capitalism and Communism,” Libcom.org, accessed May, 2025, https://libcom.org/article/capitalism-and-communism-gilles-dauve#footnoteref5_q31a7ks. ↩
“Editorial,” sicjournal.org, accessed June, 2025, https://www.sicjournal.org/editorial/index.html ↩
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, 91-2 . ↩
Ibid., 163. ↩
Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (2022), 47. ↩
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. ↩
“What is Free Software?” gnu.org accessed May, 2025, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ↩
“Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism,” gnu.org, accessed May, 2025, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html ↩
“Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software,” gnu.org accessed May, 2025, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html ↩
https://windscribe.com/blog/windscribe-expose-mozilla/ ↩
For some examples of the subsumption of open source projects by capital see: https://hyscaler.com/insights/open-source-betrayal-impact-and-solutions/ ↩
See this video for more:

↩
https://www.futo.org/about/what-is-futo/ ↩
“The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic Of Capital As A Dialectic Of Class Struggle,” endnotes.org, accessed May, 2025, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-moving-contradiction ↩
An analogy can be drawn to the passage from Hegel’s three doctrines of the Science of Logic and the logic of capital: both from Being through Essence to Concept, and vice versa from Concept through Essence to Being: “With this circularity of the dialectic the relations are bi-directional. In one direction, the capital-form of value presupposes money relations; money in turn presupposes commodity relations. Equally however, the reverse sequence of internal relations must also hold: the concept of value is only adequately grounded at the level of the totality of capitalist social relations. The circularity and bi-directionality of the systematic dialectic imply the synchronicity of its moments within the totality of capitalist social relations.” Ibid. ↩
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2024), 135. ↩
Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022), 96. ↩
“Yanis Varoufakis on Valve, Spontaneous Order, and the European Crisis,” accessed June, 2025, https://www.econtalk.org/varoufakis-on-valve-spontaneous-order-and-the-european-crisis/ ↩
“Communisation and Value-form Theory,” Endnotes.org, accessed May, 2025, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory ↩
Žižek, Less Than Nothing (2011), 433-4. ↩
Karl Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marxists.org, §2. ↩
Cadell Last, Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right (2025):

→ Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right ↩
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marxists.org. ↩
Lenin, Notes of a Publicist (1922), Marxists.org. ↩
See my presentation The Truth of Communism here: https://philosophyportal.online/rosy-cross-2 ↩
“Communisation and Value-form Theory,” Endnotes.org, accessed May, 2025, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory ↩
Paul Mattick, Karl Korsch: His Contribution to Revolutionary Marxism (1962), Marxists.org. ↩
“The Present Moment,” sicjournal.org, accessed May 2025, https://www.sicjournal.org/the-present-moment/index.html ↩
Cadell Last, Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right (2025), Substack. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marxists.org. ↩
Karl Korsch, Ten Theses on Marxism Today (1950), Marxists.org. ↩
I attribute this insight to the analogy Žižek has drawn between sexual difference and class struggle: “in the class struggle, there is also “no class relationship”: the “bourgeoisie” names the class which prevents the proletariat from fully becoming itself. Lacan’s claim that sexual difference is “Real‐impossible” is strictly synonymous with his claim that “there is no sexual relationship”: sexual difference is not a fixed set of “static” symbolic oppositions and inclusions or exclusions (with heterosexual normativity relegating homosexuality and other “perversions” to a secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, a trauma, an open question, something that resists every attempt at symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic oppositions is doomed to fail, and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean.” (Žižek, Less Than Nothing (2011)) ↩
Mattick, Karl Korsch (1962), Marxists.org. ↩
Žižek, Less Than Nothing (2011). ↩
Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022), 47. ↩
Ibid., 51. ↩
Karl Marx, The Direct Production Process (1861-1864), Marxists.org. ↩
Ibid. ↩
“Gen Z more likely to consider themselves entrepreneurs,” accessed June, 2025, https://talkerresearch.com/gen-z-more-likely-to-consider-themselves-entrepreneurs/ ↩
Karl Marx, The Direct Production Process (1861-1864), Marxists.org. ↩
In the gaming universe, popular terms such as farming and grinding point to the laborious nature of the serf-like existence the gamer, i.e. the technofeudal prod-user. ↩
Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022), 47-8. ↩
Étienne Balibar, A New Critique of Political Economy, in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image (2019), 57. ↩
See Mike Watson’s Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self (2024), Revol Press. ↩
Cadell Last, How to Hystericise a Perverted Society? (2024):

→ How to Hystericise a Perverted Society? ↩
Slavoj Žižek, Can One Exit from The Capitalist Discourse Without Becoming a Saint? (2016). ↩
Ibid. ↩
Rosa Luxemburg, Antikritik, 118. ↩
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1947), Marxists.org ↩
See here:

↩
Take Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey’s recent speech that illustrates the unity of the common sense presidency with the self-undermining of the Law in sadistic enjoyment. ↩
Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022), 49. ↩
Last, How to Hystericise a Perverted Society? (2024). ↩
Bram E. Gieben, The Darkest Timeline (2024), xi. ↩
Varoufakis, Technofeudalism (2024), 135. ↩
Mladen Dolar, A Voice And Nothing More (2006), 122-3. ↩
Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment (2022), 183. ↩
Ibid., 43-44. ↩

The Slovenian School Reading Group

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Two Short Circuits

Both of these books are part of the Short Circuits Series edited by Slavoj Žižek. They contain the same Series Foreword in which Žižek starts off with the metaphor of a short circuit to describe what he takes to be critical reading.

The gist of short-circuiting is

“to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus[.]”¹

When we read in a short-circuiting way we get insights that break with our unquestioned perceptions and uncover the fundamental linkage between dimensions that before, were taken to be disparate phenomena. Žižek gives the examples of Marx short-circuiting philosophy and religion with the domain of political economy and Nietzsche and Freud short-circuiting morality with libidinal economy.

What occurs in this short-circuiting disillusionment is not the reduction of a naive imagination to the cold hard reality underlying it, what Žižek calls ‘desublimation’. For example, it is not simply that theology is reduced to anthropology in Marx. Rather, Marx’s short-circuit reveals what is inherently disavowed in our perception as subjects in capitalism: even though we might be secular atheists, theology persists in our ideological activity, namely in political economy.² Short-circuiting reveals the way in which our immediate life-world is mediated by the unconscious.³

Žižek argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is especially suited for such a short-circuiting approach to texts. As the editor of this series, Žižek says that each book achieves this basic criterion of short-circuiting:

“After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.”⁴

This approach is part and parcel of philosophy that actively works with psychoanalysis. In these books we will not find treatises attempting to convince us of an ontological map that we can superimpose on our uncertain lives. What we will find is the confrontation with disturbance as this is what makes up the short-circuiting.

By this short-circuiting, one realizes that one has always lived with a certain knowledge that one did not know one had. That is what this type of critical reading lays bare. It’s in this sense that we can understand reading philosophy as psychoanalytical praxis with oneself. This time of course, with oneself and others in our group. As Mladen Dolar says: “thought is both a very solitary thing, but it is not enough. It is always a collective thing.”⁵ This is the spirit of Philosophy Portal that we take with us during our readings and discussions.

Taken metaphysically, we will get down to the nitty-gritty of causality. In the sense of Lacan’s proclamation that “[t]here is a cause only in something that doesn’t work.”⁶

In short, on the side of the object(-cause), we will study the voice with Dolar. On the side of the subject, we will study comic spirit with Zupančič. Here, I will shortly introduce you to the introductions of both books.

A Voice And Nothing More

Dolar starts his book by distinguishing three aspects of the voice. First, there is the voice that carries a message across, the medium conveying a meaning. Secondly, there is the aesthetic experience of the voice that distracts us from this message. The voice does not carry words that aim to signify, but is “the bearer of a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings.”⁷

And third, besides the voice as “vehicle of meaning” and the voice as “the source of aesthetic admiration,” there’s the third level. As Dolar explains:

“The aesthetic concentration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object; the aesthetic pleasure obfuscates the object voice, which I will try to pursue.”⁸

This third object voice is the blind spot in the conveyance of meaning in the first type, and the disturbance of the aesthetic pleasure in the second type.

To clarify this object voice, Dolar turns to the speech-machine from the 19th century. It looks like this:

Kempelen’scher Sprechapparat

This machine could make uncanny human-like sounds. It could reproduce what sounded like a voice speaking Latin and French words and phrases. Nowadays, we’re constantly surrounded by uncanny robot-like voices, like in public transport. Back in the day, this device with its very nonhuman look fascinated its audience for its familiar yet utterly estranging humanoid voice. With its voice, this mechanical machine seemed to cage an inner soul. Even though we know it is simply a mechanism, the object voice seems to be imbued with some form of a life of its own, as if its effect surpasses the explicable causes. This alien ‘more’ to the voice is the object that Dolar focuses on in the book.

The Odd One in

Comedy is no joke, especially as a philosophical research topic. Zupančič starts the introduction by saying that

“[i]t may come as little surprise to say that comedy is an extremely diﬃcult subject of investigation—not only because of the multiplicity of various techniques and procedures involved in its process, but also because this process is in constant motion.”⁹

The constant movement of comedy makes it tough to pin down. Any definition of comedy is itself subject to comical treatment. Were this not to be the case, it would fall flat as a suitable definition. But it is the case. Any definition of comedy is going to be stretched out, cut apart, turned upside down and inside out. In other words, the definition seems itself to fall apart except for the fact that this comical motion is given:

“[T]he argument of this book is that comic subjectivity proper does not reside in the subject making the comedy, nor in the subjects or egos that appear in it, but in this very incessant and irresistible, all-consuming movement. Comic subjectivity is the very movement of comedy. However, movement is not the whole story of comedy. Stumbling, interruptions, punctuations, discontinuities, all kinds of ﬁxations and passionate attachments are the other side of this same movement, and constitute a—not exactly objective but, rather, object-related—facet of comedy. It is with the scissors of this double perspective that this essay ventures to conceptualize the phenomenon of comedy and of the comical.”¹⁰

The constant motion of comedy comes to a halt. And urges it to keep on moving again. This theory on comedy’s ‘double perspective’ is deeply influenced by Hegel’s theory of comedy, which I’ve written about here.

From there on out, the crucial political distinction Zupančič makes regarding comedy is between its ideological and subversive forms.

Comedy and laughter allow us to take distance from what is happening to us. To shake something awkward and unpleasant off ourselves. This is the form of comedy that Zupančič critiques for being ideological. In laughter, the pressure of ideology finds its relief valve. After this release the pressure of ideology builds up again until its next release, making it bearable enough for us. In that liberating feeling of laughter, we get the breathing space to go back and hold our nose in the pressure of ideology. Ultimately, this type of laughter keeps our need to step outside of the bounds of ideology at bay. In our taking distance from it with comedy, we are all the more caught up in what we are supposedly taking a distance from. But that is not all there is according to Zupančič.

“If a truly subversive edge of comedy exists—as I believe it does—it is to be sought elsewhere.”¹¹

Today, the most blatant form of ideology is in the guise of being distant to ideologies and naturalizing some immediate felt perception of reality. As Zupančič puts it:

“Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.”¹²

Good comedy subverts exactly this naturalization, or ‘sober’ and ‘direct’ sense of reality. Good comedy, she argues, is not the compulsive entertainment that is so common on social media, but unearths the innumerable discrepancies and antagonisms in phenomena that are taken to be natural. Good comedy makes us attentive to the inevitability of any seamless dynamic to be interrupted — short-circuited — and linked to motion of a different order. An inappropriate example from a Dutch joke: what do you do when your mother in law is limping through the garden? Shoot one more time.

This joke might rub one the wrong way, which goes to show comedy’s nonaffinity with feelings. It introduces a distance or ‘nonimmediacy’ in them. Here, Zupančič cites Horace Walpole:

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”¹³

In today’s context, doom-scrolling obviously gets at the tragic mode of subjectivity that is forever at a distance to the natural flow of things (the feed), yet always trying to be submerged in it.

It begs the question what in this digital universe can be comical without being an ideological relief valve.

For Zupančič, compulsive entertainment, the promotion of happiness and the reliance on the immediacy of our feelings that naturalize of sociosymbolic relationships are all hostile to the comic spirit. In the book Zupančič doesn’t only attempt to think comedy for the sake of comedy, but also because she deems this to be crucial for philosophy as such. Philosophy is not without comic subjectivity, the very motion of short-circuiting that Žižek described above.

To finish on a clarifying note regarding the terms. She uses the word comedy in the general sense of what is funny or comical. But she also distinguishes the comical as a specific mode of comedy.

Different from jokes, irony and humor, she understands “the comical as a singular form of “funniness” at work in comedies that can be distinguished from some other forms.”¹⁴ How exactly this pans out, we will learn during our reading and discussions.

Žižek, S. (2006). Foreword. In M. Dolar, A voice and nothing more. MIT Press. ↩
In his Das Kapital, Marx grounds the short-circuit regarding the theopolitics of capitalism with his concept of commodity fetishism. ↩
This is how we can understand Lacan’s dictum that Marx invented the psychoanalytical symptom. ↩
Žižek, S. (2006). Foreword. In M. Dolar, A voice and nothing more. MIT Press. ↩
From this conversation:

↩
(Lacan 1979, p. 22) ↩
Dolar, M. (2006). A voice and nothing more (p. 4). MIT Press. ↩
Ibid., p. 4. ↩
Zupančič, A. (2008). The odd one in: On comedy (p. 3). MIT Press. ↩
Ibid., p. 3. ↩
Ibid., p. 5. ↩
Ibid., p. 7. ↩
Ibid., p. 8. ↩
Ibid., p. 9. ↩

Special Announcement & To Live Philosophically

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Slovenian School Reading Group

Starting from the 22nd of January 2025. We will begin the Slovenian School Reading Group at Philosophy Portal.

The first six months of the year will be devoted Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing more. In this inventive and foundational work, Dolar grounds his philosophical theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause (objet petit a). The book traverses different disciplines to delve into this underexplored terrain of philosophy and psychoanalysis. In the study group, we’ll be going into the linguistics, metaphysics, physics, ethics and politics of the voice.

For the remainder of the year, the study group will come together to read and discuss Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In. This work hones in on comedy with a Hegelian and Freudo-Lacanian lense. In this work, Zupančič goes into the political and subversive nature of comedy, and juxtaposes it to its ideological forms.

Both these understudied works of the Slovenian School will help us to think the politics of subjectivity. The goal of the study group is to come to a refined understanding of the dialectical and unconscious dimensions of the subject’s life in regards to the voice and comedy. Both of these books are urgent in today’s world that is decidedly in need of psychoanalytically informed theory.

How to join and what do I get?

We will hold monthly live-sessions accessible to all subscription tiers of my Patreon which can be found here. Members of Philosophy Portal get free access.

It is also possible to join by becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack.

Each group meeting will take place once per month on Wednesdays at 7PM CET (Central European Time). See the website for the complete schedule.

All live-sessions will be recorded and will be made available for participants. PDFs of the books will be provided too. Sign up now:

Transcript

To Live Philosophically

Cadell Last: What does it mean to you when I pose the question of living life as a philosophical journey?¹

Dimitri Crooijmans: For me it all starts with Socrates, historically. What is Socratic questioning? It is this kind of childlike questioning, “why, why, why,” and then the person you ask this to gets annoyed because of course he doesn’t know it all in the end. Socrates has two ideas with this Socratic questioning: one of them is to really assume his own unknowing and to see where the knowledge of the other is, if it is actually self -grounded. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates has ideas, but he would only tell these ideas when someone asks him. But a lot of times he would ask another person and they would never ask him back: “Well I don’t know but what about you, what do you think about it?” But that point of saying “I don’t know, what do you think about it?” That’s actually what I would say is the very start of a philosophical dialogue. This is the point that Socrates wants us to get to, to get to a point where we are mutually open to each other because we both know that we don’t know. That’s the ultimate Socratic point of knowledge; to know that you don’t know.

Now, since you’ve asked about long-form research and writing, recently at the end of the year I’ve been getting into Descartes and Spinoza. There’s a massive shift that occurs with ancient philosophy and modern philosophy, mediated historically by Christianity as we’ve been exploring in the Christian Atheism course. Like Socrates, Descartes also has this point of knowing an unknowing. For Descartes the name of this is the cogito. The cogito is this point of unknowing because it’s a point of ultimate doubt. Descartes says that I think therefore I am. You could just as well say: I doubt therefore I think therefore I am. It’s a fundamental doubt that you are subjectively involved. It’s not a doubt that you think: maybe it’s A, maybe it’s B but who cares. No, your identity hinges on this doubt. You don’t know who you are. That’s the state of doubt that you are in. It’s a type of despair as Hegel will describe it, as he will radicalize the Cartesian cogito. So I think that this is a fundamental shift we find from ancient philosophy to modern philosophy, this type of knowing of unknowing in Socrates and then the knowing of unknowing in the cogito and thereby knowing thought to be being. To say thought is being or in other words “I think therefore I am,” this is something that I think is a very crucial feature of philosophy. Because philosophy posits that there is such a thing as truth. Unconditional truth or absolute truth maybe but definitely truth as such. During the time of Plato the battle was against sophists. The sophists claimed: maybe there’s a truth, maybe there’s not a truth but it’s not for us to try to resolve these fundamental questions of reality. We can just do rhetoric and we can learn to become very good at convincing other people of what the truth is regardless of what the truth really is. Yet, it is also more complicated than that. Plato has a certain respect for rhetoricians and sophists.

In modern philosophy what emerges is of course Humean skepticism, but also Descartes himself was seen as a skeptic. Which is not true. Descartes was very much against skepticism because he didn’t want to doubt for the sake of doubt, which is what I would say is what we can call skepticism: to doubt for the sake of doubt. Philosophy doubts for the sake of truth and philosophy, modern or ancient, does come to this point that it finds a truth. Hegel’s variant of what Socrates and Descartes were pointing at is called absolute knowing; a self-emptied state that’s also absolute certitude. It’s self-othering to put it as shortly as we can. These variants of all three are the beginnings of philosophy. They are not the end of philosophical cognition as you put it; they are the very start of philosophical cognition. Which then sets out to think the differentiation of the facets of ultimate reality. Which could be, metaphysics, ethics and logic. After the Phenomenology of Spirit that ends with absolute knowing we get the Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature and philosophy of spirit which are all done from that philosophical standpoint.

So, what is this today? What does it mean to take this truth and to run with it? To take this truth and live with it as a subject? I think everything changed with psychoanalysis. Last weeks I’ve been tempted to work with the hypothesis that modern philosophy is dead and that Hegel is the last modern philosopher and that Hegel killed philosophy and the truth of that we can see not only in Hegel necessarily but mostly in what emerges after Hegel. We get Marx with his focus on class, Freud with his focus on sex, Nietzsche on power, Kierkegaard on faith and so on. You get these highly idiosyncratic specializations occurring within philosophy, but they’re not simply specializations as in “Nietzsche knows a lot about power and Freud knows a lot about sex.” I believe they all aim to get at a fundamental fissure in reality itself.

Sometimes Marx is critiqued because of course there’s not just two classes in reality. There are middle classes and there’s many more categories you can make. But Žižek makes the wonderful point that that’s besides the point. What’s fundamental in Marx is the fact that there’s never two simply opposed classes. And this is actually what makes up the class struggle, and is the very discrepancy in our political economy, the economic incoherence or the economic split that determines us so deeply in our capitalist civilization. Whether we can deduce communism from it is another question.

Freud and Lacan get at this fundamental fissure of the subject as regards sexuation: the split between men and women, or consciousness versus unconsciousness. And I think today to live as a philosopher, so to live in a thoughtful manner, we have to realize that we can’t go back to ancient philosophy. We also can’t go back to modern philosophy, but we have to work with these fundamental fissures in sexuality and in class These are two that come to the fore for me. Why is that? To finish, because if we return to what precedes psychoanalysis and Hegel too we return to a type of dogmatism. And I would argue that Kant’s project was to a large extent responding to dogmatisms in his day and age. He awoke from his own dogmatic slumber which was this kind of Spinozan/Leibnizian idea of I’m going to systematize the whole and I’m going to give everything its place and see the fundamental harmony underlying everything. That’s both Spinoza and Leibniz to a certain extent. Kant wanted to get rid of this and got to the point of the transcendental apperception, which I don’t want to go into now. What happens when we return is that we get forms of political regression. Ultimately for me, I think – and I can expand on that – I think philosophy and to live as a philosopher is also a political deed. Thinking is not opposed to deeds. It is itself a political deed. And I think it’s highly important to not cover over these fundamental antagonisms of sexuality and class with beautiful ideas. I think that maybe this is the greatest danger to philosophy and also to politics today and we see this happening with many people. I can give examples. This is where I want to start, I think philosophy and being a philosopher is living a political life in thought, also.

Click here to sign up for the Slovenian School Reading Group.

Or get access to it by becoming a paid subscribed to my Substack.

Actual Spirit Patreon

Full video:

↩

Everyone Knows Perfection Is Absurd

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Reality is perfect, because perfection is reality itself, apart from which nothing exists. God, or nature, is this substance, the perfect reality.

Along with substance, there are its attributes and modes. These are the three most important categories of Spinoza’s ontology, which the first part of his Ethics (1677) is devoted to. The remainder of the book explores his ideas on the human mind, feeling, power, the intellect, freedom and bliss, all rooted in this ontology.

Historically, Spinoza came right after Descartes, whom he was profoundly indebted to. He sought to resolve the disparity that Descartes left unthought, namely the connection between the two substances (which I’ve written about here). Spinoza reduced Descartes’s two substances to one: the underlying fundamental unity of reality. The duality of mind and extension would be demoted to the status of attributes of God, instead of being substances in themselves. For Spinoza, mind and body are one in God. The discrepancy of Descartes’s distinction between a created substance and an uncreated substance was eliminated. Spinoza held that being is, and that non-being is absolutely not.

In the post-Cartesian 17th century, this Sephardic Jew, violently banned from his Portuguese diaspora in the Netherlands, stepped forth to respond to Descartes with a modern iteration of Parmenidean monism.

Substance

In his substance monism negativity is prohibited. There is no such thing, there is only being, only the affirmation of the absolute power of nature. All that exists is God, who is infinite. Anything finite is a mere passing away and finds fulfillment only in its extinguishment in God, the all-engulfing substance. Here in the Ethics we see the minimal distinction between infinite substance and finitude:

“Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.”¹

God is not caused by another, is not opposed by another, but is in himself, which means that he is his own cause. Modes, in contrast, are in something else. Modes are not caused by themselves but are caught up in the causal chain which is traced back to what is in itself, substance.

Besides monism, another popular way to identify Spinoza is as a pantheist, meaning ‘everything is God’. And while I believe there is merit to this label — insofar there’s no actuality for Spinoza that is not God — here, I’ll introduce another -ism to highlight a key division in his philosophy.

I call this acosmist-panentheism (AP).

Central to Spinoza’s Ethics, and therefore AP, is that it maintains that:

God is everything that is not (acosmism).
Everything is in God (panentheism).

God is everything that is not. Not everything is God, but God is the first cause of everything. God is in everything without directly being everything. So God is in everything and everything is in God. But what then, is everything?

I’ll unpack how the triad of substance, attribute, and mode answer this.

Both the terms acosmism and panentheism have been used to describe Spinoza’s system, but they have not been considered together. Before going deeper into the meaning of AP, I will address a common and false presumption. Spinoza’s system is contrary to what many “scholarly debates” seem to yearn for not a complete system unto itself. This is noteworthy because it relieves us of the fascination with the seeming incommensurable difference between the simplicity of his monism/pantheism on the one side, and the complexity of its intricate system on the other side. Neither Spinoza nor any scholarly debate can complete Spinoza’s system because it’d lose what makes it characteristically his, namely the manner in which it is incomplete. Trying to get the true meaning behind Spinoza’s convoluted logic, as well as seeing our cognition as lacking in the face of this complicated book, fails to take Spinoza’s project for the unfinished result that it is. Similarly to how Spinoza is dissatisfied with the split of the substances in Descartes, we’re going to turn this around on Spinoza himself and see how this split is reproduced in his acosmist-panentheism.

Let us take an example of how this split is made apparent:

“[T]he human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God; and therefore when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we are saying nothing else but this: that God — not insofar as he is infinite but insofar as he is explicated through the nature of the human mind, that is, insofar as he constitutes the essence of the human mind — has this or that idea.”²

There are two ways God appears in this passage: (1) as infinite and (2) as constituting the essence of the human mind. What this division entails is that knowledge of God’s infinity can only be attained by knowledge of God as an attribute — specifically as mind. There’s no direct access to substance, we get to apprehend its essence only as it constitutes itself as an attribute.

In addition to that, to intuitively know God is not one’s own doing. It is God’s activity: our knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of himself. God loves himself with our intellectual love for him. Not by us imagining his presence, but by understanding him as the eternal cause of everything. Our intellectual love for God is nothing but God’s love for humans, for what is godlike in the human mind, for what of the human mind partakes in his infinity. For Spinoza, this intellectual love is nothing but infinite bliss, over against which anything that comes to an end is null:

“[D]eath is less hurtful in proportion as the mind’s clear and distinct knowledge is greater, and consequently the more the mind loves God.”³

“[T]he human mind can be of such a nature that that part of it that we have shown to perish with the body is of no importance compared with that part of it that survives.”⁴

Bodily life is null in the face of eternity, the continuation of the intellect in God.

This is Spinoza’s acosmist God, to whom everything finite is starkly opposed, at an infinite distance to his infinity. Substance is not everything because everything comes to pass, unlike substance. God as the eternal cause of things, is the truth that precedes everything and lives on beyond their inevitable demise. In this way too, he is the everything that is not — infinity.

Acosmism, God being in everything as the first cause is itself the difference between substance and the finite. This difference shows it to be independent from, and causally prior to finitude.

The panentheist side points to this everything being in God, and: that the very difference between everything and God is in God himself. God is present in finitude as it comes to pass and God is infinity in which everything finite is. He is the cause of the passing that itself does not pass, immanence:

“God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.

All things that are, are in God, and must be conceived through God, and so God is the cause of the things that are in him, which is the first point.”⁵

So, God is everything that is not. He is everything’s ending, the point at which every finite individual thing reaches its eternal truth. Any finite individual thing is not substance, but a mode of it. Either in the attribute of thinking (as thoughts) or extension (as bodies).

Is it fair to say then, that God resides within things, and emerges at their termination? No. Let us take one of his concrete examples:

“Further, water, in so far as it is water, is produced and corrupted; but, in so far as it is substance, it is neither produced nor corrupted.”⁶

As a mode, water is finite; as substance, it is infinite.

The cosmos, a mode, is not substance. Substance is the infinite cause of the finite. Or, put differently: we can’t comprehend any mode on its own terms because a mode is that which is in another. Only when we understand the mode which is in something else that is not in another, do we come to know what is in itself, what causes the mode and itself, God.

All over the Ethics, Spinoza argues against the anthropomorphic God, against imagining God as a human person:

“God is without passive emotions. Again, God cannot pass to a state of greater or less perfection, and so he is not affected with any emotion of pleasure or pain.”⁷

God is the infinite perfection which does not become less or more real. Spinoza’s predecessor Descartes held that philosophy is concerned with relative degrees of reality. He did not believe its job was to critically examine knowledge of the absolute nature of God. Since the belief in him came down from divine revelation, Descartes granted God’s infallibility. Spinoza on the other hand does not at all shy away from continually making absolute statements about God and his perfection. The eternity, or unchanging nature of substance means that it cannot pass over into greater or lesser states of perfection. God is and has always been the zenith of perfection. And since God and nature are the same, Spinoza considers perfection and reality to be synonymous. Yet, Spinoza still subscribes to the view that there are relative degrees of reality in the following way:

“It may be objected that in understanding God to be the cause of all things we thereby consider God to be the cause of pain. To this I reply that insofar as we understand the causes of pain, it ceases to be a passive emotion; that is, to the extent it ceases to be pain. So insofar as we understand God to be the cause of pain, to that extent we feel pleasure.”⁸

In short, by understanding God to be both the cause and end of individual things, we know the latter to have its truth in the fullness of his eternal perfection. God, at a distance to the imperfect finite, endlessly persists beyond it, contains the unity of all individual things: as the cause of their finite existence and ultimately their annihilation.

So does Spinoza regard individual things to exist in any meaningful sense at all? It does not seem to be the case:

“Since in fact to be finite is in part a negation and to be infinite is the absolute affirmation of the existence of some nature, it follows from Proposition 7 alone that every substance must be infinite.”

If what is, is in part negation, what exists is in fact the part of God that is not. What exists, is what is of God that is nothim. And right here lies the kernel of AP: the finite is severed from itself insofar as its truth is what in it makes up its infinity, which is where it ceases to be finite and is one with substance. The finite, as being in another, that is, the fact that it does not ground itself in itself, means that its existence is akin to the utter obliteration of itself: vacuity. The issue that emerges here for Spinoza is that there’s no way such non-being can be, because according to him only being is. He asserts that “there does not exist a vacuum in nature.”⁹ But how can we distinguish between vacuum, this void, and God?

Pain

Spinoza’s stubborn exclusion of the void while affirming God as the perfect unchanging nature into which everything ceases to be is ambiguous to say the least. The fact that this remains unacknowledged by Spinoza results in his inability to take note of the speculative logic of some of his assertions. For instance, for Spinoza, truth is the standard of itself as well as for what is false. Even though he works with the logic of the coincidence of opposites contained by one of the terms (truth contains the truth versus false opposition), he does not take note of this fact itself. Another example important to understand the disparity in AP is his idea of human perfection. Human perfection as this affirmative determination contains its opposite within itself. Contrary to God, whose perfection does not undergo transition and is purely and completely perfect; for man, there are degrees of perfection. Consequently, man is more real the more he transitions to perfection:

“II. Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.

III. Pain is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.”¹⁰

In man, perfection must be distinguished from itself. There is God’s eternal and complete perfection and the human transition:

“I say “transition,” for pleasure is not perfection itself. If a man were to be born with the perfection to which he passes, he would be in possession of it without the emotion of pleasure. This is clearer in the case of pain, the contrary emotion. For nobody can deny that pain consists in the transition of a state of less perfection, not in the less perfection itself, since man cannot feel pain insofar as he participates in any degree in perfection. Nor can we say that pain consists in the privation of greater perfection, for privation is nothing, whereas the emotion of pain is an actuality, which therefore can be nothing other than the actuality of the transition to a state of less perfection; that is, the actuality whereby a man’s power of activity is diminished or checked.”¹¹

This means that properly speaking, pain does not exist. It is merely transitory. But it is also an actuality of diminishing that limits us. Substance, as impersonal and eternal, does of course not undergo passions or feelings like pain. It is active of its own accord, by its own power, and this necessity is its own free causality that is not short of anything.

In substance, existence and essence coincide: what makes it what it is (essence) is the same as the fact that it is (existence). There is no difference that is a difference for it, since the nothing that is in it is transition of no importance. Does that mean that substance qua the infinite immanence of nature is severed from the transient human being, this finite mode? Spinoza attempts to solve this rift by connecting substance and mode with what he terms attribute:

“Our mind, insofar as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking which is determined by another eternal mode of thinking, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum, with the result that they all together constitute the eternal and infinite intellect of God.”¹²

Each one of our thoughts is a finite mode insofar as they are taken to be individual things. Thinking as an eternal attribute is to be distinguished from this as it is the expression of God’s essence. Our mind is a part of God, and the further we go on to comprehend each link in the logical chain of causes, the closer we come to know God’s inner workings. But as we transition, we are not with him, as there is no importance to finite transience. That which is transient in immanence does not exist, only unchanging knowledge gets at truth as such.

Immanence is eternal.

If we claim pain exists, we do it from the perspective of finitude, from the perspective that God is not. On the other hand, if we claim pain does not exist, there is no actuality of transition: all that is is God as the cessation of existence. The immanence of substance is simply unchanging absolute negation. Feeling pain is feeling impossibility, God’s inexistence.

This is starting to sound absurd.

Natura

Another way to go about the ambiguity of God and existence in the Ethics is by going into the following two terms that overlap with the three categories of Spinoza’s ontology.

Substance and attributes are on the side of natura naturans (creating nature). Modes are on the side of natura naturata (created nature). Substance and its attributes are both infinite, whereas modes can be infinite (God’s intellect) or finite (the human).

In natura naturans existence and essence coincide which is not the case for natura naturata. In the latter, essence and existence are split.

Essence is understood here as the property of a thing that is not accidental but which makes it what is, without which it cannot be understood. The essence, or definition of the human is not the same as the existence of the human. The existence of the human is not necessary, because the essence of the human does not entail that it exists. The human exists only insofar as it persists, insofar as God makes up the power of the duration of its existence.

Spinoza defines essence as follows:

”I consider as belonging to the essence of a thing that, which being given, the thing is necessarily given also, and, which being removed, the thing is necessarily removed also; in other words, that without which the thing, and which itself without the thing, can neither be nor be conceived.”¹³

Further on, he argues that the fact that substance exists does not mean the human must exist. Substance is self-causing independence, power of which its existence and essence are the same. Humans are dependent on this, but could just as well not exist.

Now, if existence is determinate in the mode of the finite human body for example, then in this strict sense it follows that God does not exist, or more precisely, that God is beyond determinate existence:

“Since determinate denotes nothing positive, but only the privation of existence of that same nature which is conceived as determinate, it follows that that whose definition affirms existence cannot be conceived as determinate.”¹⁴

Understood in this way, Spinoza’s notion of substance is identical to Eyn Sof. In Kabbalah, Eyn Sof is God qua infinite and unnameable. Everything finite that falls under the negation of existence does not affirm existence as positive, but the infinite as positive. To put it simply: God’s positive infinity is the same as his indeterminacy. Equating determinacy with existence is a contradiction that affirms God’s unspeakable affirmative infinity:

“If this be denied, conceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists.”¹⁵

God exists necessarily and eternally. Finite modes exist imperfectly, which means not at all: “For inasmuch as his essence excludes all imperfection, and involves absolute perfection, all cause for doubt concerning his existence is done away, and the utmost certainty on the question is given. This, I think, will be evident to every moderately attentive reader.”¹⁶

Necessity

If the human is not necessary (does not have substance for its essence), does that mean the opposite is true? Is his existence contingent? Does contingency exist in the first place? The more imperfect something is, the further it is from God, the deeper it is in the natura naturata. And therefore, the more dependent it is on the necessity of God:

“Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.”¹⁷

The human is necessary. The finite modes are necessary after all. But isn’t that impossible? That would mean God does not exist, because it entails that God’s existence and essence are in unity as panentheist (as he contains everything within himself) yet become split in natura naturata. The existence which he is not is within himself. God is not the cosmos, and has this finitude, this inexistence of himself in himself. But this is absurd! Because it will bring us to conclude that contingency is not, yet impossibility is. The impossibility of anything that determines itself apart from God exists in God. And of course, we know that this existence is impossible apart from God, who determines it out of his own necessity. Contingency doesn’t exist, because impossibility is necessary:

“If they be not conditioned by God, it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should condition themselves; contrariwise, if they be conditioned by God, it is impossible, and not contingent, that they should render themselves unconditioned. Wherefore all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that is contingent.”¹⁸

It’s not that Spinoza believes that impossibility exists, but there is no other way to reconcile the actuality of God within himself having any kind of incongruity with himself. So in the meantime, I’m going with the necessity of impossibility to stitch things back up.

But hold steady — we’re not leaving contingency behind. Spinoza explains it with the terms necessity and impossibility. Necessity is what it is, by virtue of its essence or cause. Either its existence and its essence are one, as natura naturans, or because of its efficient cause has brought about a particular mode. Impossibility then is what contradicts itself in terms of its essence, or because there is no external cause to bring it forth. Simply put: there is no cause that is external to it, that is different from it, that is contained in it, and of which it is the effect.

“[B]ut a thing can in no respect be called contingent, save in relation to the imperfection of our knowledge.”¹⁹

Okay. Yes Baruch, that’s also a way to go about it.

Now hear me out.

Not knowing whether a thing’s essence is contradictory, or not being able to fully trace the chain of causes leading up to an effect, manifests as the appearance of contingency, which consequently is necessary because it exists (at the very least as an appearance). Contingency exists where our knowledge is imperfect. But this is at the same time impossible since the necessity of contingency means that there is an existence that is unified with its essence insofar as its essence is in opposition to its existence.

Contingency is necessary because there is no way in which the human mind (imperfection) is directly God (perfection). God necessarily contains both determinate inexistence (impossibility) and indeterminate existence (contingency). This is absurd!

But maybe this absurdity is where freedom lies. Substance is the efficient cause of itself, but not only this. God is free, is free to cause himself the way he does. Of course, God is impersonal and operates perfectly and out of necessity without regard for our imagination and the possibilities (contingencies) we attribute to him. Freedom cannot not merely lie in our imagined contingency. If God is free, it is to be regarded as necessary.

Freedom

God is free, the mind is not. God’s necessity is self-caused, the mind cannot be its own free cause because it is caught up in external causality. The mind is dependent on what is outside of it. God contains everything within himself. But freedom is possible for Spinoza, which means none other than that it is impossible and necessary. Not in the sense that we can freely determine ourselves from within ourselves as if free will exists independently from God. No, we can act free only insofar as we understand God. Understanding nature increases our freedom because adequate ideas enable us to not undergo our passions (slavish emotions). When we understand God’s chain of necessity, we are in touch with reality. We find freedom in this because it allows us to be active in reality since we’re not overpowered by the appearance of contingencies that makes us helplessly passive. We understand what and how things happen. Understanding God is the first step to act according to what is necessary. That is to say, to align with God’s immanence, the chain of himself within himself whether finite or not. But human potency is limited, so naturally we cannot always adequately act in alignment with God.

Even so, Spinoza assures us we can still be free:

“For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.”²⁰

As he goes on to explain further in the text, this freedom is equal to bliss. To recapitulate: the more we act according to necessity, the freer we are, and there where our knowledge fails us, we have bliss, because we can be satisfied with knowing that the necessity of incomprehensible external causes that appear as contingent is our own imagination. Adequate ideas, or concepts grasping factually existing objects, are not mere imagination. When knowledge fails, imagination makes up for it:

“[I]t is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.”²¹

Understanding the necessity of being overpowered by contingency is what satisfies us because truth sets us free by aligning us with how nature is ordered. In other words, the necessity of contingency is a purely logical way to formulate the necessity of imagination supplementing conceptual thought. First, freedom seems to be attainable thanks to the mind having an adequate idea of God, so that we can act in accordance with nature’s causal necessity. But since my knowledge cannot cover the entire chain of necessity, this must be supplemented by grasping the truth that imagination will fill out the gaps of necessary causality with the appearance of contingency and possibility.

God is fully rational and perfect, and it is possible to align with his immanence. So we strive toward freedom. But our striving is imperfect, otherwise there would be no imagined appearance of the possibility of freedom. Which, when ridden of imagination, is metaphysically identical to the necessity of impossibility.

This is absurd. First, he claims we can be free once we act in accordance with God by comprehending adequate ideas. Then his possibility is excluded because our finite mind cannot comprehend all and our imagination fills in the gaps of causality with the appearance of possibility and contingency. Yet, to comprehend this last fact as such unites our striving toward freedom with freedom itself; with being content with knowing the truth of the impossibility of freedom. At this point, striving to be one with nature’s order is itself being one with nature’s order.

This necessity of impossibility, the actuality of contradiction, is the absurdity of God.

The logic Spinoza is working with her operates analogously to Žižek’s description of speculative closure:

“[T]he Lacanian ‘Real’ ultimately denotes such a non-mediated leftover which serves as a support of the symbolic structure in its formal purity. Yet the paradox of identity resides in the fact that it is precisely through this remainder of the Real – through this supplementary remark which maintains its non-identity and openness – that the system […] achieves its identity with itself.”²²

Our finite mind cannot know everything adequately to achieve total freedom (in alignment with necessity). Therefore freedom is to know imagined contingency to be necessary. That is Spinoza’s ‘non-mediated leftover’ which solves the impossibility of having necessity and freedom coincide in a smooth alignment. This absurd solution is — far from being negligible — a crucial moment in Spinoza’s system.

We should read the word absurdity in this light; both as a supplemental leftover as well as in the etymological sense of being misaligned. Not in the negative sense, but in the same way as we should read the declarations of things being ‘self-evident’, or that ‘everyone knows’. These are all stopgaps that tie formal logic up and express the extent to which a system goes to be internally coherent. We’re to take note of what necessary impossibility is patched up in the closure such statements perform.

Power

“God’s power is identical with his essence.”²³

The nature of striving necessarily involves the appearance of contingency at the moment of inadequate knowledge. The finite mind is overpowered by what is not subject to the split between existence and essence, namely substance.

Power is a prerequisite to strive. For Spinoza, power is the ability to exist, the ability of a thing to endure. How do things cease to exist? When the power to endure is annulled by another power that opposes it. This intrinsic self-preservation of all things is called conatus:

“[T]he power or conatus by which it endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing but the given, or actual, essence of the thing.”²⁴

As long as something is not destroyed by an external cause it preserves itself indefinitely. Neither substance nor any mode can self-destruct, because that would mean a thing would not agree with its definition. Put in another way, if a thing’s existence would be opposed by its unchanging essence it would contradict itself, and that would be absurd.

Hence, Spinoza argues that self-destruction is impossible. Suicide is not the act of killing oneself, but happens due to external causes getting the best of the subject. Self-harm is in the same category. Spinoza rejects human free will in the first place because the only freedom is knowledge of God’s necessity, the continuation of what endures. Without a free will and the impossibility to turn against oneself, self-destruction is totally ruled out.

Therefore, the human being cannot change, his power is to endure. He is strong insofar as he persists in himself, it makes him virtuous. Only the weak man changes. He fails to endure, he is dominated by external causes:

“No virtue can be conceived as prior to this one, namely, the conatus to preserve oneself.”²⁵

As we’ve seen, contentment with truth as the power to know necessity is freedom. It’s to revel in the thought of the power of oneself and God. Humility, arising from the contemplation of one’s weakness, is not virtuous at all but comes from succumbing to external causes. According to Spinoza’s theory of power, one’s weakness is not one’s own, it is rather the lack of one’s own endurance against external causes: “The mind’s conatus, or power, is the very essence of the mind.”²⁶ We can only affirm and think its own positive activity. In contradistinction to Descartes’s self-doubt, Spinoza gets rid of the hysterical and feeble despair of the cogito, and immediately identifies mind as positive; Not as a substance in itself, but as enduring in its existence and disregarding frailty and doubt as external to it. Doubt is not allowed to be equated to my existence, because my existence falters there by the doing of an external power. This begs the question of how God has brought about the very phenomenon of death, or of ceasing to exist.

Out of the acosmist-panentheism ontology, we get a vitalistic naturalism that cannot — because it refuses to — think death:

“A free man, that is, he who lives solely according to the dictates of reason, is not guided by fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is, to act, to live, to preserve his own being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own advantage. So he thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.”²⁷

Spinoza’s self-affirming power is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s master morality that unconditionally says yes to itself without reservations; yes to its power, yes to its life. Nietzsche was deeply inspired by Spinoza. Nevertheless, he critiques him in the Gay Science on the question of power. Nietzsche writes that the power of striving is not out for self-preservation, but:

“The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life.”²⁸

For Nietzsche, the will to power is not about sustaining oneself in the face of external danger. On the contrary, it is more like pushing oneself into one’s own fire, so that one emerges anew out of it with an even greater power to overcome the next (self-)restriction. Such is the true impulse of one’s strength that tends toward overcoming the human. In contrast to Spinoza’s rigid opposition between life and death, Nietzsche thinks them in an amoral and visceral unity:

“What is life – life, that is: continually shedding something that wants to die: life: that is; being cruel and inexorable against anything that is growing weak and old in us, and not just in us. Life — therefore means: being devoid of respect for the dying, the wretched, the aged? Always being a murderer? And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.”²⁹

In Nietzsche’s will to power, dominating others is subordinate to self-overcoming. One kills oneself for oneself to become who one is. And even though Nietzsche’s metaphysics of power is different from Spinoza’s, his ideal of ever strengthening one’s power and staying true to the earth is thoroughly Spinozan.

Nietzsche’s formulation of amor fati that turns each “thus it was,” into a “thus I have willed it,” is undoubtedly inspired by Spinoza. Specifically by combining and changing two notions. First, Spinoza’s amor intellectualis dei, which is the highest virtue, bliss and freedom, our infinite intellectual love for God. Second, Spinoza’s ideal of becoming a “free man,” who as we’ve seen, strives to perfectly align with God and to endure in it within the scope of our intelligence and external causes. Which everyone knows is absurd. Nietzsche critiques Spinoza’s intellectual love for God because he holds it to be death preaching; it is all too otherworldly, not true to the earth. Nietzsche’s amor fati stays true to Spinoza’s move to consider God as immanent, while rejecting Spinoza’s belief of an intellectual love that endures beyond the body in an afterlife. Turning each “thus it was,” into something of my own will, is virtually the same as Spinoza’s freedom qua aligning with necessity by comprehending the truth of causality as God’s doing. It is an integral feature that Nietzsche incorporates into the notion of amor fati. Where they differ is that while Spinoza rules out final causality as anthropomorphism, Nietzsche’s “return to the earth” affirms humanization for the metaphysical principle of will to power to immanently overcome the human for the Übermensch.

Besides the question of power, Nietzsche accuses Spinoza’s emphasis of self-preservation to come out of his distress. I find it to be quite cheap, though not unappealing. But isn’t the same true for Nietzsche’s will to power? After God’s death, only the immanence of self-overcoming nature is alive, but is this deified Will not coming out of Nietzsche’s own distress, or worse, the panic-stricken inversion of his miserable impotence?

Fate

Anyhow, Spinoza adamantly holds that non-being is not. Death and powerlessness are nothing in another, let alone in themselves.

Only the power of God is.

In the late 18th century, Friedrich Jacobi kicked off the pantheism controversy which led to a re-popularization of Spinoza in Germany. He coined the term nihilism to describe what he saw as the inevitable result of Spinoza’s philosophy.³⁰ He rejected Spinoza’s pantheism on the grounds of its denial of transcendence. He claimed that the immanent nature of God in Spinoza led to a fatalism whereby no individual free will or divine final cause could guarantee meaning and purpose from above. He considered this intrinsically amoral absolute atheism to be the logical end conclusion of enlightenment rationality.

The status of everything in acosmist-panentheism, amounts to nothing within God. All that is is God’s eternal immanence; nothing supernatural, no miracle, no revelation, no religious authority can plausibly represent God’s mandate anymore. God has no human-like will. After Spinoza, all that remains is the power of fate as divine and the ethics of rational freedom.

Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, his attempt to remedy the death of God with the eternal return and amor fati should be considered in this light.³¹ The usual readings of Nietzsche as the anti-Christian thinker par excellence or the protestant rebel within Christianity fail to see the fundamental spinozism in Nietzsche which can be elucidated by Hegel’s critique of Jacobi in his History of Philosophy:

“[T]he allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God.”³²

Similar to Spinoza, Nietzsche’s God lives on as the power of nature. In addition to Spinoza having too much God and not being atheistic enough, Hegel argues that the flip side of this is that Spinoza is atheistic regarding Spirit.

The difference between Hegel’s Spirit and Spinoza’s God is clear in their views on love. For Spinoza, love is reducible to joy stemming from an external cause.³³ In other words, for Spinoza love is reducible to power. For Hegel in contrast, love is a self-originative contradiction that is irreducible to power.³⁴

The impact of Spinoza on Nietzsche and Deleuze (and contemporary culture at large!) can’t be underestimated. What is crucial here on the question of power is that Hegel teaches us that power is never straightforwardly itself but always supplemented by symptoms dealing with sex and death in the face of which we confront our fundamental impotence. And yet, all hinges on grasping the absolute not only as the omnipotence of God, but also the ‘more’ in Spirit that is not reducible to nature while also not being another transcendent realm on top of it.

In Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze though, we find their fundamental anchor points in conatus, the will to power, and a life respectively.

A life, as Deleuze’s formulation of his ultraspinozism:

“We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.”³⁵

Seems psychotic? No, it is the ethical law as amoral joy beyond good and evil. As we’ve seen, virtue and its reward, striving and alignment are one in the Ethics. Freedom and bliss are one in the fullness of life that does not think about death.

Death may occur, but nonetheless…

Spinoza’s God does not need subjects. The truth of our activity as subjects is nothing but our capacity to instrumentalize ourselves for the power of God’s self-serving love. To be more precise: in Spinoza, the truth of us is our alignment with the impersonal power whose fate we are subordinate to.

Feelings

In the Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze lineage

“there is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force.”³⁶ (Deleuze, Practical Philosophy)

Nietzsche’s will to power beyond good and evil is a variation of Spinoza’s idea that the will is prior to that which constitutes the good. I will the good, but not because it is good as such, but it is good because I will it. As I’ve already said above, doubt, this despair in limbo is a sign of weakness for Spinoza. It is a lack of the mind’s power. In Descartes, the cogito, the despairing doubter, attests to the certitude of its existence. Opposed to this, we have Spinoza claiming that:

“Things are of a contrary nature, that is, unable to subsist in the same subject, to the extent that one can destroy the other.”³⁷

The subject cannot self-destruct because there is no positive existence of doubt. There are just different emotions and desires that mutually conflict, each of which tries to endure and overtake the other. But the free man is not enslaved anymore to the passions, he does not undergo them but he is active because he knows God. He does not simply know God’s essence as infinite substance, which, as such, is of course indeterminate. He knows that he is within God’s immanence, within degrees of reality. He knows that:

“we acquire a greater and more perfect knowledge of God as we gain more knowledge of natural things.”³⁸

And if we imagine the good to be prior to the will, we fail to understand that:

“No emotion can be checked by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered an emotion.”³⁹

If we want to vanquish unwanted emotions, we can only do it by overriding it with other emotions. We can defeat the weaker emotions with stronger emotions that are truer because they are closer to the knowledge of God’s perfection.

“An emotion cannot be checked or destroyed except by a contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion which is to be checked.”⁴⁰

With my knowledge of the ways of God, I can strive to align with what empowers the emotions that will liberate me from the passions and lusts that I am enslaved by. By submitting to God, I can liberate myself.

“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. We do not enjoy blessedness because we keep our lusts in check. On the contrary, it is because we enjoy blessedness that we are able to keep our lusts in check.”⁴¹

Not only do divine necessity and human freedom align in the virtuous free man. Also blessedness itself is liberation because the biggest enjoyment is more powerful over all lesser ones. It liberates us from being enslaved by the passions. Virtue is bliss is freedom is love for the eternal and infinite power of God.

As Deleuze says in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy:

“[In part V of the Ethics] there is no longer any difference between the concept and life.”⁴²

In other words, there is no difference that makes any difference. All is the same to the indifference of divine nature. Life is one with God, the human being is the instrument of His self-love. Spinoza’s “free man” is perfectly aligned. And insofar as one strives to become oneself, to be more happy, more free, more virtuous and more knowledgeable, more perfect — the more one forgets that the process of self-perfecting has always been completed; that God and the subject are always already aligned in the transparent absurdity that the subject is in God the substance, because God himself necessarily contains his own impossibility within him, he ceases to exist by entering himself.

Spinoza’s improper place

Spinoza’s Ethics is great for succeeding to show the following:

His ontology is a distilled form of a modern secularized God qua nature that is non-subjective. One that is still very much alive in contemporary culture, both artistic and scientific.
He reproduces the Cartesian split between mind and body, but not as two substances that have an ambiguous relationship to God (their origin) but by thinking God as containing the opposite of himself in himself, acosmist-panentheism.
He oscillates between speculative determinations that contain their opposite within themselves and being inclined to make conclusions that he ultimately recoils from by calling them absurd.
His belief in the adequate nature of the mind to know God leads to the necessity to seal his system regarding necessity and freedom, i.e. freedom is aligning with necessity and knowing the impossibility to do so.
He shows how immanence itself is all too transcendent in its attachment to eternal necessity opposed and independent from individuality.

Today, Spinoza’s ontology is worthwhile to work through to see the spontaneous spinozan motives that are present in our culture. Take speech acts. Visible at those moments in his texts where he extrapolates his logic and comes up against a contradiction pushing him to exclaim: “But this is absurd!”

In such speech acts, declarations actualize what is declared by the act of declaration itself. The author does not justify his declaration with a neutral reason. He declares something to be the case, actualizing it at once. Such a phenomenon is enabled by the position from which one speaks. The speech act can only come from a particular — and authoritative — subjective position.

To put it in Spinozese: in speech acts, existence and essence coincide, they are their own cause. The essence of the speech act is that its existence is true: “Hereby, I close the meeting.” As it is said it is done. Yet, in the act, the necessary role of the particular subjective position is obscured at the same time. Consequently, the declaration retains the appearance of a judgment based on an external cause. Psychoanalysis does a good job of demystifying such commonplace yet subtle phenomena:

“As Lacan repeatedly points out, ‘primordial’ speech acts are single exclamations, as a rule curses or vulgar words (‘Shit’, ‘Wow!’ . . .), which play a very speciﬁc role: they are neither statements about things and processes that are going on in reality (like ‘a storm is coming from the north’), nor are they expressions of our inner reaction to external events (fear, anger, joy . . .). At their most basic, they express our lack of a proper place in the symbolic order in which we dwell.”⁴³ (Žižek, Against Progress)

There was no proper place for Spinoza. Not in Portugal, not in the Synagogue in Amsterdam, not in the reformed Church in the Hague, not at the University of Leiden, or the one in Heidelberg. Spinoza repudiated authority because he couldn’t rely on it, it did not resonate with him because it did not address him.

His cause lay elsewhere. The very first definition in the Ethics functions as Spinoza’s minimal philosophical speech act: Substance is causa sui. The unconditioned, independent eternal truth is Spinoza’s cause because it is its own cause. This definition of substance as its own cause self-authorizes itself. As I’ve explored in my series on the ‘I’, this circular logic is absurd.

In contrast to his formal definition of substance qua causa sui, Spinoza’s exclamations of absurdity have a negative connotation. Still, they are declarative speech acts without which the formal logic could not achieve coherence. For his opponents, it did not matter. Substance or absurdity, or better yet, their coincidence in Spinoza’s passionate drive — his true cause sui if there ever was one — were out of place and uncalled for.

Just after he died in 1677, even mentioning or citing Spinoza in one’s texts could get one arrested or fined in the freest republic in Europe — let alone disseminating or publishing his works.

During his life in Holland, the unmarried Jew was grinding lenses. But he was far from a lone hermit. In the last period of his life in The Hague when he didn’t work to sustain himself, he exchanged thoughts in letters to his many friends and followers all over Europe. Or he turned to his circle of close friends in the area — consisting of atheistic misfits — to discuss philosophical and political matters. He worked on his texts like the Ethics and his secular political treatises.

In his view, the fact that he could not depend on any external authority, caused him to fall back to the only worthwhile cause: the self-causing cause of God’s intellectual love. And even though Nietzsche was right to see Spinoza’s amor intellectualis dei as not being true to life in this world, I claim instead that Spinoza was not true to another immortality, one that is also not reducible to Nietzsche’s will to power. This immortality is nothing but the death drive as Cadell Last helps to clarify:

“But not the sublime immortality of a heavenly afterlife as theological residue, but rather the undead and indestructible drive body in the form of an “embarrassing monstrosity”. This idea is explicitly linked to Freud’s death drive:”⁴⁴

“The compulsion to repeat introduces an obscene infinity or “immortality” — not spiritual immortality, but an immortality of “spirits”, of the living dead.”⁴⁵

Spinoza’s passionate drive, the immanent immortality in this life, is far from the positivistic vitalism we find in his own work and many of his admirers. This immortal drive comes out most clearly in the speech acts discussed above. The drive is immortal and indestructible as substance qua causa sui, and it is embarrassing and monstrous at the moments of his exclamations of absurdity.

The immortal drive, this absurd void-god that Freud introduced back in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, can simply not be thought insofar as we take philosophy to be a meditation on life that seeks to unify itself with the notion of experiential fullness, which itself is nothing but a symptom of that immortal drive that repeats itself in a circular motion — with, for, or against its non-mediated leftover.

In response to the impossibility of being embodied in any official institution, Spinoza chose to embody the impossible position of acosmist-panentheism; the stance that maintains that the death of God is contained by this same God. Of course, he rejected the Christian idea of incarnation in the process. He chose to identify himself with God’s instrument, to deem anything dubious or finite to be negligible impotence at an infinite distance to perfection.

On the one hand, Spinoza’s aesthetically pleasing sadism, in the form of his ontology that sought to break with the Cartesian paradigm, was a necessary patricide. Along with his rejection of worldly love, it makes up the naturalist vitalism of the Ethics.

On the other hand, the author Spinoza, as viewed from the standpoint of the Ethics, shows something that everyone already knows. That is to say, that the subject regarded from the perspective of substance is absurd.

I hope to have shown that whenever Spinoza is referred to as a monist/pantheist or a complicated thinker with a self-consistent (or self-enclosed) system, we are glossing over what makes him great. That is, the improper place he occupied, the place of necessary impossibility manifesting as the cursing subject, the causa sui of the immortal drive wherein the height of substance and ridiculous absurdity are one.

“And we should go to the end here: one of the signs of such an authentic Master is that he swears – there is no authority without curses. Swearing is here not a ‘personal touch’, not an obscenity signaling the presence of a private person, it is an immanent feature of the engaged Master. Only experts do not need to swear, and that’s why their authority is much more dangerous.”⁴⁶ (Žižek, Against Progress)

Spinoza’s strength as a thinker, is that he fails to seal up his own formal system and inserts gaps of knowledge with non-mediated speech acts that stain the entirety of the Ethics with zealous engagement. Inconceivable without the drive and far from a dispassionate attitude, this dislocated subjective involvement is a rarity indispensable to think ontology, ethics and politics today.

Excommunicated Spinoza

from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm#chap02

Ethics, Part I Axiom I. (e1a1) ↩
e2p11c ↩
e5p38s ↩
e5p38s ↩
e1p18 ↩
e1p15s ↩
e5p17 ↩
e5p18s ↩
e1p15s ↩
e5d1e ↩
e3d1e ↩
e5p40s ↩
e2d2 ↩
p. 858. Spinoza, B. and Morgan, M.L. (2002) Spinoza: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett. ↩
e1p11p ↩
e1p11s ↩
e1p29 ↩
e1p29p ↩
e1p33s1 ↩
e4a32 ↩
e2p44c1 ↩
p. 60. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK. ↩
e1p34 ↩
e3p7p ↩
e4p22 ↩
e3p54p ↩
e4p67p ↩
p. 292. Nietzsche, F.W. and Kaufmann, W. (1974) The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs. New York: Vintage Books. ↩
p. 100. Nietzsche, F.W. and Kaufmann, W. (1974) The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs. New York: Vintage Books. ↩
Check out Dylan Shaul’s excellent video to learn more about the pantheism controversy:

↩
Check out Cadell Last’s video that contextualizes Nietzsche’s philosophy regarding the death of God:

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From Hegel’s History of Philosophy, see: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpspinoz.htm ↩
“Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” e3d6 ↩
For more on love, see this podcast episode with Cadell Last on my paper on the topic in Logic for the Global Brain:

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p. 257. Deleuze, G., Boyman, A. and Rajchman, J. (2001) Pure immanence: Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books. ↩
p. 128. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ↩
e3p5 ↩
p. 428. Spinoza, B. and Morgan, M.L. (2002) Spinoza: Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett. ↩
e4p14 ↩
e4p7 ↩
e5p42 ↩
p. 130. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ↩
p. 79. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK. ↩
→ Landian Exit and Hegelian Love ↩
Žižek, S. 2011. The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 493. ↩
p. 84. Žižek, S. (2024) Against progress. Bloomsbury UK. ↩

The Refusal to Enjoy

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Descartes can’t be blamed for positing the necessity of God’s existence for establishing the truth of our shared reality. On the one hand, this move can be seen as halting the solipsistic madness of the self-causing cogito, on the other hand — and this falls outside the anachronistic light of reason — God’s existence constitutes the madness of the embodiment in reality.

As of writing, when we direct our attention to the recent victory of the Right in the elections of the American Empire, we find it to be enjoyed in a carnavalesque manner by the winning side. But before delving deeper into the contemporary political situation, we’ll turn our gaze to the 17th century.

Along comes Descartes, whose method of universal doubt shreds any and all suppositions, making him stumble, fall and hit the hard rock of the cogito: I think, therefore I am. If he had put the valor of doubt above this hard rock, he might’ve leaped over it with questions such as: “I still know nothing about thinking or existence as such. How can I conclude the certainty of their unity in the cogito if these are not thoroughly known first?” One of the early critics of Descartes claimed that this would continue the nauseating process of self-questioning, which he believed Descartes was not justified to put an end to. And is that argument wrong? Isn’t Descartes’ choice to cut doubt short at the cogito arbitrary? Descartes dismissed this critique. He argued that our innate knowledge of thought and existence is sufficient to prove the cogito, regardless of the prejudices attached to these words. He also claimed that using a definition to clarify these terms beforehand would have the opposite effect and bestow unnecessary obscurity on them, as well as set aside and devalue the sufficiency of the mind’s innate knowledge.

Descartes made his choice, and he stopped where he did. He was not a sceptic who put doubt over knowing for the sake of enjoying the abstract freedom of indeterminacy. As a philosopher with a method, he aimed for the truth and the necessity of closure it entails.

This is what we find with the Father of Modern Philosophy. He opened up a closure with the cogito, deciding that he was going to be a receptive target at this exact point, exposing himself to all the criticism for generations to come. He rejected the terminological and metaphysical baggage that preceded him, which he had studied during his scholastic education. By starting over from scratch as if nothing came before him, he could naively and infirmly reinstate, or better yet, revive philosophy in a radically modern iteration.

“In this regard [my text, the Principles of Philosophy] will have an effect contrary to that of the ordinary philosophy, for it may easily be observed in those who are known as pedants, that it renders them less capable of reasoning than they would have been had they never learned it at all.”¹

Freed from the redundant complexities of the scholastic corpus, in the cogito, knowledge of the eternal truth was found in simplicity. In subsequent writings, this allowed Descartes to think about how to subordinate the actions of the machinic body to the desire of the cognitive soul, for example in his text Passions of the Soul. But, prior to that, philosophy needed to lay the groundwork of first principles by setting aside the superfluous excess of what previous generations had left it:

“So, when we have true principles in philosophy we cannot fail, by following them, occasionally to meet with other truths; and there is no way in which we can better prove the falsity of those of Aristotle, than by pointing out that no progress has been attained by their means in all the centuries in which they have been followed.”²

Descartes wrested himself loose from the archaic regurgitations of Aristotle in the unclear and indistinct jargon of the scholastics. According to Descartes, one will be more rightly fitted to apprehend the truth by starting with his own texts, rather than by beginning with ancient philosophy. With the method of universal doubt concluding with the cogito, Descartes had made himself into a type of first-person socratic figure who did not find stable rest in the anamnesis of the pythagorean forms, the parmenidean one, or homeric myth, but in the reflexive and positive truth of doubt — its cognitive existence independent from embodiment. With Descartes, philosophy afforded itself a new beginning.

What exactly did Descartes open up for modernity then? For one, he did away with the need for a final cause in the study of truth. He was concerned with the efficient cause only, and grounded reason in its own causality, the name of which is res cogitans, the cogito reified as substance. And, he opened up the diversification of self-grounding minds to find a unity in their diversification, underpinned by the uncreated substance, God. He asserted that diversification in the world is better than there being no evil and hence no freedom at all. All this necessitated was that res extensa, embodied space, was independent from the thinking substance, but just like it, created as well as linked to it by God.

Philosophy in modernity starts with this incongruent split, which is at the same time a unity of the two substances (thinking and extension). That the cogito was thought of as its own cause, meant that it can be understood on its own terms, distinctly, without the need of something else. Doubt itself is the simple truth of first philosophy, the proof too, of my mind’s existence. And as Descartes will repeatedly emphasize throughout his works, he does not appeal to some faith or praise of God’s infinity to universalize his truth: “… I wish no one to believe anything that I have written, unless he is personally persuaded by the force and evidence of reason.”³ Is that true? Yes and no — and I can’t blame him for the ambiguity — without God, the res cogitans has no truth for Descartes, it is not just a substance, but a created substance. And insofar God’s infallibility comes to us from divine revelation, this cannot be contested in the realm of philosophy. Descartes believed that philosophy can only concern itself with the relative degrees of reality. Yet, in other places in his writings, Descartes does have tautological fun with the God question. The ambiguity of the position of God in Descartes philosophy is precisely its strength; the success of Descartes being able to hold a certain tension in his thought. The irresolved and uneasy relation between philosophy and God in Descartes, or, in adjacent terms, reason and revelation, would only continue to intensify in the rest of modernity.⁴

What for Descartes is the origin of the unity of thought and being, or their split in the first place? And if there is two substances, how do they meet? Many critics of Descartes emphasized the strangeness of the fact that in Descartes’s meditations, God’s existence only comes after the cogito, as an afterthought. So, naturally, Descartes was accused of atheism, since he seemed to not need God at all. But before drawing any conclusions from that, let’s take a closer look at where Descartes situates God. For him, God is on the side of res cogitans, the non-extended and intelligible substance. Ah, God. The most perfect perfection, the res cogitans, not as my own feeble mind, but as the uncreated substance. The very thought of the mind’s imperfection, leads to the thought of perfection. And this perfection would not be perfect if it did not exist in the first place — so God exists. The consequence of this is that whenever we err, it is because our finite understanding cannot grasp everything, while the infinity of the will overstretches, resulting in making the privation of res extensa apparent. This is the case especially when the soul is overtaken by physiological factors, by the passions for example. In other words, when we err, it is never the mind’s fault, and always the body’s. Descartes was consistent enough with himself to deduce from that, that properly speaking, the body and its senses can fool the mind, but not the other way around. The mind, when it thinks a discrete and clear truth, can only be certain of it when it comes from God, whose benevolence assures me he never deceives. Back in his meditations, the moment the evil genius fulfilled the function to prove the self-standing cogito, God was welcome to take his place.

“[A]t least through the instrumentality of Divine power, mind can exist apart from body, and body apart from mind.”⁵

Yet, in Descartes’s writings, we never come to know how, or why God has created two substances. God only comes at the end after having proven that the substances subsist in their own right. Does that not undermine the point of a substance in the first place? And would it not be better to posit God as the third substance? And besides creating these two, what assures the interconnection of the two, regarding the soul in the body? His infamous pineal gland sat in the center of the brain to do the job, the seat of the soul in extension. Of course, the knowledge that this was the location where the soul controlled the body, would fall flat if it did not fall back on God.

So, ultimately, God is the one holding the two substances together. He created them both, but Descartes left the origin of the created substances unknown. If this does not strike you as strange, I concede that it has done so to me. For Hegel, this createdness of the substances, was the point in his philosophy that Descartes left unthought. Fortunately, today philosophy is not bothered by such absurdities of some external guarantor being the crutch for obscure origins. No Great Outside can lay claim to being a principle that has merit on its own, and its vastness collapses in on itself when “I think”. But for Descartes, doubt as the proof of my mental existence as its own cause, namely the res cogitans, would not sustain itself were it not for the more perfect height of the realest reality, God. For him, it did adequately succeed to bring thought and being together. It saved him from the risk of a disembodied cogito with its innate knowledge, who has no need of God, or others.

Back in our world, in November 2024, Trump won the US elections. To analyze what led up to this, we should, regardless of the multiplicitous and complexity of causes that have preceded it, see into the way these causes are inscribed into our shared social space, if we are real materialists that is. Way back, Descartes opened up that path for real materalism to thread, which is worth exploring before continuing on the political analysis.

Descartes has ruled out any type of monism of the body-mind. Contact between these two is never simply direct. Descartes’ student Malebranche picked this up and developed “correlationism”, which more discreetly and clearly situates God by explaining how he mediates the two substances, making the pineal gland superfluous. He held that the two substances exist separately, yet in parallel. They function independently, but correlate because of God’s doing. In other words, the alignment of body and mind as a harmonious single thing is not on us. I think of raising my hand, and my body enacts it, or so I assume — in correlationism, all activity is ascribed to God as the mediator between mind and extension. Unlike Descartes, for Malebranche, it’s not that the res cogitans touches the extended substance through the pineal gland, but that the two substances operate in tandem, through the active mediation of God. Translated to psychoanalytical parlance; following Descartes, Malebranche was aware that reality makes sense (has its substances correlate) because the Big Other exists.

And now, just after the election results are out, we can observe the Big Other’s enjoyment being embodied by the Right’s righteous and hopeful celebration.

At last, everything makes sense again. Everything has been set straight. Normality has returned, the incoming four years will be nothing but memes. But as Descartes demonstrated, the Rightists are not one with their so-called common sense. Their passionate bodies are experienced as spontaneous and intuitive, but only because their body correlates with their mind as long as it is mediated by the Big Other.

“I exist too,” the leftist might say. And she does not have the ability to enjoy along with the banter of the victorious broligarchs. Her feelings admit to defeat. Yet her resentment, her moral indignation against the victors, and the appeal to her disagreeable passion is simply a cope, the Right can rightfully claim.

Her inability to enjoy might stem from an untrustworthy weakness. I mean, who could identify with what the Democratic party’s campaign and candidate represent? There is also those who did take note of the blatant inadequacy of the the Democratic campaign, like Bernie, who released the following statement in a letter in response to Trump’s victory: ”It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”⁶ For the Left still remotely in touch with its past, the political issues of capital and class come to the fore. And even though someone like Bernie is not blind to the enjoyment of the right, the fact that Trump has progressed from being a one time aberration in 2016, to an irreversible world historical moment, signifies a turning point that the extinction of the berniebro foreshadowed.

Enjoying the moment like the Right, or not being capable to enjoy it like the Left — I refuse all of it. Not because “I exist too”, but because I do, regardless of whether Big Other does or does not. I feel something — so take away that feeling, take away what caused it. And yet I think, so I exist. Again, I can’t blame Descartes.

But where does this knowledge of the Lack in the Big Other come from? It doesn’t really come from anything at all. Except for despair fleeing from itself, also known as courage. Here, the courage to doubt, which “sets out for us a very simple way by which the mind may detach itself from the senses.”⁷ Descartes’s doubt, the doubt that does not doubt that it doubts, but knows it to be the undeniable truth, is the power of the mind to refuse the body. Doubt then, is a denial to be embodied. Doubt is the hesitation, the faltering of sense. Doubt is a hiccup of reality, that reveals it not to be dependent on either embodiment or God’s benevolence. To paraphrase Lacan: all doubt clarifies, is that reality where I don’t think, is where I am, and that I’m not there, where I think. Merely this fragile doubt amounts to the certitude of I think therefore I am. Doubt proves that embodiment is not all, that knowledge of truth lies in the discordance between the mind and extension, which only the former is capable of cognizing, as it comes to see its shaky unground as certainty, but only after it negates the external crutch of being that reveals itself to come down to nothing.

From both the vitalist and anti-intellectual side, philosophy is sometimes accused of being stark and frigid, caught up in lifeless abstractions. In a similar but less cynical and more rigorous move, throughout Descartes’s oeuvre, we constantly find him being astounded by the breathtaking ignorance of the learned. Every so often he provides a funny, incisive or insulting remark to the literate, the studious, the scholars, and the philosophers of the letter. His writings could in part be seen as a response to those who enjoy to confuse themselves with complexity instead of ridding themselves of the prejudices which cloud the hardest, clear and discrete truths. His decision to begin with the most simple enabled him to start over from a new point, birthing modern philosophy in the process.

The Right definitely knows how to enjoy, take Trump’s recent announcement of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), the new presidential comission which Musk believes could reduce the federal budget by one third. This meme is no doubt in line with the Right’s indulgence in seeing the Left, reacting against it, being incapable of enjoyment.

Descartes’s method, torn from its context, brings me to refuse the fundamentally Right’s proposal to return to embodiment, in favor of the Left’s disorienting and insecure rejection of it. Not because I do not know how to enjoy, but because I do. And, in addition to that: that which I am incapable of is also not to be known at all. There is nothing to know there, nothing which I would be capable of if I relinquished the poetry of the future, the impotence of the ought. I don’t reject this axis of being incapable of enjoyment versus knowing to enjoy because I operate above the sensuous enjoyment of the Right. The Left which does not dirty itself with this passion of ignorance in the guise of knowing how to enjoy, is a dead end too, and not supersensuous at all. The supersensous, the cogito, is not a transcendent, pure and cleansed realm above the raw and dirty real of the body. The Right’s celebration of embodying the Other’s enjoyment, and the Left’s disembodied incapacity to do so because it takes place where it is out of joint both obscure the fact that they themselves operate by having their impetus be obscured to them, namely, the cogito.

Analogous to my leftist critique of the Right and Left, which is in line with Žižek’s incisive new article⁸ on MAGA 2024: what Descartes has achieved with the inauguration of modern philosophy, is thanks to his retreat to the zero-point of the cogito, the decision to begin over from universal doubt, least of all immediate embodiment.

Then, how do I know “I exist”, given that God does not? Because reality, this political problem, is not mine alone. The cogito points to a rupture in what is. I exist, and that is not supposed to be. Because it would show the Right’s above-mentioned knowledge to be unintelligible only because of its embodied idiocy.

So, to step take a step back. I exist, there where there’s nothing to be, there where something other than the body refuses to take part in reality as we know it. This is, as seen from those taking the side of embodiment, assumed to be a part that is either yet to be included or simply looked over as if it doesn’t exist. And it’s true. It doesn’t exist, solely because it contains the whole of reality in the speech of its self-discrepancy. It’s not right, and it’s not on the Right, and not in the center either, but on the zero-point of the Left.

The minimal, subtle and fragile nature of Descartes’ assertion was enough to crown him the father of modern philosophy. It provided the irrefutable certainty of the unity of thinking and being, while at once being a vanishing and insubstantial moment of the disembodied subject. But does this modern philosophy concern itself with that which is embodied but can’t speak for itself? Or do we now receive the highest truths from the grace of the self-causing intellect? The word substance, as the self-subsistent, self-causing cause, has been the way out of the contingencies without essence for millennia. Subsequent development in modern philosophy has shown that the age of reason, of rationalism, with the scientific illumination of matters taken for granted in past, had to make way for the dark ground of being, the night of the world, and the death of God. Which are respectively put forth by Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche most expressedly. Especially in German idealism and psychoanalysis, we find elaborations of Descartes’s cogito. The psychoanalytical subject was, as Lacan rightly claimed, the true inheritor of the cogito, visible in the unconscious disembodied slips of the subject. Freud and Lacan haven’t come on to the scene to shatter the ego and to reveal the underlying psyche with its primal drives and instincts underlying it. That is a complete misunderstanding of Freud’s Copernican revolution. Lacan’s reformulation of the cogito in

“I am that impossible piece of the real where I cannot think.”⁹

means that any assertion of a life deeper than thinking and language, are ways to deceive oneself with the Other’s fantasy that there is a way out of the disjointed cogito, the perturbance of the Real. This deception is yet another symptomatic attempt to patch up the repetition of reality’s discordance with itself, from which this symptom itself emerges. As Žižek perspicuously notes in his reading of Kant:

“In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes this paradox of cogito at its purest:’In the pure thought of myself, I am the being itself [ich bin das Wesen selbst], yet no part of this being is given to me thereby for my thought.’ So, in the unique point of cogito as the intersection between being and thought, I lose thought as well as being: thought, because all and every content is lost; being, because all determinate-objective being evaporates in the pure thought — and, for Lacan, this void is the Freudian subject of desire.”¹⁰

Descartes opened this up for German idealism and psychoanalysis. These two Cartesian traditions were concerned with thinking, not the primal shadow underneath the seemingly substantial ego, but the self-referring tautologies of thought and being stemming from their coincidental obliteration in the subject:

“[The] most radical zero-point of the Cartesian cogito [is] the point of the negative intersection between being and thinking: the vanishing point at which I don’t think, and I am not. I am not: I am not substance, a thing, an entity, I am reduced to a void in the order of being, to a gap, a béance.”¹¹

Philosophy is maddening, not only because it is madness that is more (or less) than idiotic in the etymological sense, but also because it ceases to be itself when it stops inverting what is given into a mere option among the series of madnesses which are held together by their negative universality. It is more than idiotic because it does not relativize madness into oblivion, as if it would be without its truth. And it is less than idiotic because it has to decide between assigning its own dislocated standard to itself or to forsake itself for false immediate embodiment, for example in the guise of vitalist affirmation. At least, these are post-cartesian temptations that Hegel seeked to remedy.

The price to pay for this concrete freedom of the cogito, this sickening cure of the pharmakon, is the discrete and clear dislocation of ourselves. Today, the ubiquity of the Digital Other has made all of us into Newtonians, insofar as he’s taken to have said “Physics, beware of metaphysics.” We unconsciously operate with the axiom that the physics of the social space must beware of the metaphysical cogito lurking behind the externality of numeric degrees and quantities. Digital life, both mechanical and smooth-functioning, has, far from disembodying us, inserted a new digital God as our Malebranchian, occasionalist embodier. And if this virtual reality is taken to be disembodied — and this merits repetition — it should instead be reduced to the axis of knowing enjoyment and the incapacity to have it, behind which lurks the decision to sever oneself from these two which are still all too corporeal. To sever oneself from the pressure to be embodied, to refuse to enjoy.

But disembodiment can’t be the end of it, can it? What about reintegrating the cogito back into reality, back into the body? Not as a mode or part of the body, but something else. Yes, but only by assuming its inexistence in reality. In other words, as that which has been excluded to constitute reality, the incongruity of which is patched up by the Big Other, thank God. Embodiment signifies a new kind of triumph, one that is sensuous and speechless, the point of common sense, where everything is needless to say, because there is no need to speak. This is the triumph of incorporation (which has etymological root in the word embodiment) into the Other’s regime. For the Right, the outspoken subject is the part supposed to be incorporated into the whole, returned to its proper and mute place. This whole, this perverted madness posturing as natural common sense stupefies subjectivity. It rests on the myth that in the future, we’ll be fully one with our bodies, directly linked to the enjoyment of the unspeakable, as we were before the present day disembodied aberration disturbed it. Only on the Left, can this disembodied aberration, that is the subject be assumed as such. The continuation of today’s right wing upsurge without any great shocks, is indeed as Žižek in his article says, the worst of all futures. To begin afresh is what Descartes did, as is the task of the contemporary Left to do, by refusing both the pressure to be embodied as well as the resignment to itself for its inability to do so.

“The most that the will can do while this commotion [of the passions] is in its full strength is not to yield to its effects and to restrain many of the movements to which it disposes the body.”¹²

Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 217. ↩
Ibid., 272. ↩
Ibid., 337. ↩
I can highly recommend the following video-essay by Cadell Last on the topic:

↩
R, Descartes. Arguments demonstrating the existence of God and the distinction between soul and body, drawn up in geometrical fashion. https://dbanach.com/homepage/13-descartes%20geometrical%20arguments.htm ↩
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698 ↩
Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 130. ↩
→ FROM MAGA TO MEGA: AFTER TRUMP’S VICTORY ↩
Žižek, S. (2012). Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso Books. 644 ↩
Zupančič, A. (2000). Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan. Verso. Foreword by Žižek. ix. ↩
Žižek, S. (2012). Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso Books. 630. ↩
Descartes, R. (1997). Key philosophical writings. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 379. ↩

Enlightenment

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking, how do we delineate the term ‘turgidity’? A quick Google search has shown me that there’s two different meanings. A sack of fluids can be turgid, excessively swollen, bordering on collapse. Beyond this, we have turgidity as pompous or bombastic speech. I am a calm person, I am repulsed by turgid phenomena; hence, I’ll abstain from giving an example. I’m sober and to the point. Banality soothes, caresses and massages the dried and crusted scabs of my soul. My grandmother always used to meander on about how every come-up is destined to come down. I always thought that was profound and unequivocally true. But. I am confident that cognitively circulating around the potential limits of the term ‘turgidity’ will reap benefits. It awakens a sense of rejuvenation, of righteous pride within me. Of course, I must halt you here. I am not talking about the self-righteous kind. To be turgid, is to refuse the come-down. To be turgid is to – as Freud was well aware of – reek of an anal refusal to defecate. Somehow – and here I am approaching the limits of my knowing – turgidity combines the notion of overzealous excretion with its very opposite; constipatory accumulation of excrement.

Richard Apemantus O’Briar neatly placed his gold alloy fountain pen in its stand and looked out the window. Large windows such as this one, he felt, were decadent and could never compare to the serenity of blank white walls. Still, his view was sufficiently unchanging. The flat green field ahead of him stretched out in a seemingly endless plot of land which had been bought but not yet touched by a monstrous corporation, and submissively awaited upheaval and construction. Finite endlessness — the opposite of turgidity, perhaps? Richard, or Dickie as his mother used to call him, let out a deep sigh and pondered his imminent displacement. He would have to leave this place, and soon. His suitcase, a tense brown square waiting by the door, stained his peripheral vision. His train tickets, which he had printed out twice, weighed heavily inside his breast pocket. 3:07, platform 4a. He would leave his keys in the door.

As it was 3:00, and the station was at least seven minutes away by bicycle, Dickie started to worry. Not because he’d have to rush cycling to the station, but because his bicycle had a flat tire. “Dickie, that is the name I have been sentenced to. What will I do for it!” he thought to himself. Forgetting to zip up his fly, he flew out the door and zipped away through the streets of Shifterswil City. He was so fast and fabulous in his sprint! We are so proud. Fortunately for Dickie, he had the privilege to step onto the platform at exactly 3:06. How did he run that fast? We do not know. He looked at his watch, gave himself a moment to breathe, and walked to the closing doors of the train. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, let out a sigh, and pressed the button to re-open the doors. “I love buttons, I am a button-type person, not least in the physical sense; I abhor virtual buttons which have been designed to deceive and humiliate my sense of autonomy.” For some reason, the door did not open after he pressed the button. For a split second, his heart stood still. But then he was relieved when he saw a sign on the door saying “PRESS DEFECTIVE BUTTON AT YOUR OWN RISK.” So he walked toward the other door, which was just 5 metres away. While approaching the door, he realised that the next problem was that the train was filled to the brim with Chinese tourists. Dickie looked Chinese himself, but would never lower himself to the tourist variant. Self-loathing was an activity he passionately clung to. A few years ago he got an anti-squint surgery performed on him, a purported attempt to cure his passion. He would never tell anyone about it, but I will. He paid his friend Slort Chomskyhonk to slice a piece of skin out of his eyelids. Chomskyhonk was from Nigeria, where he studied the art of procrastination during his university courses on sustainable development. Needless to say, his doctorate was not fit for meticulous operations involving knives and eyelids.

Dickie was the luckiest man alive, his eyelid surgery went flawlessly. Entering the train compartment was something else though, and even here his laughably short height and scraggy body did not help. A big and muscled Chinese tourist kept shoving him back to the platform while intently gazing and frowning at him. The strength of his body was almost godlike, in Richard’s view that is.

“Say, will you stop that?” Dickie uttered through gritted teeth, as if he needed the extra barrier, because the question was only a tiny sliver of what he wished to say. But he would remain civil. If he was ever to unleash the wild storm of exasperation he harboured in the deepest, darkest, most cramped space of his otherwise tidy brain, he would not unleash it at someone with godlike bodily strength. The target of his cathartic outburst would preferably be shorter than him, and weaker. “Please let me in,” he begged. The Chinese tourist said nothing, and did nothing. Dickie stared at him as he, very slowly, attempted to step onto the train again. The man kept staring back at him. His frown, though unmoving, seemed to deepen. His eyes were the only part of him moving. They followed Dickie as he entered the train and shuffled to the side, so he could lean with his back against the wall and eliminate any possibility that someone would push him out. He put three tourists in between himself and the aggressor. Just to be sure. “Sorry, apologies,” he kept saying as he wiggled past them. A sharp whistle trilled in his ear; the doors closed with an unsatisfying thwomp. Then, slowly, the train started to move.

He had made it.

The train conductor started to speak unintelligibly over the intercom, and the babble filled Dickie with an unpleasant amalgamation of satisfaction and dread. He did not like paradoxical emotions. Outside, the landscape flashed by in stripes of dark purple skies, greyish yellow wheat fields, and silhouettes he could not quite make out. This is what he was leaving behind. He supposed he preferred it over what was to come, because in his mind, the future looked like TV static. Void. Though that was not entirely true. Dickie stuck his hand into his pocket and felt around for the instruction letter he had received. It was still there, and so he knew exactly where to go, and what to do.

“I don’t have any feelings.” He murmured to himself. “Look how they treated me.” He nervously pulled his hand out of his pocket, as if the instructions would contain yet another alien imperative subduing him to a rule that was opposed to his own free will. It read:

BRAIN RESTITUTION CO.

*Congratulations!

You have been selected to voluntarily participate in the mandatory “Chosen One Programme” in the famous capital of the Beldeguuz Canton, Switcherland. Follow the following instructions to be followed:

Exit your train at Beldeguuz-City Central Station
Wash face and hands at Free Public Toilet in the Central Station
(not reimbursed by BRC)
Take a cab or taxi to BRC HQ in Fizgole Alleé 57A
Clearly articulate the following code to our reception service

WARNING: Mentioning anything other than the provided code will result in immediate expulsion from the programme.*

CODE: XX XX XX XXX (X)

Safe travels, and thanks to FatherLord HighFriend for gifting you the opportunity!

*BRAIN RESTITUTION CO.

For those who will have been who they are, to become what they will be*

A wave of gratitude and relaxation came over Dickie. He crumpled the instructions, electrified by a vigorous excitation. Smoothly, he slid hand in his pocket, and he savoured the fine texture of the wad. While intimately feeling around its contortions, he thought: “These instructions are clear enough for me. I used to have problems with stainless clarity, like the transparency of water. I used to be fettered to arbitrary abstractions getting in the way, pushing me around to assert my particular inclinations without greater care for what is deemed polite by social life at large. I was so impulsive, but now, I freely assume my mandatory subjugation by this foreign corporation. I am to be free at last.” His eyes. You should have seen his eyes. I think that which comes closest to a viable description is to denote them as white marbles marinated by a type of demonic possession, like those carried by followers in MegaChurches in the Nighted States.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Beldeguuz-City Central Station!”

Dickie startled, and woke up from his dream-like state. “This is me.”

For a while now, worry had been growing in his gut like a bread rising in the oven. There were things to be done, important things. Dickie enjoyed executing necessary tasks, especially if those tasks bore an authoritative air, but only if he knew how to. The horror of attempting something new, meticulously following every instruction, and still failing, was grotesque to him.

To subdue himself, he had to find the Free Public Toilet in the Central Station as soon as possible. “At least there is no wrong way to execute step 2 of the BRC instructions,” Dickie thought. “I just need to find the Free Public Toilet and wash my face and hands.” Bravely carrying himself across the platform and down into Beldeguuz-City Central Station, he kept his eye out for signs alluding to toilets. He found none. No iconography of the bowl, no little man and woman figurines, not even an abbreviation. This could not be! When Dickie had circled the entire station hall twice, he felt a quiet desperation dawn on him. He reread his instructions to make sure that he had not missed a clue somewhere, and kept looking. Twenty minutes passed. He considered asking for help, but feared the BRC would expel him from the programme if they found out about his incompetence. After forty minutes, Dickie let out a high-pitched whining noise. The lament sickened him and drove him to the threshold of the station, on the verge of fresh air.

Six feet away, built against the outer wall of the Beldeguuz-City station hall, stood a crooked white cube with a red-blue flashing sign that read, Free Public Toilet. Dickie exhaled and felt his face contort into a mellow smile.

Clean-faced and fresh-handed, Dickie watched the streetscape of Beldeguuz-City float by. There were tall grey buildings reaching up into the clouds, loudly decorated with painted storefronts at the base level, but blatantly boring when you looked up. The taxi driver was humming something cheerful and it was hard not to sing along, though out of respect for the unspoken rule of pretending not to be in the same car together, Dickie resisted the urge. Instead, soundlessly tapped his fingers along with the cheerful rhythm. He had been chosen for Restitution, and although he was unsure what ‘restitution’ meant exactly, he did know that words starting with the re- prefix oftentimes had to do with improvement, like revival and restoration and rejuvenation. Morphologically speaking, his life could only improve.

“Fizgole Alleé” said the taxi driver in his thick Beldeguzian accent, which was sensually ugly. Before Dickie had paid him, he drove off into the sunrise and his cheerful song faded in the distance. Befuddled, Dickie turned his back to the growing light. He had been left to his own devices in front of a ginormous concrete building, imperially decorated with pillar facades. A sleek blue door awaited him, windowless and without a letterbox. It was a tall slab, so smooth that Dickie could vaguely make out his own reflection in the blue surface. Next to it, a small intercom had been built into the wall. ‘Brain Restitution Co.’, a name tag below the intercom read. And below that, in the sober helvetica font: ‘For those who will have been who they are, to become what they will be.’

“Code please.” An exhausted and disinterested voice said through the intercom. Dickie looked away from the in-built camera. He finally felt seen, yet he did not like it. It awakened a novel affect in him – the feeling of spiritual nakedness. “I am here for the restitution programme, I have a note, one moment please.” “Code. Please.” The intercom sounded again. Dickie raised his left eyebrow in astonishment. “How come I am feeling rushed?!” He blurped out while still looking away, wagging a finger at the intercom. He clenched his fist and slid it into his pocket. His hands were sweaty. The amount of liquid would definitely spoil the wad and make the code unreadable. “Excuse me, do you have a napkin?” He said. Yet he knew he could not even find the wad in the first place, let alone clean it with a napkin. “Code needed for entry is necessary for the door to open. Code please,” said the intercom again. “What the hell am I on about, why does everything worsen? And why now, why to this pedantic extremity?” He loudly exclaimed. “Dickie, cut the bullshit,” a familiar voice sounded from behind. A shiver went through his spine as he felt a hand pat his shoulder. “I got two tickets left, I would’ve come along with my fiancée, but during our discussions on the progress made in the Nigerian oil fields, she wouldn’t cave to my claim that green oil is the future. Ugh, green coal is nonsense. Flying money pigs don’t grow on trees, let alone a wife in crude oil. Hence, I decided to come alone.”

The intercom beeped happily. Slort stretched himself out by putting his hands as high as he could and let out a profoundly primal roar, making sure to show he was at the zenith of comfort. “Orghshoshmaloch!”

The door opened.

Dickie, with Slort’s arm around his shoulder, entered the building with each step in unison, insofar as Dickie could keep up with Slort’s arrhythmic pace.

The vast and baroque hallway made its impression on Dickie.

“Woah.”

As Dickie attempted to halt, Slort’s strong hands pulled him away. Slort did not have the patience to savour the architectonic beauty surrounding him.

“Don’t sweat it Dick.”

“I am not.” he said, while wiping his face, undermining the content of what he said with the form of his bodily actions. The way in which he pretended to be confident in his obviously pathetic shape repulsed Slort more than ever before. They would walk on for 20 minutes. At the very end of the hallway stood a statue of FatherLord HighFriend’s son, Peter. “The turd,” Dickie whispered to himself while seeing Slort’s deep bow humiliate his purported nonchalance, or worse, sarcastic disrespect for dominance hierarchies. Slort pretended not to notice any of it. He stayed in his bowing position for a few more seconds, looking like some sort of carpentry tool. He felt that making Dickie wait a bit more was his appropriate punishment. “A 90-degree angle is not only a right angle, but also the right angle par excellence!” He exclaimed while raising his torso and coming to stand upright again. Then, he started pinching his eyes to make out the details of the face of the gargantuan statue, or, pretended to, as it was merely to show Dickie the amount of esteem he had for the FatherLord’s son. The building had its own internal metro system. Fortunately, the station was right beside the statue. They took their seat while the apparent conductor somehow disapprovingly stared at them. As the metro rode away, Slort kissed Dickie on the cheek, showing a sign of maternal love that he knew Dickie had been missing out on in his childhood.

They arrived at the station, entered the waiting room and sat down on the sofa. Slort immediately decided to stand up again. “I’m done here,” he said while doing jumping jacks. An impeccable performance, given the speed with which he was enacting it. Dickie stretched out his hands, yet Slort turned 90 degrees and marched into the metro tunnel. Slort felt conflicted about his friendship with Dickie. And Slort had nothing to do in the building; his brain had been restituted since birth, and so was not in need of further operations, unlike his fiancée. And, having been born from BRC employees, he felt certain that Dickie’s participation in the programme was a lost cause. As he heard Dickie call his name from the waiting room, Slort increased the pace of his stride and tensed his muscles to intensify the dominant appearance of his military march. Why you might ask? To be ready to belittle anyone inhibiting his determinateness, even, no, especially Dickie. While striding through the metro tunnel, he noticed Dickie let out a final squeal, which he knew was common to Dickie when he did not have his way with Slort. Yet Slort also knew that the intonation of this squeal was of a defeated type. So he relaxed his posture, decreased his pace, walked through the emergency exit in the metro tunnel, out into a meadow. He took off his clothes, stood still, widened his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and like the scary lion he envisioned himself to be, opened his mouth and let out a gratifying and majestic roar. After which he twirled around a few times, let himself fall with his back to the grass, and tenderly scoffed at the insignificance of the outer world, grinned, and dozed off.

The act of doing absolutely nothing is, in some cases, incredibly useful, as self de-actualization makes space for renewed individual fulfilment. The act of waiting, however, is in most cases tedious, even harmful in some, because the paradoxical combination of rising anticipation and unfathomable boredom is difficult for the human brain to endure. Dickie wondered whether his brain restitution would make waiting easier for him in the future. There was no clock in the waiting room; only a faux-leather beige little bench, one very silent door, and a chandelier made of vertically hanging fluorescent lights. He was tapping his index fingers together, wiggling his toes, and clicking his tongue. A one-man orchestra playing the Neurotica.

“Richard Apemantus O’Briar?” someone called from behind the door. It was a woman; her voice was slightly high-pitched from the strain of kindness.

“Yes?” Dickie asked. When nobody replied, he rose from the bench and slowly approached the door. He raised his fist to knock.

The door flew open to reveal a tall, lean woman wearing a skin-tight white space overall and a bonnet. One blonde curl escaped the haircover behind her left ear, and it was shaped so perfectly that Dickie thought she must have placed it there on purpose. The woman was beaming at him with teeth even whiter than her overalls. “Welcome. Slort has told us so much about you, Richard.”

“It’s Dickie,” he said, realising too late that he had just ruined his chances of no longer being named a diminutive.

The woman placed her hand on the small of his back and gently led him through the door into a dimly lit hallway. His eyes sluggishly adjusted to the darkness. They started walking side by side at a pace that was slightly too slow for him. “Well then, Dickie, as you know, FatherLord HighFriend has kindly chosen you as a candidate for brain restitution,” the woman said. “We would like to start the procedure shortly – is that alright with you, Dickie?”

“Where is Slort?”

“Oh, no idea, darling. Now, it is our strict policy to share as little information as possible about the procedure beforehand. FatherLord HighFriend finds it crucial that the candidate find their own purpose in the restitution process. Influencing your expectations now could harm the rest of your journey.”

“I don’t think I have any expectations,” Dickie said.

“Wonderful!” said the woman. They stopped in front of a solid wall, which turned out to be a wall-textured door. She placed a keycard against the stone, and a green light flickered in the top-right corner. The door opened soundlessly, revealing bright white light, and the woman’s voice suddenly sounded very far away as she said: “Go on in. He’s waiting for you.”

Whilst jitteringly entering, being ecstatically frantic, trembly knowing himself to be emasculated, but simultaneously mantic, he thought:

“Now the time has come, the time has come for me, and only for me. Personally – I don’t feel like I am ready yet, I feel a sense of perturbance, a sense of protruding, too. Whatever I have been missing out on, it has not been a part of me, I aligned with it, and condoned its will for the sake of higher-”

“Slort!” FatherLord HighFriend interrupted.

“I am Dickie!” Immediately taken aback by his rude and unthoughtful abreaction, he froze.

“Slort!” Another FatherLord HighFriend pounced on him, knocking Slort, no, I mean Dickie, to the ground.

“Get me out of here!” Dickie, or Slort, whoever you want at this point. – They are all the same to me now. Vague screen memories tend to melt different singularities into a mess of particular colour palettes, but in a mix, a melting pot wherein each colour loses its vitality without succumbing to the Great Brown.

First things first, it was turgid, turned sped up, so I spat it all up and got fed up – the Chinese tourist did not stop to frown. Dickie thought himself as high brow, but high-flownness was not wherein he excelled, not by far, it was more or less far-fetched, it might all feel smashed, mashed up together now, don’t get riled up, I’m hardly impressed. Wow.

Condemn the condo and expect a slugfest. High friends, are fatherly. The totem erects because the Lord of the forebearers was unbearingly, daringly, making the One in hole – the mole digs deeper and does take its due when due time’s dully and it all seems like folly but the continuation relapses, transgresses and fends off what clashes.

“The sceptre swings and I cling to the crown!” FatherLord HighFriend A cried out.

“I am greater and more cruel! I challenge thee to a fencing duel, take this sabre and bow!” FatherLord Highfriend B slyly shouted.

As soon as the poetic function of a discourse dominates, overtakes what the emotive adresser attempts to narrate, each signifier in line is but a shrine for what is yet-to-come. Wait, hold up, here, a last word: tricky, no, fat chance – bait.

“Now wait just a second,” Dickie stammered as FatherLord HighFriend A and B had at each other. They swirled around him in a piercing dance — there was one, two, many FatherLords — the world was a kaleidoscope, visually and sonically. “Cuse-excuse me! Excuseme! I ididn’t come all this way justo watch you two have a dis a greement!”

The two FatherLords slowly lowered their sabres and turned their heads in complete synchronicity, they might as well have been mirror reflections. They took three steps toward him, blending into One. The FatherLord HighFriend handed Dickie one of the sabres. Dickie took it and held it like he would a wand. He tried sticking the blade out in front of him.

“You have to treat the sword as an extension of yourself.” FatherLord HighFriend pointed his sabre at Dickie’s and started to draw tiny circles with the tip, around Dickie’s blade. “The institution for restitution counts on your intuition to bring the process to fruition, Richard. Bow in earnest or ironically towards iconography, it does not matter to me – this, Slort knows. Whichever way the wind blows, straighten your back, Richard. You have to treat the sword as an extension of the Self, replacing something that you lost, perhaps. It is a temporary solution, though not quite restitution-”

Dickie frowned. “I starkly dislike physical violence.”

At this, the FatherLord HighFriend laughed and opened his arms wide. “Defeat me. You might find fulfilment, Dickie. Become me, and be restored.”

Dickie became him, and was abhorred. There, on the floor, lay a deflated body delicate as a popped balloon. The body was cartoonishly still – an uncanny semblance of a person. A hunk of lowly, stinking meat, and Dickie towered over him high and mighty.

“Is this what they call the state of separation? Is this not precisely a residue of the self-alienated dread of post-mortem narration?”

Dickie’s eyelids came down, as he was carried away by the relaxation of his receding frown. What now, he thought, what now? He reached into his pocket, and found that the wad of instructions was truly gone.

Then, he finally awoke from the dream that was his former life, into his truest dream. Wherever he went, wherever he used to leak, he would now seep. As ever, he was still made out to be a freak, yet he refound his foundation time and time and time again, each as ever slightly oblique, rearranging his shape, reaping the misfitted benefits. Time and time and time again.¹

The authors took turns writing each scene. The one rule during the writing process was that they could not speak about that which was not written yet, or what was to come. ↩

Ravin

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Brussels, 2024.

Lyrics

Cadell: And Raven, anything you wanna add?
Raven: I’m a God, I’m a God, I’m an immortal God
Cadell, Raven, Owen: I’m a God, I’m a God, I’m an immortal God
Raven: That’s my contribution

Ravin, ravin
At the rave with Raven
She’s not a white dove, her heart black, like a raven
Jk that’s cap don’t get anal, she sweet and fly don’t be mad
I don’t mean to be abrasive, I know she’s taken

Bard told me to go tantric, now I cannot help it but be brazen
When Raven does her thing many lacking men get so stunned and start feigning
Technodynasties is what she’s cravin
And it’s so amazin
I do not shame sluts at this point I embrace ‘em

Where’s waldo, where’s waldo, where’s waldo
Where, huh
Where’s waldo, where’s waldo, where’s waldo

Now I found that sperg fakin
Way there to the right
And I know he’s not a shaman
Show me your face meet me outside
He’s too boring to be satan
Work up to my might
Just evil like a pagan
For real I’m so bright
Don’t cave for waldo Raven, don’t do it Raven

He’s the bottom of the barrel
No renaissance, just dark
And a pussy man, a farce
Cadell said it too, and he begged me to behave man
You are way above him, do not be mistaken

Raven: And the phallus is not aimed in the direction right now

The phallus not aimed at the right direction
Bribe your gf, tie her up but you wont get her wet
That’s not enough traction
She’s won’t love you for the money you get
Not even a fraction

I’m just like Faust, I sold my soul
I got big erection, I’m on a roll
I know the truth, I know it’s whole
I know they jealous, that’s why they fold
Now walt so dumb, go read a book
Pay Raven’s rent, but you will not get her cooch
These girls on me so sticky like glue
I’m a learned virtuoso, that’s why they do
Get love from Europe you american fool

American idiot

Raven: Hi everybody, my name’s Raven,
I’m really excited to be here today to be put on the spot.

The flock hits the wall, too late to get late
The eggs all cracked, no next generation
And it’s so amazin, it’s so amazin
Okay then, ravin at the

Yeah

Ravin at the rave with Raven
My body might shake, my ideas subordinate them
I catch the hate from Dave
But I flow with mad bars, envious cucks are stark
Get my whiplash and I tame them
So many girls, I might not shame them
But I will not save them, I will not save them

I might not shame them, but I will not save them (all these girls)
I might not shame them, but I will not save them (all these girls)
I might not shame them, but I will not save them (all these girls)
I might not shame them, but I will not save them

Notes

Where’s Waldo? You can find him right here: The Walt Right.
I gotta thank Theory Underground of the American Idiots Tour in Brussels for setting up the conditions of possibility for the invitation to speak at the Dark Renaissance Radio event in Stockholm.

Only Free Will Is Thoughtful

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is third and last article in a trilogy on the I. Part I, inspired by the Phenomenology of Spirit, is on the dialectic of the I. Part II, inspired by the Science of Logic, is on the I as a metaphysical circle that expresses itself comically. Reading both beforehand is not necessary, but can enrich the thinking experience.

The will would not be the will if it wasn’t free. Whether or not I am determined by the causal chain analyzable by the natural sciences, I continue to experience myself as a free subject. No matter how much I’m being determined by external factors, the biopsychosocial context with its insurmountable quantity of variables that reduce my freedom to either something inexistent, or make the space of freedom so insignificantly tiny it is practically inexistent — I still do experience myself as willing freely.

I can’t help it but continue to experience myself as free. On the other hand, this free will might just be a necessary social illusion, so that I’m being held accountable by my surroundings and the state at large.

The choice seems to be:

I feel that I am free, so I must be free.
Determinism leaves no space open for free will, so it is at best a mere practical illusion.

In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel sees spirit, and the free will specifically as a necessary belief of the fact of self-consciousness. His position is not reducible to the two options above. Attempting to prove the free will, by giving a definition and subsequently looking for some corresponding fact is not the way he proceeds to assert the actuality, the truth, of free will.

La Liberté ou la mort by Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1795

The freedom of subtraction and destruction

Perhaps, freedom is the freedom to not be beholden to anything. The freedom to abstract from everything. I might be who I am in existence, but to the extent that I substract myself from this existence, I am free from it. I am who I am, but I am not only who I am. I am also not who I am, so I am free. This is what Hegel calls the freedom of the void, the freedom to substract myself from all particularities that exist, to raise myself to universality above existence. This freedom does come to exist, but only as the negative will, saying its simple “no!” to everything. This position does not let itself be positively defined, but cannot help to do so. It does need a sense of existing. A good example of how this type of freedom manifests in the world, is the destructive fury of those who do not see themselves recognized in their world. For example, in the contemporary political context, we’ve seen the demolishing of statues on the one hand, and as of writing of this article, we can see the riots taking place in the UK on the other. Both are unified as impotent rage that attempts to get a sense of self by the destruction of (an) order. Any purported positive goal is meaningless insofar as this position of the negative will can only assert itself through demolishing what exists. This freedom, is the freedom to be indeterminate, to be nothing, really.

The freedom of choice and determination

Naturally, true free will cannot merely will nothing, as the negative will would have it. The negative will that can only say “no!” can only oppose itself to the objective world. But for the free will to be will, it has to will something. It has to will something in particular. To will not only not this, but that. Yet, by willing something, the freedom of the void is lost. Now, is this freedom of the void so indeterminate after all? No, as its indeterminate state is bound up with negatively determining itself in contrast to the outer world. It turns out that the freedom of the void, the negative will, is not as boundless as it takes itself to be. The freedom to substract from all particularities of existence, to be raised above existence to universality, this indeterminate nothing, makes up its determinateness.

Willing something in particular, is this the free will? Surely I choose what it is that I will. But what about the content of this will, what is its effect? The particular content is itself not a self-determining will. The freedom of choice, the determinate will, is subjected to the content that it wills. It is dependent on what it wills, it is limited by it. The will does not determine this content, the content determines this will. This determinate will loses its freedom as soon it comes into existence, it is not truly free. This will, the freedom to will a particular, is unfree as it is determined by the content as soon as it attaches itself to it.

Free self-determination

The free will cannot be either of the inadequate positions described above, both have turned out to be false and unfree. The former because the content of this freedom is anything that is not, it takes its freedom to be everything that it makes inexistent, destroys. The latter because it is limited by the particular content that it has for its goal, it is not the self-determined free will. Both mirror each other by virtue of being determined by something that is outside of the will.

The true free will is neither the first negative will that is abstract universality, nor the second determinate will which is caught up with contingent particularity. The truly free will determines itself for its own content. It has itself, its own form for itself. It is the universal that has particularized itself and returned to itself as a concrete singularity — it is self-determining will bringing itself forth from its own freedom, which is not only its beginning, but also its end.

As free will, I posit myself, determine myself, which is self-limitation. Do we not lose our freedom in this limitation? Yes, in that the freedom of the void is lost. No, as it is my own free determination, through which I am with as universality. The closure of determination, is its own openness in the true free will. Consequently, for it, limitation is a moment of its own free act, what is in itself is a moment for itself. Free will is indifferent to the particularization, or the loss of abstract universality. This negativity is simply redoubled as my own abiding self-reference, a fact and deed of self-consciousness. Determination, or the making finite of myself, exiting the realm of infinite potentiality, inexistence itself, is where I become beholden to an alien particularity when I fail to recognize myself therein. This concrete form that freedom takes, self-posited objectivity — is the true freedom of the will and the substance of its actuality.

Free will, as the I, shatters the opposition between universality and particularity: the universal’s particularization is the correspondence of the universal with itself through its other. This is the concept. Freedom with the form of concrete universality no longer opposes itself to the particular content. This subjectivization, or the I’s self-posited otherness as the concept, is, as Hegel says, what the faculty of the understanding takes to be incomprehensible.

But it is this contradictory incomprehensibility, not keeping to the rules of formal logic, which is simply the concept itself. In love and friendship I am limited, and I myself have determined this limitation. Is that true? I have not chosen my flaws which inevitably appear in these relationships. I have not, yet insofar I still hold myself to be responsible for them, I take these flaws to be mine, so I must also be able to rid myself of these particularities. In love, I am not standing above my determinateness but am with it as the universal I.

La République by Jules-Claude Ziegler, 1848

A closer look at the form of particularization

What is the form that the will takes? As will, the process of my activity is the work to bring about my subjective goal, to realize it as a product of objectivity. This form of the will is not the self-determining described above, since I can only externalize this goal outwardly, from subjective goal to objective product.

According to Hegel, such a determinate will is formal because its freedom can only be 1. an abstract universality of indeterminateness which 2. is applied to a determination, which is the loss of prior universality. Such a will loses its universality of freedom as soon as it applies itself, the content, or objective are detached from it.

This formal will, as the natural and immediate will, has the content of drives, desires and inclinations. In principle it could choose to satisfy any one of them. Yet the will itself has nothing to do with what it chooses, this will is not what it wills. The form differs from the content, the latter opposes and limits it. This natural will is finite, or, in other words, the only infinity of this natural will is the monotonous variety of drives it can satisfy, momentarily extinguish. Each of my drives are mine, but as an aggregate they are universal and indeterminate, it is out there for me to choose to go into. The choice of which one to satisfy, of determination, comes back to me, this is what makes this will take the form of actual individuality. However, the content itself is the loss of individuality. This content is not the work of my freedom, although we do have a form of freedom here. The free space to make a decision. An inadequate freedom, a freedom that in existence takes the form of its opposite: the unfreedom to be determined by that external thing which is decided on. But despite that, before making the decision, what is free is to reflect on it.

Those who separate willing and thinking understand nothing about both

Intelligence is that which thinks, which is an activity that has an object, a universal, for its content. The object of thought is universal because it is an abstraction from particularity: thinking takes what is essential from the world, separates it from what is unnecessary, contingent. Thinking becomes willing when it decides to determine itself into existence:

“Intelligence, which as theoretical appropriates the immediate determinacy, is, now that it has completed taking possession, in its own property; by the last negation of immediacy it is implicitly posited that for the intelligence the content is determined through the intelligence. Thinking, as the free concept, is now also free in the content. When intelligence is aware of itself as the determining of the content, which is is just as much its own as determined as being, it is will.”¹

The will is a particular way of thinking, or more precisely the particularization of thinking brought into existence, thinking that sets itself into existence, practice. Thinking takes away the particularity of the existent object of thought, making it universal, theory. I am insofar as I think, and therefore the I is universal, but only theoretically, as it severs itself from practical existence. Now, the will’s object comes from thinking, it has its origin as an object of thought. I will a particular that intelligence has represented. Thinking posits an object by abstracting from the world, and consequently makes a distinction between it and itself, its object is a representation for the will that works to achieve it as a goal. There is no will without thought, willing is free thought’s decision to determine itself into existence.

“The commonest representation one has of freedom is that of arbitrariness – the position of reflection between the will as determined solely by natural drives and the will which is free in and for itself. When we hear it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do as one pleases, such a representation can only be taken to indicate a complete lack of intellectual culture; for it shows not the least awareness of what constitutes the will which is free in and for itself, or right, or ethics, etc.”²

Free will is commonly held to be the choice to do whatever one wants. Animals, subordinated to instinct have no such freedom of choice. However, as we’ve seen, such a will is still determined by its external content. And since such a free will is only formal, determinism is right to claim that there is no true freedom there. The independence of such a will is an illusion, a lack of self-determination. To get to free will that is true to its own concept, we cannot exchange one content for another, but we can take a step back by abstracting from the existing options present, by putting form in the place of content, and willing the will apart from particularities. Through this abstracting, this reflection into oneself, the abstract form of freedom becomes the content. The linear direction of the formal will, pointed to the content outside of it, is bent into a circle when it casts aside any particular content and reflects on its own form and has itself for its object of thought.

Cleanse the drives!

From particular drives to universal determination of the will

The natural will is free in itself to choose from the infinite array of particular satisfactions. Its form is finite, it is unfree for itself. The will to be freed from this form of immediate naturalness, the plethora of satisfactions of the drive, sees a unity in what each drive in particular fails to get at. The will does not will the satisfaction of any one drive, but total satisfaction as such.

“The human being who is rational in himself must work through the process of self-production both by going out of himself and by educating himself inwardly, in order that he may also become rational for himself.”³

The reflecting will, goes from making choices outside of itself to an inward turn and comes to see general happiness (Glückseligkeit) as the essential substance of its many drives. Not any one satisfaction in particular, but general happiness as such. This new goal, this formal universality, requires of the reflective will that it will cleanse itself from the uncultivated stupidity of each of its drives, that it sacrifices immediate satisfaction, and reflects into itself before subjecting itself to a drive, so that it can achieve general happiness. The will sets out to gratify itself on a higher, cultural order. How is this to be achieved? This universal goal ought to particularize itself in existence, general happiness must be finitized in an individual will with its particular determinateness, but only that one that is willfully chosen to trump others. And so, general happiness is not freed from its external content, which is the particularized universal, but it is, because, the particularization is willfully chosen for itself. In other words, the sensuous material is sublated by free reflection for the will.

“But the truth of the particular determinacy, which just as much is as it is sublated, and of the abstract individuality, the arbitrariness which both gives and does not give itself a purpose in happiness, is the universal determinacy of the will in the will itself, i.e. its very self-determination, freedom.”⁴

Self-determining universality

“The truth, however, of this formal universality, which is indeterminate for itself and encounters its determinacy in the material already mentioned, is self-determining universality, the will, or freedom. When the will has universality, or itself as infinite form, as its content, object, and end, it is free not only in itself but also for itself – it is the Idea in its truth.”⁵

Now, the difference between the reflective will, with its opposition to its natural drives, and the formal universality of happiness (which falls back into a drive) on the one hand, and the will that is free in and for itself on the other hand is the following:

The particularization of universality, or the fact that any infinite form of freedom must negate itself for it to have existence, an opposition, dissolves itself when it is not taken to be an external doing against the free will, but is taken up to be a moment of the free self-determining will.

The free will has itself for its object, it has united infinite freedom with finite determination. The dialectic of universality and its particularization is itself raised to concrete universality, as the activity of the thinking will itself:

“The self-consciousness which purifies and raises its object, content, and end to this universality does so as thought asserting, perservering itself in the will. Here is the point at which it becomes clear that it is only as thinking intelligence that the will is truly itself and free.”⁶

This universality, is the concept as existent, actual infinity, objective outwardness as inner self.

Concrete universality

The actual universal will self-limits in and as unlimitedness, the limit of itself is posited by itself and in itself. Such universality that is concrete, or in itself and for itself is not:

Commonality
Allness
Excluding individuality
Abstract self-identity

It is free will by virtue of grasping its object by the universal going through its determination which is in it as identical with itself. This is what Hegel calls speculative reason, self-determining universality.

Understanding the dialectic of the will

For the fixated understanding, thought that has become other to itself is a sign of falsehood. Consequently, the will comes to be thought of as either the choice to do what one wants arbitrarily, to not be limited by anything. Or else, it takes this to be wrong, as it sees that such a will is determined by its content, and declares free will to be an illusion. Generally, it confuses the negative will with the determinate will, the reflective will and the self-determinative will. It cannot raise itself to awareness of self-determination, to comprehend it in thought, and as a result, it does not have it. It is stuck between feeling and formal logic. Both take their content from what is outside, not from what is immanent to the concept itself, and separate subject and object as static representations, which can only be applied externally, clash with each other or terminate each other.

Reason is free and has relinguished the rigidity of such a fixated thinking, which is not dillusioned enough to see its own doing in existence, as determined by the free concept. The subject, concrete universality, has itself for its object, and is free in its unity with difference.

To summarize: the will as freedom existing in itself is subjective, which therefore is its concept, and so its objectivity, which is the will for itself. The unity of unity and difference is determined by the absolutely free will.

Absolute Will

Absolute determination of the free spirit, self-determined drive which makes freedom its object — the absolute will. It is objective in two ways: it is its own creative rationality, and it also produces its own immediate actuality. Like a self-propelling wheel, it is

“ … the free will which wills the free will.”⁷

The activity of such a will, being concretely universal, is to particularize its universality while being indifferent to this negativity and abiding with it as universality. Such a standpoint of freedom, boundless apart from and in binding at once, is the singular I filled with free thought.

Right is the existence of will

The existence of free will, is right, the right of self-consciousness to determine itself. It needs no explanation, let alone a justification. Belief in the free will is necessary and true, like the freedom of thought and speech are. The existence of the forms of right, has its richest truth in rights that are also duties, the freedom of ethical life. Which first of all, is objective in the institutionalization of love.

The stakes of a metaphysical investigation into the nature of free will has immense political ramifications. Today we can see two major tendencies in our political landscape. One of them, regardless of what flag one subjects oneself to, claims that it can justify the drive to freedom based on felt experience. Proposals of more desirable states are based on what kind of particular feeling one has toward reality. It finds those, who do not feel like it feels to be wrong. The end conclusion of this negative will is destruction: of laws, institutions or some scapegoated enemy.

The other tendency, either rejects freedom or reduces it to insignificance or a practical illusion. These all boil down to the same — determinism. As we’ve seen, determinism rightly points out that basing the concept of freedom on one’s feeling is false. So, we could argue that it does take a higher standpoint of thought. Be that as it may, by invalidating freedom, it invalidates the right of subjectivity, the self-determination of the individual.

So where do we go from here, politically?

“No Idea is so generally recognized as indeterminate, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions, to which therefore it actually falls pray, as the Idea of freedom, and no Idea is in common circulation with so little consciousness of it. Since the free spirit is the actual spirit, misconceptions about it have the most tremendous practical consequences, and when individuals and peoples have once got in their heads the abstract concept of freedom that is for itself, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of spirit, and is in fact its very actuality.”⁸

Because freedom as an abstraction (even if it is for itself, like in communist theory) is so volatile and explosive, its concrete existence in right, its objectivity in law, institutions and ethical life (Sittlichkeit) must be recognized before moving on to passionate and zealous proposals for political action, regardless of how heartfelt these are. This recognition of concrete freedom comes about by spirit thinking itself in the infinite differentiations of itself, like in the family and the state for example. This is the only way for spirit to rise to its self-determination, not as an inner contemplation of itself apart from the objective world, but by developing itself in self-reference to the world, its own world.

“This will to freedom [that finds its life impaired by being subjected to slavery] is no longer a drive which demands its satisfaction, but the character, – the spiritual consciousness that has become driveless being. – But this freedom, which has the content and purpose of freedom, is itself initially only a concept, a principle of the mind and heart, and destined to develop into objectivity, into legal, ethical, religious actuality, as well as scientific actuality.”⁹

Icarus rex by a good friend, 2024

Original: “Der Mensch, der an sich vernünftig ist, muß sich durch die Produktion seiner selbst durcharbeiten durch das Hinausgehen aus sich, aber ebenso durch das Hineinbilden in sich, daß er es auch für sich werde.”

Original: “Das Selbstbewußtsein, das seinen Gegenstand, Inhalt und Zweck bis zu dieser Allgemeinheit reinigt und erhebt, tut dies als das im Willen sich durchsetzende Denken. Hier ist der Punkt, auf welchem es erhellt, daß der Wille nur als denkende Intelligenz wahrhafter, freier Wille ist.”

§468 in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. All translations are slightly modified by me. ↩
§15 in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. ↩
§10, Philosophy of Right. ↩
§470, Philosophy of Spirit. ↩
§21, Philosophy of Right. ↩
§21, Philosophy of Right. ↩
§27, Philosophy of Right. ↩
§482, Philosophy of Spirit. ↩
§482, Philosophy of Spirit. ↩

Who Can Philosophize?

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Who wrote the Oldest Systematic program of German Idealism? We have no definitive evidence of Hegel having written the text (the title was given to it by Franz Rosenzweig in 1917). Thinkers like Lukács and Habermas were convinced Schelling wrote the text, while Heidegger denied this as a possibility, but he would also not confirm any author. To me, for reasons I will go into below, it is quite clear that Hegel wrote the text.¹ Anyhow, this text is a fragmentary essay written around 1796/97, which means Hegel would’ve been around the age of 26 while writing it.

The Unity of Absolute Beauty

Why does it matter who wrote this text? No, why does this text matter in the first place? Besides being of philosophical interest to analyze how Hegel as a thinker came to be, this youthful, almost zealous text reveals some core philosophical principles; their timeless and contemporary relevance. If it is indeed Hegel who wrote it, it’d be significant for laying bare to his lifelong consistency regarding the point in the following quote. In the Oldest Program, he writes:

”I will show … the idea which unites all, the idea of beauty, the word taken in a higher Platonic sense. I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, which, embracing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only conjoined in beauty.”²

As is well known, the triad of the good, true and beautiful comes from the ancient philosopher Plato. According to the young Hegel in the passage above, the former two are only conjoined in beauty. In his magnum opus, the Science of Logic, we find the most mature formulation of this stance. At the very end of the book, we find the practical and theoretical Idea coming to be united in the Absolute Idea:

The practical Idea strives for attaining the Good, thereby failing to attain it fully.
The theoretical Idea strives for attaining the Truth, thereby too failing to attain it fully.

And then, 3. The Absolute Idea! The grand reconciliation of the true and the good in the beauty of harboring within the concept, or the “I,” the most extreme opposition: the principally unovercomeable nature of the two former Ideas.³ The insurmountable rift is reconciled within and as the highest Idea — the beautiful.

So, what do we make of this Idea of the beautiful? It won’t suffice to get off on some emanation of the One. The image of a navel-gazing circle-jerk is off-putting. While leaving the nutting behind, we will go for the pure and clean clarity. Half-jokes aside. Firstly, for Hegel, philosophy is philosophy of Spirit. And Spirit is what? God seeking his self-knowing, attaining it, and losing Himself in Himself, as the plethora of self-differentiating subjects coming to themselves through their own otherness, actual as the concrete existence of language. Now, back to his Oldest Program. In there, Hegel lays it all out in the open for us:

”The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet. Men without an aesthetic sense are our philosophers of letters (Buchstabenphilosophen). The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One cannot be witty (geistreich⁴) in anything; one cannot even reason wittily about history — without an aesthetic sense.”⁵

The poet is praised for his “aesthetic power.”⁶ He is the philosopher’s friend, while the philosopher of the letter is dry, sterile, unimaginative, intentionally uninventive and spiritually poor (unwitty). It’s not that their philosophies are non-aesthetic, but that their aesthetic is bland. We can therefore easily draw the conclusion that if Hegel were to take a plunge in our time, he’d be more sympathetic to creative and unorthodox interpretations of his philosophy, than scholars merely identifying, praising and regurgitating his system and its gargantuan proportions and meticulous inner workings, notwithstanding the valuable pedagogical role they might serve.

Alcibiades

Kant and Ye

For Kant, answering the question of this article’s title, boils down to the distinction between learning philosophy (by the letter), or learning to philosophize. This minimal distinction (seemingly no distinction for the multitude) makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between being dazzled by complexity of thought and the particulars of history, versus being mutually fascinated, in living dialogue, by the universality of the becoming of truth. Identification with any kind of perceived (sometimes lost) perfection in any historical thinker, or even your direct, living predecessor or mentor who lets truth speak through them is inevitable and forgivable, but also — especially if one clings on to the thinker on for an extended amount of time — goes to show one’s unreconciled self-relation. One comes to outsource one’s thinking to some other, so that one halts the angst of having to sing one’s own song. Analogously, there’s nothing wrong with making great covers of beautiful songs, although something is definitely covered up, if this is all one can bring oneself to do.

In line therewith, True masters or teachers are always repulsed by groupies or yes-men. The best thing that they can in turn do about it, is to attempt to give these people back to themselves. The work of art has the power to inspire, made possible by the creator who masters said art-form. This then causes the subjects whom are inspired to be attracted to not only the work of art, but also to that which in the work of art spoke to them. This attraction, might subsequently attach them to the creator, possibly even in guise of repulsion. Because of the distance to the artist, this dynamic, or rather dialectic is not between master and listener or reader, since the former is a projected image put up by the latter. It is a dialectic occurring within the listener or reader’s self-relation. This is not to say that there’s no input the creator can take in from the responses the listeners evoke and have lent from their image of the art and artist.

Kanye expressed the one-directional, or non-relational, nature of transference unambiguously when he said: “If you’re a Kanye West fan, you’re not a fan of me, you’re a fan of yourself.” The privilege of falling in transference for a creative spirit and their particular songs, poems, and philosophical works, is the result of sensitivity for being receptive to the aesthetic revelation these works bring about. This sensitivity indicates the singularity (and universality) of what one finds aesthetically appealing — one’s style. It occurs out there. Comes down from above, occurs within oneself, speaks to one’s unconscious, and so one’s own (external) Other discourse. These works dreamily awaken a spark within oneself.

From there on out, what is at stake is identifying with already established projects, versus carving out one’s own creative becoming, confronting the limits of self-making, and persevering in the work⁷. To finish any work of art, one must struggle with chaos (gaping abyss in ancient Greek) and discipline. Each result, any finished song or writing has been preceded by discarding many potentialities. Oftentimes, a lot of work has to be discarded, the crux is that this invisible work, and the discarded and unfinished potentialities are just as much part of the finished result, which could not have come about if it wasn’t for all the “wasteful effort.” The fact that this invisibility can be seen only from the side of the creator, attests to the importance of art and philosophy as creative autobiographical work.

Kant and Kanye rejoicing

Spirit in a Bildungsroman and the Aesthetic Idea

Art and philosophy are works of sublimation, which, Lacan explains consists of “raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing,” that is, picking out any seemingly contingent appearance and idea-lizing it. It is the mythologization of one’s experience, in a beautiful, free and self-determined manner. To become an artist or a philosopher, it is, of course, inadequate to sing or regurgitate solely the admirable and life-changing projects of others, no matter how masterful they may be. Yet, only affirming this side of the story is insufficient too, as the importance of mimesis, i.e. rehearsing and mimicking the master repeatedly, is a crucial step to submit to if one is to become one’s own in a cultivated, and encultured sense. If, on the hand, we get the trap of one making covers and the philosopher of the letter, then on the other hand we get the premature self-expression of singularity trumping humility and gratitude, trumping the awareness of being positioned in a spiritual tradition, trumping universal truth. Even if projects turn out to be ground-breaking works that defy genre, these are only achieved through the arduous labour that has tarried with traditions which were present at hand, this is especially the case in philosophy. My bet is that this is true to a lesser extend in music. In any case, in the Oldest Program, Hegel believes to innovate on the following:

“First of all, I shall speak here of an idea which, as far as I know, has not yet come to mind — we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.”⁸

The manuscript cuts off before we get to see how Hegel would build out his mythology at that time. Fortunately, he published the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is a project in the same vein. Mythology, a literary genre, undeniably appeals to aesthetic sense. The Science of Logic too, falls within the category of the mythology of reason. Whereas the Phenomenology functions as a Bildungsroman about Spirit undergoing its development and final consummation in Absolute Knowing, the Logic starts out from this vantage point, culminating in the Absolute Idea, that is, the beautiful. It’s not a surprise that Goethe the poet had an direct influence on Hegel. Hegel’s philosophical innovation is partially attributable to Goethe’s literary ingenuity.⁹

Goethe looking at a Silhouette by Johann Ehrenfried Schumann

A Change of Mind on the Title Page

Showcasing Hegel’s consistency from this early text to his mature works is interesting, but there’s also a major difference between this early text and his mature works. Let us juxtapose this quote to an epigraph Hegel uses:

“Before we make ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, it has no interest for the people (Volks); and conversely, before mythology is sensible, the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus, at last the enlightened and the unenlightened (Unaufgeklärte) must join hands; mythology must become philosophical and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make the philosophers sensuous. Then there is eternal unity among us. Never the contemptuous look, never the blind trembling of the people (Volks) before their sages and priests”¹⁰

A few decades later, Hegel’s last written words were on a note to his printer asking him to add the following epigraph by Cicero to the title page of the Science of Logic:

“For philosophy is content with a few judges. With fixed purpose it avoids, for its part, the multitude, which in turn views it as an object of suspicion and dislike.”¹¹

It’s not that Hegel gives up on the masses, Hegel solemnly came to realize that it is the destiny of the philosopher to cope with the thankless reception by most, who have no intention to give it a sincere chance. Philosophy, however aesthetic or mythological, soulful, rigorous, or simply truthful it might be, will never be a thing of the people. Music, obversely, is widely accessible to the multitude, insofar as it attracts many by the sheer auditory harmony it produces. Why is the nature of aesthetic sense such? Why is not the most logical, the most beautiful? Why would that be a wrong question? Because… the singular and universal are, apropos beauty, inextricably intertwined. To restate it simply, the Big Other is internally incoherent with itself, not a guarantee of meaning. And thus, furthering this line of questioning begins from that position.

The philosopher must not possess the aesthetic power of the poet to proselytize his mythology of reason to the multitude, but to further the cause of the sublime, subliminal and sublimative beauty of liberatory love. Philosophy is only possible in mutual confession of unknowing, opening up the possibility for the unity of living spirits in dialogue towards knowing.

This too is generally accepted by contemporary scholars, who have compared the handwriting to other works by Hegel from the same period. the relevance of that fact I will leave to you, my dear reader. ↩
Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: Translation and Notes by Daniel Fidel Ferrer ↩
I don’t aim to do justice to entirety of the technical intricacies of the systematic dialectical explication. Nevertheless, here’s is the quote I’m alluding to:“The Absolute idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical idea, each of which, of itself one-sided, possesses the idea only as a sought-for beyond and unattained goal; each is therefore a synthesis of striving, each possessing as well as not possessing the idea within it, passing over from one thought to the other without bringing the two together but remaining fixed in the contradiction of the two. The absolute idea, as the rational concept that in its reality only rejoins itself, is by virtue of this immediacy of its objective identity, on the one hand, a turning back to life; on the other hand, it has equally sublated this form of its immediacy and harbors the most extreme opposition within. The concept is not only soul, but free subjective concept that exists for itself and therefore has personality – but the practical objective concept that is determined in and for itself and is as person impenetrable, atomic subjectivity – but which is not, just the same, exclusive singularity; it is rather explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for its subject matter. All the rest is error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, and transitoriness; the absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth.” - Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel ↩
Witty! A beautiful word when translated to German, geistreich, literally translated to spirit-rich! That is quite funny, or geestig, as we say in Dutch, which would literally translate to spirity! The French and Italians too, have their own variation; esprit or spirito — wit as being one of Spirit. ↩
Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: Translation and Notes by Daniel Fidel Ferrer ↩
He continues… “Poetry (Die Poesie) thus acquires a higher dignity, it becomes again in the end what it was in the beginning — teacher of mankind; for there is no more philosophy, no more history, poetry alone will outlive all other sciences and arts.” ↩
Check out Owen Cox’s Dark Renaissance Radioand his concept of the Technogypsy to read more about the creative struggle. ↩
Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: Translation and Notes by Daniel Fidel Ferrer ↩
If you would like to dive deeper into the idea that the Phenomenology is a Bildungsroman, I can highly recommend this article by Hernet Saeverot (open access, bless him). ↩
Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: Translation and Notes by Daniel Fidel Ferrer ↩
See The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing by Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda for more on the meaning of this epigraph. ↩

How to Regrow the Soul's Wings

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve expounded in my previous article, Nietzsche and Hegel have homologous ideas regarding the fact that the soul can fly. I believe that both of them get this from Plato, who two thousand years before, spoke of the soul as a flying entity.

Blessed with Madness from the Heavens

In the Phaedrus, Plato distinguishes between two types of madness. One is the madness of disease and mental derangement, a human kind. The other one is divine madness. This latter type of madness comes to us “as the gift of heaven”, which he says “is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.”¹

Divine madness is necessitated in the creation of beautiful art, which cannot come to fruition with a mere familiarity of the technical prerequisites of any form of art. The disturbing and awe-inspiring art-work comes to us from madmen who are inspired by divinity and utterly outperform the creations of the sane man.

Besides making great art possible, wisdom and love alike cannot exist without divine madness. Firstly, wisdom is not at all cleverness, the sober-sense of an uninspired and down-to-earth man. Wisdom is the result of a long journey that requires the rigour of hard work, an extended period of learning, or initiation, which is only possible with a humble openheartedness.

Secondly, love is not only one of the types of divine madness, as Socrates² tells us in the dialogue; “It is for us […] to show that this type of madness is the greatest benefit that heaven can confer on us.”³

Now, what is this divine madness called love? All we can do here is give some preliminary intimations to the answer. Love is not love without the fall. Plato in the Phaedrus goes into a myth to describe the birth of the human as the result of a falling soul which loses its wings. In that sense, the divine madness of love, or love as the soulful god, is inseparable from the soul’s fall.

“I” — the Immortal Soul

As described in the Phaedrus, the soul has two aspects. Firstly, it is the cause of its own motion. Secondly, it is immortal, by virtue of it being its own self-caused motion, as its sole self-derivation. Its motion is its life, and it’s this life which causes other objects to move. This is why Plato calls it a prime origin. The soul being of an immortal nature is a necessary conclusion according to Plato that he will draw from the fact that if the soul were to stop moving, it would have to be because of the fact that some external movement that made it move in the first place would cease. This cannot be the case, as we’ve defined the soul to be that which moves out of its own accord, and hence it is nothing but that immortal self-movement. A body that moves only as a result of external causes is therefore soulless.

Socrates, humble as he is, tells Phaedrus that: ”To describe it [the soul] as it is would require a long exposition of which only a god is capable; but it is within the power of man to say in shorter compass what it resembles.”⁴ Because soul, ψυχή in Greek, or what Hegel calls the “I” or concept, is responsible for all that is soulless, or spiritless nature, it traverses any kind of intelligible totality, which is its starting-point. In the dialogue, Plato uses a myth to communicate the nature of the soul, its perfection, subsequent fall, and return to flight:

“[Socrates:] Soul taken as a whole is in charge of all that is inanimate, and traverses the entire universe, appearing at different times in different forms. When it is perfect and winged it moves on high and governs all creation, but the soul that shed its wings falls until it encounters solid matter.”⁵

By falling into the body, the soul sheds its perfect state of flight above creation. To come into creation, is to become in the realm of imperfection, which is the result of the loss of the soul’s wings. Alas, this is not to be lamented, as this prior state of perfection that Plato gets at here serves as a mythical reference-point that has no reality of its own if it was not for it being retroactively posited, whereby it is established to be an uncreated state of existence prior to and apart from the fallen world. It is only by the soul’s fall that it becomes aware of its (potentiality of) flight. To understand what it can possibly mean for the soul to fly we are to take into account that:

“[Socrates:] The function of a wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up to the region above, where the gods dwell; of all things connected with the body, it has the greatest affinity with the divine, which is endowed with beauty, wisdom, goodness and every other excellence. These qualities are the prime source of nourishment and growth of the wings of the soul, but their opposite, such as ugliness and evil, cause the wings to waste and perish.”⁶

In the myth, Plato tells of the soul as a flying charioteer with two horses, one of them of a virtuous nature, the other one of a vicious nature. In the flight of the soul in the heavens, prior to the state of creation, the vicious horse forces the charioteer down by throwing all his weight toward the earth, resulting in the birth of the human being, commencing all the agony and strife that his earthly existence entails. The immanence of the region where the gods dwell, as a transcendent realm of spirit, is the same as what Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra speaks of:

”Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me.”⁷

The Fall of Phaethon by Peter Paul Rubens

Get refuted and Recollect to Purify and Fly

How do we learn how to fly again? On the outset, we can begin by recollecting this region of the gods, the summit of the souls, as the pursuit of the truth which we call philosophy, a strenuous spiritual labour. This path confronts the soul with refutation after refutation, i.e. the purification necessary to go beyond what one takes to be the true, since it will inevitably be revealed to be erroneous, Socrates states;

“Nevertheless the fact is this, for we must have the courage to speak the truth, especially when the truth itself is our theme. The region of which I speak is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without color or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by intellect which is the pilot of the soul. So the mind of a god, sustained as it is by pure intelligence and knowledge, like that of every soul which is destined to assimilate its proper food, is satisfied at last with the vision of reality, and nourished and made happy by the contemplation of truth, until its circular revolution brings it back to its starting-point. And in the course of its journey, it beholds absolute justice and discipline and knowledge, not the knowledge which varies with objects which we now call real, but the absolute knowledge which corresponds to what is absolutely real in the fullest sense.”⁸

Philosophy that aims at thinking true reality is beyond any mythical configurations that taint this reality of true knowledge with representations, although these may have a pedagogical function in one’s training. This ultimate reality is without color, shape, or any way in which the senses, or representations picture it. This true reality is above what these faculties deem to be real. Funnily enough, this realm of truth is intangible and invisible, while at the same time being perceptible, or more precisely, apprehensible. This absolute truth is to be beheld as a circular movement whereby the vision of real truth reconciles the soul, thus bringing it back to its starting-point. Absolute knowledge is this completed correspondence, the having gone full circle of the intellect, the point at which knowing and truth are equalized. The completion of this circle results in a return to its starting-point, which simultaneously opens up a new circle of becoming.

Restoring the Internal Eye’s Sight of Invisible Truth

How are we to think this metaphor of the invisibility of truth and the apprehension or beholding of it by the intellect as the pilot of the soul? Let’s take a look at what Plato’s most ambitious student, Aristotle, has said on the matter:

“This knowledge, [i.e. philosophical knowledge] is indeed contemplative, but it enables to frame all our practice in accordance with it. For just as sight makes and shapes nothing (since its only work is to judge and show us everything that can be seen), yet it enables us to act as it directs and gives us the greatest assistance towards action (for we should be entirely motionless of deprived of it), so it is clear that, though knowledge is contemplative, yet we do innumerable things in accordance with it, choose some things and avoid others, and in general gain as a result of it everything that is good.”⁹

Philosophy is a taking up of the truth, a practice of knowledge and truth linked and distinguished in contemplation that does not externally impose representations on what is already there. It is a methodical discipline of self-thinking thought which is both a radically involved engagement that changes one’s essence, while also being an indifferent observation of that very process. The soul itself would be nothing if not for the truth of this self-same self-motion. For Plato, all movement that learns essential truth — which as we’ve seen is piloted by the intellect — is a recollection, an inwardization that brings the soul to the truth of the circularity of its becoming. This in turn lays the basis for bringing the subject to novel action, in accordance with thought. Action is not instructed directly by philosophical contemplation, which attests to the latter’s absolute freedom.

To delve deeper into the analogy between the eyes and philosophical contemplation, in the Science of Logic, Hegel will speak of the immediacy of thought, or the extreme simplicity of the concept, the directness of what is found in the succession of becoming, he said that “because of its immediacy [it] can also be called a supersensuous, inner intuiting.”¹⁰ We can’t find the truth of being out there, with sense and outer intuition, since

“[…] the difficulty of finding being in the concept in general, and equally so in the concept of God, becomes insuperable if we expect being to be something that we find in the context of external experience or in the form of sense-perception, like the one hundred dollars in the context of my finances, as something graspable only by hand, not by spirit, essentially visible to the external and not the internal eye; in other words, if the name of being, reality, truth, is given to that which things possess as a sensuous, temporal, and perishable. — The consequence of a philosophizing that in regard to being fails to raise above the senses is that, in regard to the concept, it also fails to let go of merely abstract thought; such thought stands opposed to being. “¹¹

Thought is thus a beholding, or an inner intuiting done by the internal eye. The intellect, this internal eye of the soul, takes up what is there, does not impose external opinion on it that would change it, but by looking on, by inner intuiting, recollects the essence out of the immediate being. The external eye is caught up in sense-perception and the perishable semblances that for Plato, as well as Hegel, are below the realm of absolute, ideal truth.

The false mirror by Rene Magritte

Now, back to the true reality, and the question of how the soul is to regrow its wings. In the story, the intellect, prior to creation, beheld the absolute truth. The winged soul was borne aloft and nourished by the vision, and, somehow, in its circuiting, it eventually fell to the earth, becoming human. Plato tells us that it will take 10.000 years for the soul to fully regrow its wings and win its release. Fortunately, the soul which chooses the life of the philosopher three times successively can re-enter the bodiless state in just 3.000 years. How are we to interpret this? At the very least it’s clear that it will take a few deaths, a long time, and a soul dedicated to the pursuit of truth to regrow one’s wings. Some of the aspects of the process are described as follows:

“[Socrates:] It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into our human shape; it takes a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the multiplicity of sense-impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason. Such a process is simply the recollection of the things which our soul once perceived when it took its journey with a god, looking down from above on the things to which we now ascribe reality and gazing upwards towards what is truly real. That is why it is right that the soul of the philosopher alone should regain its wings; for it is always dwelling in memory as best it may upon the things which a god owes his divinity to dwelling upon. It is only by the right use of such aids to recollection which form a continual initiation into the perfect mystic vision that a man can become perfect in the truest sense of the word. Because he stands apart from the common objects of human ambition and applies himself to the divine, he is reproached by most men for being out of his wits; they do not realize that he is in fact possessed by a god.”¹²

To think, one puts aside the immediacy of sense-impression, thereby retreating back to the unity of the concept and its process of reason, which, again, is a process of recollection concerned with absolute truth, a divine activity of contemplation leading to the soul being initiated to the mystic vision of invisible circling. Some have forgotten that they themselves have not missed out of the vision, as all humans have;

“[Socrates:] but it is not every soul that finds it easy to use its present experience as a means of recollecting the world of reality. Some had but a brief glimpse of the truth in their former existence; others have been so unfortunate as to be corrupted by evil associations since they fell to earth, with the result that they have forgotten the sacred vision they once saw. Few are left who retain a sufficient memory. These, however, when they see some likeness of the world above, are beside themselves and lose all control, but do not realize what is happening to them because of the dimness of their perceptions.”¹³

There’s a few symptoms, one could say, of those who cannot ascend their souls to take off in flight. Perhaps the vision they had was too brief, or they’ve been corrupted since falling down, perhaps it’s an emotional resistance to uncovering oedipal truths which they consequently compulsively repeat in their lives. In any case, when they use their internal eye to intuit the real, it simply becomes overbearing to them, that is, the enveloping darkness or overwhelming illumination of the reverberating unknown makes them lose control. They lack the ability to return to the loss which can only be attained by losing oneself in the return. The return which does not have the nature of a regression, but a forward return to the self (as I’ve written on in this article).

Love Floods the Soul With Emanations of Absolute Beauty

As we’ve mentioned, love is the supreme form of divine madness as Plato conceptualizes it in the Phaedrus. It’s a decision made in the vein of radical and free risk, its high-flownness leaves behind down-to-earthness:

“[Socrates: This] type of madness, which befalls when a man, reminded by the sight of beauty on earth of the true beauty, grows his wings and endeavours to fly upward, but in vain, exposing himself to the reproach of insanity because like a bird he fixes his gaze on the heights to the neglect of things below; and the conclusion to which our whole discourse points is that in itself and in its origin this its the best of all forms of divine possession, both for the subject himself and for his associate, and it is when he is touched with this madness that the man whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover.”¹⁴

As is evident from the experience of falling in love, one, awakened by the emanation of the beloved’s beauty, neglects and becomes apathetic to the usual motions of one’s daily life. According to Plato, one is to keep in mind that one physically perceives the beloved, which is at most a shining intimation of true beauty. Is the beloved hence not truly beautiful? This is more ambiguous than it might seem. “Beauty on earth” is not merely a worthless copy of the true beauty, as will be clear in the following quote, which goes deeper into the phenomenon of falling in love and how it delightfully and painfully forces the soul to regrow its wings:

“[Socrates:] What overpowering love knowledge would inspire if it could bring as clear an image of itself before our sight, and the same may be said of the other forms which are fitted to arouse love. But as things are it is only beauty which has the privilege of being both the most clearly fresh discerned and the most lovely. Now the man who is not fresh from his initiation or who has been corrupted does not quickly make the transition from beauty on earth to absolute beauty; so when he sees its namesake here he feels no reverence for it, but surrenders himself to sensuality and is eager like a four-footed beast to make and to beget children, or in his addiction to wantonness feels no fear or shame in pursuing a pleasure which is unnatural. “¹⁵

Knowledge would be totally overpowering in inspiring love if it could bring forth an image of itself, for the outer eye to see. The reason behind this is that knowledge of the truth is the contemplative comprehension of the realm of the gods, the unity of the excellence of perfection. For Plato, philosophy is the journey of initiation to come to the state of having fully regrown the soul’s wings.

Is the transition one makes to absolute beauty, in the reverence of the beloved, sexless? Not quite, later on in the dialogue Plato jokingly speaks about allowing oneself to indulge in the enjoyment of the charioteer’s vicious horse. However, the premature surrender to the raw immediacy of sex reveals a lack of reverence to the beloved according to Plato. To him, sex without love is a cold, needy and calculative vice that breeds ignoble qualities in the soul. Nevertheless, both in Plato’s as in our time, the multitude will extol those qualities as virtuous. Mediating the object of desire by plunging into unsublimated libidinal attachment is not to be condemned for the sake of morality, though it will likely inhibit one to make the transition to absolute beauty, according to him. Whether this is possible, is a question to be asked only after having more clarity on the exact meaning of this transition as regards the question of love.

Like we’ve said, it does not suffice to demote the representation of beauty to a worthless copy. Plato believes it’s the privilege of those souls who have fully seen the vision that allow them to make worthwhile judgement on earthly beauty pointing to its beyond:

“But the newly initiated, who has had a fully sight of the celestial vision when he beholds a god-like face or a physical form which truly reflects ideal beauty, first of all shivers and experiences something of the dread which the vision itself inspired; next he gazes upon it and worships it as if it were a god, and, if he were not afraid of being thought an utter madman, he would sacrifice to this beloved as to the image of a divinity. Then, as you would expect after a cold fit, his condition changes and he falls into an unaccustomed sweat; he receives through his eyes the emanation of beauty, by which the soul’s plumage is fostered, and grows hot, and this heat is accompanied by a softening of the passages from which the feathers grow, passages which have long been parched and closed up, so as to prevent any feathers from shooting. As the nourishing moisture falls upon it the stump of each feather under the whole surface of the soul swells and strives to grow from its root; for in its original state the soul was feathered all over. So now it is all in a state of ferment and throbbing; in fact the soul of a man who is beginning to grow his feathers has the same sensation of pricking and irritation and itching as children feel in their gums when they are just beginning to cut their teeth.”¹⁶

Shivering, worshipping, sweating, a desire for sacrifice — these are all the symptoms of a soul which by falling in love is slowly regrowing its wings. This madness opens up and softens the closed off passages of the soul’s surface, while one is flooded by the emanations of beauty. To gaze upon the beauty of the beloved relieves the pain of longing and makes the soul glad. On the other hand, the passages where the feathers are supposed to shoot up can close up through separation, caused by a drought which prevents new growth. The precision and beauty of the following part of the text, a continuation of the last passage, merits to be quoted in full:

“Imprisoned below the surface together with the flood of longing of which I have spoken, each embryo feather throbs like a pulse and presses against its proper outlet, so that the soul is driven mad by the pain of the pricks in every part, and yet feels gladness because it preserves the memory of the beauty of its darling. In this state of mingled pleasure and pain the sufferer is perplexed by the strangeness of his experience and struggles helplessly; in his frenzy he cannot sleep at night or remains still by day, but his longing drives him wherever he thinks that he may see the possessor of beauty. When he sees him and his soul is refreshed by the flood of emanations the closed passages are unstopped; he obtains a respite from his pains and pangs, and there is nothing to equal the sweetness of the pleasure which he enjoys for the moment. From this state he never willingly emerges; in his eyes no one can compare with his beloved; mother, brothers, friends, are all forgotten, and if his property is lost through his negligence he thinks nothing of it; the conventions of civilized behavior, on whose observance he used to pride himself, he now scorns; he is ready to be a slave and to make his bed as near as he is allowed to the object of his passion; for besides the reverence which he feels for the possessor of beauty he has found in him the only physician for sickness of the most grievous kind. This sickness, let me inform the handsome lad who I am supposed to be addressing, men call eros, but the gods have a name for it which in his youthful ignorance he will probably laugh at. There are two lines on love quote by the admirers of Homer from the apocryphal works, of which the second is highly bizarre and not free from defects from metre. They go as follows:

Eros the god that flies is his name in the language of mortals:

But from the wings he must grow he is called by celestials Pteros.”¹⁷

Pteros, the god of Love

To summarize, love as a type of divine madness is a massively ambiguous, confusing state which is hypnotizing and unbearable and excruciating and exhilarating. The mystical nature of this divine madness which opens up one’s soul and forcefully makes one regrow their wings is the possession by the god of love, Pteros, derived from πτερον, meaning wing.

The Sickening Cure & The Blinding Eternity of Jouissance

How does the beloved cure the lover from his illness? The heart is flooded and brims over, leading to the return of the stream of beauty to the source in the beloved: “It enters in at his eyes, the natural channel of communication of the soul, and reaching and arousing the soul moistens the passages from which the feathers shoot and stimulates the growth of wings, and in turn the soul of the beloved is filled with love.”¹⁸ The flow of love, going from soul to soul, through the eyes, can of course be understood in some kind of supernatural sense, as an illusory and obsolete conception that is not in touch with reality. Yet, as Žižek says:

“First, love cannot be reduced to a mere illusion or imaginary phenomenon: beyond its fascination with the image of its object, true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself, in short, at what Lacan called objet petit a. Love—as well as hate—is supported by what remains of the object when it is stripped of all its imaginary and symbolic features. Secondly, love is therefore an inherently historical phenomenon: its concrete configurations are so many (ultimately failed) attempts to gentrify, tame, symbolize, the “unhistorical” traumatic kernel of jouissance that makes the object unbearable.”¹⁹

Love, the god Pteros, is not reducible to the emanation of the image. Its beauty, which is perceptible as the image, must be stripped off to see it for what it truly is. Yet this stripping off, rids it at the same time of its appearance, or appears itself as its non-appearance, a redoubled appearance perceptible only to the internal eye. This god is above all comprehensible in the truth of knowing, as absolute knowing. However, there is no discourse that is not a semblance of truthful comprehension of impossibility. This impossibility is the traumatic and “unhistorical” or eternal kernel qua jouissance, which is the core of the soul’s immortal self-motion. As is clear from the Phaedo, Plato couldn’t agree more with Žižek, and speaks to the unbearable impossibility of jouissance himself:

“[Socrates:] When I had given up inquiring into real existence, he proceeded, I thought that I must take care that I did not suffer as people do who look at the sun during an eclipse. For they are apt to lose their eyesight, unless they look at the sun’s reflection in water or such medium. That danger occurred to me. I was afraid that my soul might be completely blinded if I looked at things with my eyes, and tried to grasp them with my senses. So I thought that I must have recourse to conceptions, and examine the truth of existence by means of them.”²⁰

Does this recourse to the concept, or retreat from the senses and their overwhelmingly blinding modes of jouissance entail a step back from the engagement with truth? In other words, is the concept lesser than the senses in relation to the grasp of real existence? This cannot be the case, because philosophy is in the business of truth, and thus does not live up to its own notion if one does not have the courage to assume the strongest principles or thoughts insofar as one thinks them out to their agreement with truth, as well as having the strength of seeing the persistence of the concept in refutation. Falling in love would, to Plato, be meaningless if it does not stimulate the higher nature of the lover’s soul to prevail upwards, that higher nature which pushes him to pursue wisdom and take off in flight. Love sets one free from established convention, which, along with the philosophical journey, empowers the soul to regrow its wings.

Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 46. ↩
In what way Plato uses Socrates in his dialogues as his own mouth-piece is not of interest in this article. All passages I extract are from what Socrates says, and insofar as they convey important truth, I make use of it. ↩
Ibid. p. 48. ↩
Ibid. p. 50. ↩
Ibid. p. 51. ↩
Ibid. p. 51. ↩
Nietzsche, F. W. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press. p. 154 ↩
Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 53. ↩
Aristotle, Fragments, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II. Princeton University Press. p. 34. ↩
Hegel, G.W.F. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 738. ↩
Ibid. p. 627. ↩
Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 56. ↩
Ibid. p. 56. ↩
Ibid. p. 57. ↩
Ibid. p. 57. ↩
Ibid. p. 58. ↩
Ibid. p. 59. ↩
Ibid. p. 64. ↩
Salecl, R. & Žižek, S. gaze and voice as love objects. Duke University Press. p. 3 ↩
Plato, Phaedo. The Liberal Arts Press. p. 52 ↩

The "I" as a Funny Circle

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, I started venturing into an attempt to think the “I”, mainly being inspired by its dialectic as explicated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. You can find the article here.

The Determinate Concept & The Concept as Determinate

Among the many concepts in Hegel’s Logic, it would have to be said that the concept itself, is its foremost concept. The whole third part of the Science of Logic, that is, the Doctrine of the Concept is dedicated to it. The Doctrine culminates in the truest and most beautiful blossoming of the concept, the Absolute Idea. But how are we to start understanding the concept? First of all, we would have to rid ourselves of the presupposition that Hegel is talking about the concept as something that we have, as in, ‘I have the concept of a thing’. Surely we can have concepts of things, though for this he reserves the name ‘determinate concept’. It is something different from the pure concept as determinate;

“The concept […] is none other than the “I” or pure self-consciousness. True, I have concepts, that is, determinate concepts; but the “I” is the pure concept itself, the concept that has come into determinate existence.”¹

“I” = “I”

The way in which we are to think the “I” philosophically, is firstly to abstract from and set aside any arbitrary phenomenal associations we might have with it. What is the “I”? Well, if you’ve successfully abstracted it from any associations, it would have to simply appear as a determinate concept, but then again, we’d be reducing it to the presupposition that it is something that I have… From there on out we could argue that the “I”, insofar as it is a determinate concept or insofar as we have it, is a contradiction, one which is a kind of self-contained, recursive loop (the “I” is that which has the “I”, which is that which has the “I” ad infinitum). It is evident that ‘having’ the concept of the “I”, shows that there’s no immediate self-equality, no immediate identity of the “I” with the “I”².

To give an example of what is occurring here using an analogy; I am not my body, I have a body. Therefore, I am more than body, or perhaps less than body. Either way, insofar as I have anything, I am not immediately identical with it. Strictly the same logic is occurring with the “I” having the determinate concept of the “I”. If we hold on to this thought and accept that the “I” might be something to be had, as a determinate concept, we’d have to inquire into what this “I” ‘that I have’ is, as such. Full stop. We know it at least not to be the same as the former “I” which is having it, as we’ve seen above. It’s neither your singularity (as the “I” to yourself), nor mine. It is in fact neither… However, this “I” having a negative relation to both our “I”’s, does not become completely meaningless. We could all principally have this “I” (or determinate concept thereof), and this is a commonality to all. It has constituted itself as a (negative) universality. As Hegel will put it, the “I”

“[…] is universality, a unity that is unity with itself only by virtue of its negative relating, which appears as abstraction, and because of it contains all the determinateness within itself as dissolved.”³

Is dissolved? How so? Because it denotes nothing of the sort that we’d imagine it to denote, that is, the “I” as I am, the singular “I”. So, apart from the universal “I”, there’s another one;

“In second place, the “I” is just as immediately self-referring negativity, singularity, absolute determinateness that stands opposed to anything other and excludes it — individual personality.”⁴

The “I” is both the singular “I”, which I am, and at once the “I” of universality. Do I have this latter “I”, or am I this “I”? We’d have to say that in our negative relating to the “I”, I am not this “I”, nor do I have this “I”, but am its exclusion, its negativity. The singular “I” is by neither being nor having the universal “I”. In it, I refer to negatively as affirmative. And this, the “I” as being its own not-having, or being that which is negatively related to itself, and only in this referring truly and singularly being itself, is the perishing which equals its abiding (as I’ve attempted to bring out in my former article on The Dialectic of the ‘I’).

I am I, and in this claim, I have already implied there to be a distance to the “I” insofar as I am able to relate subject to predicate in judgment. Either way, having the “I” as a determinate concept, or judging the “I” to be “I” amount to it being self-referring negativity. But what about the relation of the universal “I” to this negativity of the singular “I” in their difference? To that, I will say that I speak of “I”. And in this preceding sentence that relation and difference should already be apparent. The former I simply denotes the singular me, the latter “I” denotes the universal “I”ness, common to us both, or, which is the same, uncommon to us both as it has not much to do with our singular “I” at all.

Salvador Dali 1941 Soft self-portrait with grilled Bacon

It might seem as if I’ve made a mess, I know. The “I” has fallen apart into two, the universal “I” and the singular “I”. Though the story does not end here, there’s a third that holds together this mess. For the “I” abides in this mess, I abide in it, am unperturbed by it. As a matter of fact, “I” am “I”. “I” equals “I”, and there’s nothing any mischievous dissection can do about it. The unity persists, and is not opposed to the “I” equaling itself, for the “I” contains it. As Hegel says:

“This absolute universality which is just as immediately absolute singularization — a being-in-and-for-itself which is absolute positedness and being-in-and-for-itself only by virtue of its unity with its positedness — this universality constitutes the nature of the “I” and of the concept; neither the one nor the other can be comprehended unless these two just given moments are grasped at the same time, both in their abstraction and in their perfect unity.”⁵

For Hegel, the concept is the “I”, and the “I” is the concept. That much is clear. Now, the “I” as an object of thought, or universal concept, is not simply opposed to the “I” which I am, and we fail to comprehend the “I” if we cannot apprehend the persistence of the “I” as and through this self-opposition which collapses into a oneness, an identity inclusive of its difference, that is, a being-in-and-for-itself that not only is as such, but also posited by the “I”.⁶

The Objective Concept and Language

As we’ve seen, the “I’“ is a negative unity, a third holding two disparate elements such as the singular “I” and the universal “I” together, containing them and consequently cohering as a singular-universality. This idea of the “I” functioning as a unity as well as the “I” being the concept, goes back to Kant according to Hegel⁷. Of course, the “I” as a unity is confronted by numerous phenomena, extended in space as well as in temporal succession, and it cannot lend its unity from these scattered appearances. The name of that which the “I” does have a simple self-reference to in being constituted, is the object.

“— the object, says Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edn, p. 137), is that, in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is unified. But every unification of representations requires a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently, this unity of consciousness is alone that which constitutes the reference of the representations to an object, hence their objective validity, and that on which even the possibility of the understanding rests.”⁸

The manifold of intuitions, or different sensory impressions are disparate, but unified by the concept or the “I”, constituting them as an object. It is on the side of the “I”, or the unity of consciousness as a synthesis that objectivity lies. Not, as pre-Kantian philosophies might have it, lying out there over yonder, as a substance apart from and self-constituted independently of the “I” or concept.

“On this explanation, the unity of the concept is that by virtue of which something is not the determination of mere feeling is not intuition or even mere representation, but an object, and this objective unity is the unity of the “I” with itself. — in point of fact, the conceptual comprehension of a subject matter consists in nothing else than in the “I” making it its own, in pervading it and bringing it into its own form, that is, into a universality which is immediately determinateness, or into a determinateness which is immediately universality.”⁹

The unity of the “I” and its object, or the concept and its objectivity, is in both cases contained by the former. The “I” is opposed to its object, and since this object is only constituted by the “I”, it is the unity of the “I” itself that self-externalized this object within it, since this object itself has come from it, is not taken from the outside. The object is, only as mediated by the concept. Wherever we find jumbled up feelings or representations, or disunity, it is by thought that the “I” can mediate them and unify them into its own objectivity. This is not the same as the “I” enforcing its own singular and unique appropriation, but universal conceptualization. By diving into a subject matter, or an object of thought, we make ourselves one with it, and let its objectivity be in a unity of the concept’s singular-universality.

The “I” as opposition of different sides that is one as the singular-universal circle.

An example: when starting to learn a new language, it always looks as if the grammatical rules are arbitrary, and that the spelling of words is random. To make a new language one’s own, one is to be pervaded by it, and to study it for an extended period. Over time, the seeming abstractness of its universal grammar, and the seemingly unconnected and contingent idiosyncrasies of the language will cohere and be integrated. To put it in Hegelese: the universality and singularity will become simultaneous in the form of the “I” and its objectivity. At that point, one does not have to think consciously about its grammar, does not need to think about what word has to be used in what context, one spontaneously speaks ones determinateness universally. There’s an objectivity to the newly acquired language, but only as the “I” has made itself one with it, has made it its own, has unified itself with it, not by imposing its associations, but by letting the object of thought, the subject matter of the language run its own course in one’s studies. This goes for all conceptual subject matters that one wants to think and become proficient in. In the next passage, Hegel goes into a bit more detail as to the process of conceptualization:

“As intuited or also represented, the subject matter is still something external, alien. When it is conceptualized, the being-in-and-for-itself that it has in intuition and representation is transformed into a positedness; in thinking it, the “I” pervades it. But it is only in thought that it is in and for itself; as it is intuition or representation, it is appearance. Thought sublates the immediacy with which it first comes before us and in this way transforms it into a positedness; but this, its positedness, is its being-in-and-for-itself or its objectivity. This is is an objectivity which the subject matter consequently attains in the concept, and this concept is the unity of self-consciousness into which that subject matter has been assumed; consequently its objectivity or the concept itself is none other than the nature of self-consciousness, has no other moments or determinations than the “I” itself.”¹⁰

The concept has objectivity in and for itself, beyond appearance. What does this mean? Another way to put it is that I am united with myself in the relation I have with an object of thought. The for-itselfness, or the fact that my relation to an object is my own relation to myself, as both are within the same concept, does not take away its universality, the concept that posits its very objectivity, can only have this in itself of the universal object as a for itself of the singular “I”.

Like Kant, Hegel finds the non-“I” to be within the “I”. This begs the question — what is truly out there, beyond everything which is the “I”? For Kant, this is the thing-in-itself, unbounded to any for-itselfness, uncontained by the “I”, completely and utterly removed from it, a concept denoting solely the unconceptual. For Hegel, this in-itself, is simply another determination of the “I” itself in its abstract universal form — nothing but an empty representation.

The “I” as Representation Void of Concept

In thinking the “I”, we should be careful not to reduce the “I” to a representation of it, or what we might picture it to be.

“Accordingly, we find in a fundamental principle of Kantian philosophy the justification for turning to the nature of the “I” in order to learn what the concept is. But conversely, it is necessary to this end that we have grasped the concept of the “I” as stated. If we cling to the mere representation of the “I” as we commonly entertain it, then the “I” is only the simple thing also known as the soul, a thing in which the concept inheres as a possession or a property. This representation, which does not bother to comprehend either the “I” or the concept, is of little use in facilitating or advancing the conceptual comprehension of the concept.”¹¹

The “I” does not have the concept. The “I” is the concept. To revert to a representation of the “I” that has the concept as some kind of all-encompassing still-point that contains the concept as movement within itself, fails to include the “I” itself, and the dialectical convulsions its movement consist of as itself the concept as such. Kant with his empty representation of the “I” fails to comprehend this, since

“[Kant] fixes on how the “I” appears in self-consciousness, but from this “I”, since it is its essence (the thing in itself) that we want to cognize, he removes everything empirical; nothing then remains but this appearance of the “I think” that accompanies all representations and of which we do not have the slightest concept. — It must of course be conceded that, as long as we are not engaged in comprehending but confine ourselves to a simple, fixed representation or to a name, we do not have the slightest concept of the “I”, or of anything whatever, not even of the concept itself.”¹²

Along with all representations that we have, there is the “I”. It seems to stay self-similar in all, encompassing all, without being effected by whatever it contains. This is not actually a conceptual grasp of the “I”, but an abstract representation of it. And as I think, I might want to reduce this “I” to a means to think the “I”, as if I could be my own means. This again, takes the “I” to be a representation. It is a stoppage of thinking. Since it blocks the inclusion of the “I” into itself as movement, as conceptual. It takes the “I” to be something that could stand above and beyond itself as a fixed point, as detached from anything that it contains.

Circle of Circles

“— Peculiar indeed is the thought (if one can call it a thought at all) that I must make use of the “I” in order to judge the “I”. The “I” that makes use of self-consciousness as a means in order to judge: this is indeed an x of which, and also of the relation involved in this “making use,” we cannot possibly have the slightest concept.”¹³

It’s not that I make use of the “I”. I am the “I”, the concept, pure self-consciousness. The “I think” that accompanies representations seen as a fixed point halts the thought of it. The idea that the “I” is a means, is subsequent way in which this representation of the “I” can stop us from thinking the “I” for itself, on its own terms, as a unity of its self-contradiction. A metaphysics that relies on a representation of the “I” as a kind of meta-perspective outside of what it contains, that rejects the comprehension of its logical moments as a unity, reveals something spiritual about the very “I” proclaiming it.

Laughable Awkwardness

In the following passage, Hegel will make an appeal to Kant feeling awkward about the weird movement of the “I”:

“But surely it is laughable to label the nature of this self-consciousness, namely that the “I” thinks itself, that the “I” cannot be thought without the “I” thinking it, an awkwardness and, as if it were a fallacy, a circle. The awkwardness, the circle, is in fact the relation by which the eternal nature of self-consciousness and of the concept is revealed in immediate, empirical self-consciousness — is revealed because self-consciousness is precisely the existent and therefore empirically perceivable pure concept; because it is the absolute self-reference that, as parting judgement, makes itself into an intended object and consists in simply making itself thereby into a circle. — This is an awkwardness that a stone does not have. When it is a matter of thinking or judging, the stone does not stand in its own way; it is dispensed from the burden of making use of itself for the task; something else outside it must shoulder that effort.”¹⁴

What’s so funny? The viciousness of the circle. For Kant, however, it feels so awkward that he avoids and shies away from its truth. The truth that gets at the very essence of self-consciousness, the thing-in-itself. Stones aren’t awkward at all, because they have no way of stubbornly rejecting to be thought, they don’t have the freedom of spirit to think against themselves or deceive themselves, to be internally opposed to themselves in self-determination.

To clarify in some preceding points; does or does the “I” not make use of itself in thinking the “I”? Yes, and no. It does insofar as the hiccup in thinking the “I”, the absolute self-reference that thinks an intended object and turns around to itself, is apprehended as an existent unity of its self-contradiction. It does not if the negativity of its self-relation, the opposition the “I” has to itself, is taken as a meaningless and tautological fault. This latter, Kantian, way to ‘think’ the “I” stops short at the fixed representation and terminates the movement of thought as soon as it comes up against the quirky hiccup. For Kant, the circle is awkward and untrue. The “I” as a static representation is his final word on it. This representation of the “I” that floats above paradox and is thought of as that which uses the “I” as means, is one-sided. Kant stumbles upon the quirky circle with its hiccup, and finds the break of smoothness irking and awkward. Kant cringes at the thought of the “I”. For he cannot bear the fundamental truth of the “I” to be dissolving, and the dissolving of this dissolving to be its abiding, as a weird circle, as subject and object.

“The defect, which these barbarous notions place in the fact that in thinking the “I” the latter cannot be left out as a subject, then also appears the other way around, in that the “I” occurs only as the subject of consciousness, or in that I can use myself only as a subject, and no intuition is available by which the “I” would be given as an object; but the concept of a thing capable of existence only as a subject does not as yet carry any objective reality with it. — Now if external intuition as determined in time and space is required for objectivity, and it is this objectivity that is missed, it is then clear that by objectivity is meant only sensuous reality. But to have risen above such a reality is precisely the condition of thinking and of truth.”¹⁵

The problem — which is what Kant, not Hegel would call it — is that one can only be the very subject of the “I”, and that this subject seems not to have any objectivity to it, as I do not sense or intuit it as an object. If we think of objectivity as only existent in feeling, we fail to see how thought has its object, and that hence, there is objectivity of thought. For Hegel, the subject, the “I”, has objectivity, conceptual objectivity, it has the capacity to be an object of thought, as well as at the very same time being the subject, or the “I” that thinks — it is a singular-universal, self-thinking thought. It is concept.

“Of course, if the “I” is not grasped conceptually but is taken as a mere representation, in the way we talk about it in everyday consciousness, then it is an abstract self-determination, and not the self-reference that has itself for its subject matter. Then it is only one of the extremes, a one-sided subject without its objectivity; or else just an object without subjectivity, which it would be were it not for the awkwardness just touched upon, namely that the thinking subject will not be left out of the “I” as object. But as a matter of fact this awkwardness is already found in the other determination, that of the “I” as subject; the “I” does think something, whether itself or something else. This inseparability of the two forms in which the “I” opposes itself to itself belongs to the most intimate nature of its concept and of the concept as such; it is precisely what Kant wants to keep away in order to retain what is only a representation that does not internally differentiate itself and consequently, of course, is void of concept.”¹⁶

The “I” of representation is the “I” as one-sidedly grasped, either as the active subject that thinks, or the passive object that is thought. The fact is that we can only comprehend the “I” by seeing how the subject is the object, or how both subject “I” that thinks, and object “I” that is thought are one and the same while at the same time being absolutely different. Once we grasp the unity (singular-universal “I”) of unity (singular “I”) and difference (universal “I”), we succeed in comprehending the most intimate nature of the concept. The feeling of awkwardness is the result of one clinging to an ossified representation, which is thought of as not succumbing to this most intimate nature. The consequences are not only metaphysical, but also perceivable in spiritual expression:

“If the Kantian philosophy subjected the categories of reflection to critical investigation, all the more should it have investigated the abstraction of the empty “I” that he retained, the supposed idea of the thing-in-itself. The experience of the awkwardness complained of is itself the empirical fact in which the untruth of that abstraction finds expression.”¹⁷

Would Kant have said that the thing-in-itself is the abstraction of an empty “I”? I do not believe so. As I’ve mentioned above, the thing-in-itself is uncontained by the “I” for Kant, not within the reach of the concept, not graspable as a moment of the concept’s movement. And as we’ve said above, every object of thought in the concept, is not merely anything out there, but always occurs within the circular positing of the “I” to itself. A relationship to an object of thought is a relationship one has to oneself, since one has made themselves one with thinking objectivity. Kant’s thing-in-itself is in itself, for him, i.e. an abstraction of the empty “I”.

How can awkwardness be an expression of untruth, resulting from the above-mentioned empty abstraction, the static representation of the “I”? Hegel is making a point about aesthetic, or more precisely, humoristic disposition as an expression of metaphysical thinking. As I’ve quoted him above, Hegel finds the awkwardness laughable. To him, the “I” is a funny circle with a quirk. No need to shy away and rigidly assert ourselves against it in the face of the quirk, no need to refuse to come to terms with it. We’re always-already quirky circles, and better to take responsibility for it by asserting ourselves through and as these quirks, as it is solely Spirit that has this power in a self-conscious manner. Confronting, acknowledging, apprehending, comprehending and laughing with the quirkiness is a reconciliation with truth and a sign of metaphysical insight into the nature of the “I” that knows it to stay self-same through its falling apart, as it simply rejoins itself again. We can’t help but to have these quirks. And the more vicious the circle is, the funnier it is.¹⁸

“The triumph of the Kantian critique over this metaphysics consists, on the contrary, in side-lining any investigation that would have truth for its aim and this aim itself; it simply does not pose the one question which is of interest, namely whether a determinate subject, in this case of the abstract “I” of representation, has truth in and for itself. But to stay at appearances and at the mere representations of ordinary consciousness is to give up on the concept and on philosophy. Anything beyond that is branded by the Kantian critique as high-flown, something to which reason has no claim. As a matter of fact, the concept does fly high, rising above what has no concept, and the immediate justification for going beyond it is, for one thing, the concept itself, and, for another, on the negative side, the untruth of appearance and of representation, and also of such abstractions as the thing-in-itself and the said “I” which is not supposed to be an object to itself.”¹⁹

The thinking “I” flies. It is its own justification of itself for the reason of being itself, beyond untruth of whatever has no concept, of what is vacuous and unthought. The “I” is not only a funny circle, but also a flying circle. Free spirits laugh and fly above heaviness that clings to fixed and vacuous representations that inhibit the overflowing hilarity of our vicious circularity. They overcome awkwardness in a perspectival shift through the catharsis of humor. That is, on the spiritual side. On the side of metaphysics, this circularity is rigorously worked through, inclusive of all the difficulty that this education of Spirit entails.

For Kant it is sensuous reality that is objective, whereas the concept is seen as deficient or untruthful. It is not a coincidence that Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra says,

“The ostrich runs faster than the fastest horse, but it also sticks its head heavily into the heavy earth; so too the human being who cannot yet fly.”²⁰

Actual spirits learn to fly.

There’s two — complementary — ways to interpret sticking one’s head in the heavy earth. Firstly, Kant stops short at the quirkiness of the circle and reverts to an attempt to ground the “I” in an empty representation qua thing-in-itself, sticking his head in the sand as the refusal to apprehend the concept in its becoming. Secondly, by rejecting the flight of the concept above representation and mere appearance, he reduces objectivity to sensory reality, or feeling and intuition, thereby holding on to finite and transitory earthliness, or nullity.

To summarize:

Awkwardness is felt because of the self-othering movement of the “I”.
Kant has an inability to self-justify the concept’s flight above finitude.
Kant gives up on the concept by instantiating an a priori delimitation (thing-in-itself as empty representation of the “I”) as the justification for sticking his head in the semblance of edification, attempting to ground himself in sensuous reality.²¹

The Metaphysics and Spirituality of the comical “I”

Is Hegel laughing at Kant for his awkwardness? I’d contest this, and claim that Hegel finds Kant’s claim of the “I” being awkward comical, which is not the same. The quirky torsion, or paradoxical circle which is the “I” is essential to its existence. If Hegel thought Kant was to be laughed at, he would just point to a contradiction that Kant wasn’t aware of. But Kant was, and this led him to his complaint of awkwardness. The difference lies in how the contradiction is dealt with, metaphysically and spiritually.

In his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel writes: “In such a case” of, for example, lampooning another, “[one’s] laughter is only an expression of a self-complacent wit, a sign that [one is] clever enough to recognize such a contrast and [is] aware of the fact.”²² Kant was aware of the contrast, or the self-opposition of the “I”, to a certain extend at least.²³ The feeling of awkwardness is the expression, the spiritual result of his metaphysics that could not account for the ontological absoluteness of contradiction. The speculative metaphysics that does account for this, reconciles with the unity of the “I” as a self-contradiction. It does not overlook, or look away from it but faces it and apprehends it movement, inclusive of its negative moments. This type of speculative metaphysics that reconciles with contradiction has the same function as the art of comedy. There is an analogous reconciliation to be found in comedy, or comicality, in the form of the catharsis of laughter. Hegel’s theory of comedy posits that

“the comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his owninner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustration of his aims and achievements. A narrow and pedantic mind is least of all capable of this when for others his behaviour is laughable in the extreme.”²⁴

To be raised (and fly) above one’s inner contradiction does not imply the “I” to be the mere abstract fixed point above its representations, but, to the contrary is a reconciliation with the whole of its self-othering movement. And it is thus that we are to understand being raised above contradiction, not as being raised to a neutral, or objective meta-perspective that is detached from contradiction, but is one with it and yet undisturbed by it. Hegel is not mocking contradiction, nor is he mocking Kant for being contradictory. He sees the “I” as being logically contradictory in a metaphysical sense and hence comical in its spiritual actuality.

The feeling of awkwardness is a spiritual effect with a metaphysical cause, mediated by an implicit metaphysics. By this mediation the “I” is revealed directly as inwardly self-dissolving, and it is up to us how to behave with it, light-heartedly, comically, and taking flight with the concept, or rigidly, pedantically and awkwardly shying away from its naked truth. The choice might seem clear, or too self-evident to be true, one-sided perhaps. But just as much as the Phenomenology of Spirit is the funniest book in existence according to Lacan, it does — like Hegel says in its Preface — not only repeatedly plunge us into doubt, but its journey consists of the state of doubt itself, the pathway of despair, and so is fundamentally tragic as well. Absolute Knowing, or the rejoined unity that Spirit finds through its recollection of its shapes and them being torn apart, does not consist of a new-found edification, a point at which one can finally stop having to work with the shattering of oneself, it simply inaugurates the process for Spirit to deal with negativity on a higher order, namely, proper philosophizing.

In his Lectures on Fine Aesthetics, Hegel brings out his theory of art, including comedy. What interests us here is not the truth of Hegel’s theory about ancient comedic plays, but the way in which Hegel thinks about Spirit as comical, especially in relation to the “I”:

“What is comical […] is the subjectivity that makes its own actions contradictory and so brings them to nothing.”²⁵

And yet again, just like the “I” perseveres in its dissolution, comical subjectivity does not end up in an annihilation by bringing actions to nothing, to the contrary,

“[the] subjective personality alone shows itself self-confident and self-assured at the same time in this dissolution.”²⁶

The subjective personality, or the “I” bears the dissolving and can express the weirdness in a manner that is not unreconciled and awkward, but in a catharsis of laughter. Because “Comedy”, as Hegel says “has for its basis and starting point […] an absolutely reconciled and cheerful heart.”²⁷

The “I”, as a true infinite, as a beyond of finitude that includes it all the same is visible “[i]n comedy, [for] it is subjectivity, or personality, which in its infinite assurance retains its upper hand[.]”²⁸ The negative unity of the “I”, which is only concrete and truly infinite by abiding, can also be expressed as victorious in the art of comedy according to Hegel:

“In comedy, there comes before our contemplation, in the laughter in which the characters dissolve everything, even themselves, the victory of their own subjective personality which nevertheless persists self-assured.”²⁹

Comedy expresses the intrinsically comical nature of the “I”, as unfazed, victorious, confident, free and infinite — a funny and quirky circle.

“[comedy shows us] the inherently firm personality which is raised in its freedom above the downfall of the whole finite sphere and is happy and assured in itself. The comic subjective personality has become the overlord of whatever appears in the real world. From that world the adequate objective presence of fundamental principle has disappeared. When what has no substance in itself has destroyed its show of existence by its own agency, the individual makes himself master of this dissolution too and remains undisturbed in himself and at ease.”³⁰

The power of comedy, or the comicality of Spirit’s actuality gives us a profound insight into the metaphysical structure and movement of the “I”. Speculative philosophy with its dialectical logic gives us an insight into the funny circularity of the “I”. Metaphysical thinking, and aesthetic, or performative expression are thoroughly interlinked. The incapacity to hold fast to oneself in the loss of the representation of the self, the negative moment of the concept’s becoming, has far-reaching consequences for how one comports oneself in the world. To re-iterate once more, I will give the final word to Hegel:

”[…] the individual self is not the emptiness of this disappearance but, on the contrary, preserves itself in this very nothingness, abides with itself and is the sole actuality. […] What this self-consciousness beholds is that whatever assumes the form of essentiality over against it, is instead dissolved in it — in its thinking, its existence, and its action — and is at its mercy. It is the return of everything universal into the certainty of itself which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear and of essential being on the part of all that is alien. This self-certainty is a state of spiritual well-being and of repose therein, such as is not to be found anywhere else outside of […] comedy.”³¹

Madman looking through his fingers, ca. 1550–1599. Anonymous, Netherlands.

Hegel, G.W.F. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 514. ↩
In other words, I am not simply what I am. ↩
Ibid. p. 514. ↩
Ibid. p. 514. ↩
Ibid. p. 514. ↩
By not being what I am, I am simply what I am. ↩
“It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the “I think,” or of self-consciousness.” - Ibid. p. 515. ↩
Ibid. p. 515. ↩
Ibid. p. 515-516. ↩
Ibid. p. 516. ↩
Ibid. p. 516. ↩
Ibid. p. 691. ↩
Ibid. p. 691. ↩
Ibid. p. 691. ↩
Ibid. p. 691-692. ↩
Ibid. p. 692. ↩
Ibid. p. 692. ↩
What’s so funny about vicious circles? Take for example those moments in life where a friend makes a joke and you laugh and build on it, and then they laugh and build on it, which makes you laugh and build on it, to the point of this circle going on and on and becoming extremely silly, ending up in a point where you are just laughing at each other’s laughing. ↩
Ibid. p. 692-693. ↩
Nietzsche, F. W. Thus Spoke Zarahustra. Cambridge University Press. p. 154. ↩
There’s many more connections that could be made here, which is beyond the scope of this article. For example the following quote by Zarathustra: “Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me.” Ibid. p. 29. ↩
Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: lectures on fine art. Clarendon Press. p. 1200. ↩
The awkwardness he felt is a spiritual expression of the metaphysical way he went about contradiction, in this case of the “I” by putting a stopgap on the thought of its self-opposition by positing a representation that abstracted from it. ↩
Ibid. p. 1200. ↩
Ibid. p. 1220. ↩
Ibid. p. 1236. ↩
Ibid. p. 1200. ↩
Ibid. p. 1199. ↩
Ibid. p. 1199. ↩
Ibid. p. 1202. ↩
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 452-453. ↩

The Mystical Is Rational

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Christian mysticism is the element of Christian belief and practice that concerns the direct and transformative presence of God. The adjective ‘mystical’ means ‘hidden’ in Greek and refers to ‘secret’ realities of beliefs, rituals and practices, or the mystical meaning of the Bible itself, i.e. the inner message about attaining, knowing, or experiencing God. Mystical life is essentially a process, or a journey to God, not just a moment or brief state of mystical union. Instead, the mystic’s journey consists mostly of preparation for God’s intervention in one’s life.

Eternal Desire by Mariusz Lewandowski

This mystical union, could be an experience of a perfect harmony of becoming in an ecstatic state. For many mystics in history however, there have been other means by which one speaks of special contact with God, such as contemplation, vision, deification, birthing, unending desire and so on. Therefore, to reduce mystical experiences to a simple fusion, dissipation, absorption in or with God or Oneness, or an archaic pre-modern/ancient illusion that entails a regression or “return” to the inorganic as Freud said about the”nirvana principle” doesn’t suffice today.

In the seminar on feminine sexuality, Lacan says:

“What was tried at the end of the last century, at the time of Freud, by all kinds of worthy people in the circle of Charcot and the rest, was an attempt to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking. If you look carefully, that is not what it is all about. Might not this jouissance which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of ex-istence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported by feminine jouissance?” - Jacques Lacan, Seminar on Feminine Sexuality

The question whether feminine, or Other jouissance is the means by which one can come into contact with God is beyond the scope of this article. The one thing that will be said about it is that when one speaks of feminine jouissance, one should keep in mind that nothing can possibly be said about it, nothing that does not reduce it to a relation to the phallus.

The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa

Similarly to feminine jouissance, mystical experiences are generally thought of as ultimately not reducible to words or representation, but we should attempt conceptualising them anyway since it is at the same time language itself that creates the standard to which those words fail to express the experience, as mysticism tries to do. The fact that this standard can be proven to be mutable (take the inadequacy of Kantian epistemology that has given rise to all post-kantian philosophy), means that we cannot rely on positing an ever elusive thing-in-itself that would provide the eternal exception to the universality of the categories of the Understanding. This exception, this noumenon, is an insufficient excuse that motivates one to shirk from Truth, since the encounter with it has something traumatic about it.

Psychedelic substances taken in the proper sacred space (one which will be able to take up and not stimulate one to stay stuck with bad infinity) are one of the means to apprehend and experience the mystical core of one’s own notionally actual self-relation. It is like one will find in the mystics, an encounter or opening up of finitude to infinity, and the coming down of infinity into finitude, the experience takes place at the reverberating core of the subject, at its oscillations and as the indivisible division, or intersection of thought and being. Hence, it is reminiscent of what Bernard Mcginn said about Eckhart’s mysticism:

“In perfect self-surrender, God’s self-knowing becomes our self-knowing; or better, since there is no distinction in the one ground, there is only a single essential self-knowing.” - Source

A Scientist of Spirit, thrown into his own Otherness, can, in the mystical experience, learn about the nature of God, sexual difference, the masculine ego and the feminine soul, and the different psychical registers through which one mediates the self, i.e. imaginary-symbolic-real. These registers, as well as the three narrative-forms (mythos-logos-pathos), here fall into themselves and into each other. One is lodged within a perfect becoming where blessedness is at once absolute negativity and the perfection of division is One. Other and I are self-same; through and as Absolute Difference.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” - Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart

Alain Badiou has expounded his own theory on the relation between mysticism and philosophy. It is of interest here as it provides a starting point to understand Hegel’s speculative philosophy as a form of scientific mysticism. In one of his lectures, Alain says:

“Philosophy is not mysticism. Mysticism is the idea that the movement from inside nihilism to infinite affirmation is the same experience. The same experience which goes across nihilism and to infinity itself. […] It’s not philosophy, but is the same movement as philosophy but as pure experience, outside language, outside rational transmission. A pure experience of the infinite inside nothingness” - Alain Badiou, Mysticism and Philosophy (2010).

He goes on to describe how, unlike nihilism and positivism, mysticism is definitely not an enemy of philosophy. According to Badiou, they’re even the same kind of process, but differ in their form. Philosophy, according to him requires a labour, patience, and systematisation that is not ‘mystical’. For Badiou, the mystical ceases to be rational. Along with Hegel, I believe this isn’t the case, or at the very least not the full story, it only happens to be so if one reduces the rational to the law of non-contradiction. Hegel’s philosophy does not fit in as either mysticism or philosophy as Badiou has described them, and the solution is that we either posit Hegel’s philosophy as the unity of both and/or a difference between both. The systematical manner by which Hegel conceptualises being within mystical preparation and experience (,e.g. the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic) are therefore not a negation of mysticism but it’s being taken up into a sort of distillation where the purity of the Notion, the exercising of explication is a high level form of mystical experience, or spiritual practice. The evidence for this is that the bifurcation that Badiou’s claim rests upon, namely that mysticism doesn’t separate the nihilism (nothingness of negation) from the affirmation, whereas philosophy in its systematisation does, does not apply to Hegel’s philosophy, for he writes:

“By anguish is expressed that which we know as the absolute negativity — that is the self-conscious, self-experienced, the self-relating negativity which is therefore absolute affirmation.” - Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Section One.

For Hegel, speculative philosophy is the same thing as that which was formerly understood as ‘mystical’ by religious consciousness, albeit in a scientific form, in line with an objective method and system, inclusive of the subject. Colloquially, one can understand the mystical to be synonymous with the mysterious and incomprehensible, and as such inconceivable. Depending on one’s historical education, this could be regarded as something genuine and true, perhaps even the sole truth, or by others as superstition, deception and archaic naivete.

Breath of Life

“As regards the significance of the speculative, it bears mentioning here that the same thing is to be understood by it as formerly used to be called the mystical, especially when referring to religious consciousness and its content.” - Hegel, Encyclopedic Logic.

For Hegel, the mystical is mysterious for the Understanding, because abstract self-identity is its principle. The mystical taken as synonymous with the speculative is however the concrete unity of those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition. In other words, what is concretely comprehended, inclusive of the inseparability of its oppositional determination in its Notion, is barred from the Understanding since it can only grasp these determinations in their separation and opposition. A trap one can fall into while comprehending truth as mystical/speculative is to be content with calling it mysterious or unsymbolizable and leaving it at. This is another way one traps oneself within the Understanding, in a mode of thinking that deems itself to be merely able to occupy itself with positing abstract identities, thinking about thinking as a standpoint unable to be a still-point and at peace with the loss of substance in the abyss of spiritual reflections that find unity or even direct equation in oppositional determinations. A thinking based on the Understanding, however ‘mystical’ it might think itself to be, attempts to renounce itself in order to attain to what it understands to be an imageistic, mystical truth. Therefore it holds on to its own already established determinations and refuses to trust itself to be able to take up the contact with God as a truthful self-encounter, in whatever form it comes up. The firmness to which one holds on in the Understanding is constantly sublating itself and changing over into its opposite, but unlike for Reason, which has this truth as its inner movement, the Understanding determines itself in opposition, as it does not take responsibility for Spirit’s self-sublating.

To be mystical, or speculative, means going beyond the Understanding and is therefore only regarded to be absolutely inaccessible and incomprehensible insofar as one has not triumphed over the finitude of Other-imposed limitations through a holy yes-saying to the non-all of one’s self-experience. Everything concretely rational is therefore mystical.

Hegel’s speculative philosophy, hinges on grasping substance as subject, it relies on a type of Reason that goes beyond the faculty of the Understanding which only grasps one-sided abstract self-identity. Speculative philosophy helps one to not be led astray in an attachment to simple, undivided Oneness, intuited in (mystical) experience. Instead, what this philosophy helps us to do, is to emphasize and affirm the actuality of division, alienation and absence of this One as the One’s own self-becoming. Since Hegel’s Reason is beyond the law of non-contradiction, it can comprehend and affirm determinations in a manner that is speculative, i.e. it is mystical in a properly scientific sense.

Spiritual Practice: The Forward Return to the Self

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Spirit in Hegel’s book ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ is the process of its own self-becoming. It is the movement of knowing that is aimed at forming a deeper knowing of itself. Its power lies in staying self-same in externalizing itself, i.e. becoming other to itself. Its supreme freedom and certainty of the knowledge of itself is the release from the form of its self. By moving forward, Spirit returns to itself.

“The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself.” - Hegel, PoS, (transl. Pinkard).

In its becoming, its goal is “the revelation of the depth of Spirit”. The goal is Spirit that knows itself as Spirit — Absolute Knowing.

“Here again, then, we see language as the existence of Spirit. Language is the self-consciousness existing for others , self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self that separates itself from itself, which as a pure ‘I = I’ becomes objective to itself, which in this objectivity equally preserves itself as this self, just as it coalesces directly with other selves and is their self-consciousness. It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the perceiving is just existence which has become the self.” - Hegel, PoS, section 651.

Language is the existence of the Spirit. There is simply no universal truth or actuality outside of language, and so far as it is (posited to be) there, it is there as an outside that is inside language. The presumption that there is actuality, or a world behind or outside of language disproves itself because suggesting such ideas only occur within language, Spirit’s being-there.

Immanuel Kant argues that pure reason is not a truthful instrument to arrive at objective truth in itself because reason inherently gets stuck in what he called “antinomies”: irresolvable contradictions. For Hegel, this apparent negation of the coherency of reason reveals a positive truth of reality and its consciousness itself. The negation of this negation denotes the lack or imperfection intrinsic to existence.

“One cannot step in the same river twice.” - Heraclitus

“Something moves not because at one moment of time it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here.” - G.W.F. Hegel, SoL.

According to Hegel, contradiction is a condition of possibility for change and the succession of moments, the passage of time. For Hegel, as for Heraclitus, the river is no longer the same as soon as you step back into it, nor are you the same anymore. Even the mode of change/movement is mutable itself. The river itself is transient and perishes. The form of change is not immutable since it always takes place within a certain discourse or shape of Spirit, the truth of which can only be regarded in retrospect as determinate negation. The truth of a superseded shape is revealed once one reflects upon its totality, which implies a having gone beyond it. Change itself changes.

Hegel’s dialectic as a logical tool deviates from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Aristotle claimed that formal logic must adhere to the principle that A = A. An identity is what it is and remains so within formal logic. For Hegel, A can be both A and non-A. In fact, for A to be truly A it has to have been non-A. In other words, an actual identity contains within itself its difference. An identity that is actualized is one which has withstood the going through the negative of itself. Self-similarity implies internal division; positing “I = I” is a vanishing/passing and remaining/returning, a reflexive movement.

Phenomenologically, it can be experienced as follows, the self-othering that occurs in the self can be intensified in the reflexive reverberation it inaugurates. The return of that which the self has repelled from itself is the self in an inverted form, or the negative. The more one is trapped in the self-imposed alienated despair, and the resultant frantic grasping of certainty that is slipping away, the more one is pressured to make way for a breakthrough. The intractability allows for an overcoming of the pressure exerted. The overcoming of that resistance which is an expression of the power of spirit is a loss and finding of self. The unleashing of Spirit’s power, the supersession of its shape, necessitates one’s negative self-encounter and can be followed by what one desires in transformative spiritual practice, namely the supersession of oneself. The result is the emergence of a truer self, a self that is more self.

“Spirit […] wins to its truth only when it finds itself utterly torn asunder” - G.W.F. Hegel, PoS, section 32 (trans. Pinkard).

Only by being aware of the role of negativity in self-deception can one win to one’s truth. Self-deception is a fundamental part of every shape of Spirit. It should be noted that self-deception and truth are not externally and indifferently related to each other as a fixed opposition. The spiritual practice requires one to go into one’s self-deception and explicate it on its own terms. Only thereby can one transcend its shape. The practice, as labour of the negative, is not a leaping over the self-deception as an indifferent transcendental awareness that is not involved, that would be spiritual bypassing. On the contrary, it is only possible by Spirit willing to sacrifice itself.

The transformative spiritual practice necessitates confrontation and wallowing with the negative. The moment of the onset of negativity is a moment of encounter of truth of the self, and is the self. The self-deceit can lie in the experience of it as external disruption.

“[Spirit] is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” - Hegel, PoS, section 32.

Fundamental to the transformative spiritual practice is the revelation of the negative. The practice aims at embracing the ruthless negativity that one encounters because it is necessary for enriching Spirit’s self-knowing.

The meeting of one’s demons is inevitable. The contingency of the spiritual practice lies in the formative work one puts in after having acknowledged the meeting as a negative and therefore crucial self-encounter. This formative work transforms the destructive demons into zealous angels and is the supersession of oneself. This rebirth is the attainment of a newer, livelier, more real, more present and more aware self. It is the attainment of a new way to be for self and others as a more actual self.

Spirituele Praktijk: De Voorwaartse Wederkeer Naar Het Zelf

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hegels geest is een zelf-bewust wordende eenheid die zichzelf door middel van conflicten tussen algemeenheden opheft, en zich zodoende concretiseert. De geest is zijn eigen verloop van zelf-wording.

“Aldus zien we de taal weer als het er-zijn van de geest. De taal is hetvoor anderen zijnde zelfbewustzijn, dat onmiddellijk als zodanig aanwezig, en als dit zelfbewustzijn algemeen is. De taal is het zich van zichzelf afgescheidene zelf, dat als zuiver ik = ik voor zichzelf voorwerpelijk wordt, en zich in deze voorwerpelijkheid zowel als dit Zelf handhaaft, als onmiddellijk samenvloeit met de anderen en hun zelfbewustzijn is; het verneemt zichzelf net zo als het door de anderen vernomen wordt, en dit vernemen is precies het tot Zelf geworden er-zijn” - G.W.F. Hegel, FvdG, sectie 651.

Taal is het er-zijn van de geest. Er is simpelweg geen algemene waarheid of werkelijkheid buiten taal en voor zover die er wel is, is zij er als een buiten dat binnen is. De veronderstelling dat er een werkelijkheid of wereld achter en/of buiten taal is is zelf-ontkrachtend omdat het opperen van zulke ideeën altijd al binnen taal geschiedt.

Immanuel Kant stelt dat zuivere rede geen waarheidsgetrouw instrument is om voorwerpelijke (op zich staande) waarheden te duiden omdat rede inherent vastloopt in wat hij “antinomieën” noemde: onoplosbare tegenspraken. Voor Hegel is deze schijnbare negatie van de coherente rede juist een positief feit van de realiteit en haar bewustzijn zelf. De negatie van deze negatie duidt de gebrekkigheid/onvolmaaktheid van het bestaan.

“Men kan niet tweemaal in dezelfde rivier stappen.” - Heraclitus

“Iets beweegt, niet omdat het nu hier en dan daar is op een ander nu, maar omdat het in één en hetzelfde nu hier en niet hier is, omdat het in dit hier is en tegelijkertijd niet is.“ - G.W.F. Hegel, WvdL.

Volgens Hegel is tegenspraak de mogelijkheidsvoorwaarde van verandering en het verloop van tijd. Voor Hegel, als voor Heraclitus is de rivier niet meer dezelfde zodra je er weer instapt, en ook ben jij niet meer dezelfde. Voor de duidelijkheid wil ik daar nog aan toevoegen dat de modus van verandering/beweging zelf ook veranderlijk is. Oftewel, zelfs verandering valt niet te vereeuwigen aangezien zij zich altijd binnen een bepaald vertoog afspeelt waarvan de waarheid louter achteraf te beschouwen is als bepalende negatie. Een volmaakt/verwerkelijkt begrip is terzelfdertijd zijn opheffing. Hegels dialectiek zet zich af van Aristoteles’ wet van non-contradictie. Aristoteles beweert dat formele logica zich moet houden aan het principe: A = A. Identiteit is wat het is en blijft dat binnen de formele logica. Voor Hegel Kan A zowel A als niet-A zijn, dat hangt af van het moment waarop het zich in het dialectische proces bevindt. In andere woorden: Een identiteit bevat zowel haar identiteit als haar verschil in zich. Zelfgelijkend zijn impliceert intern verschil. Het poneren van “ik = ik” is een heengaan en wederkeer, een reflexieve beweging.

Dit anders worden van identiteit dat zich in het zelf afspeelt kan in haar weerkaatsing geintensiveerd worden. De wederkeer van datgeen wat het zelf van zichzelf heeft afgestoten is het zelf in omgekeerde vorm. De in toenemende mate weerspannige beknelling maakt een verenigende doorbreking mogelijk als overkomen van de bedrukkende weerstand. Het overkomen van die weerstand als uiting van geestelijke kracht is een verlies en vinden van zelf. Het is de samenkomst van wat men nodig heeft als zijn zelfontmoeting en wat men verlangt als zijn zelfoverstijging. Het resultaat is de ontpopping van een waarlijker gestalte, een zelfer zelf.

“De geest wint alleen zijn waarheid wanneer het zichzelf ten gronde ziet gaan.” - G.W.F. Hegel, FvdG.

De transformatieve spirituele praktijk vergt dus een confrontatie met de negatieve laagheid van de huidige gestalte van de geest, die verreweg van onwezenlijk is. Vereenvoudigd samengevat spelen de drie dialectische momenten van de opheffing van een geestelijk gestalte zich als volgt af; het eerste moment bestaat uit de positiviteit van het gestalte als functionerend en levend; het tweede moment is de aanbreking van negativiteit die in de eerste instantie als externe disruptie kan worden ervaren; het derde moment is het paradoxale moment van de volmakende opheffing, dit houdt in het te boven gaan, ontkennen en meenemen van de eerste twee momenten in een hoger, alomvattender gestalte.

Wees dankbaar voor de weerkaatsing die voorvalt wanneer de negativiteit die je zelf bent geopenbaard wordt. Sta jezelf toe jezelf te verliezen in het diepe waar de destructieve demonen naar buiten komen en zichzelf verwerkelijken. Werk er vervolgens aan om hen in ijverige engels om te vormen en overstijg jezelf zodoende. Herboren worden is het winnen van een nieuwer, echter, levendiger, aanweziger en bewuster zelf. Herboren worden is het winnen van een nieuwe manier om voor anderen te zijn als werkelijker zelf.

The Dialectic of the 'I'

Dimitri F. Crooijmans — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Section 508 in the Phenomenology of Spirit is an extremely interesting and important section in which Hegel aims to explicate the self-alienation which is a necessity in the realm of actual language, as well as show how language makes an individual universal through the particular. What I find especially thought-provoking is how the singular relates to universality in the “third dialectical moment (negation of the negation)”. Singularity seems like the coincidence of universal and particular expressed in language as an universality, which is the way it remains/persists in the tension between particular and universal.

The alienation of Spirit takes place solely in language. In the actual world, language has the essence for its content and is the form of that content. In other words, the content of language is its essence, and language is the form of the content which it has. In its self-alienation its content is the form, which language itself is, and is authoritative as language.

The real existence of the self is in speech, self-consciousness as independent separate individuality comes into existence as such. Speech (as spoken to an other) means the existence of self-consciousness is necessarily for others. In expression, the ‘I’ is immersed in an actual reality, and can withdraw from it, take the stance of an observer to that reality in which it is immersed. It hereby reflects itself back into itself from its action, as well as its embodiment, and distances itself from such imperfect existence, which is always excessive and lacking at the same time.

Its imperfect existence is excessive in so far as it’s too much too bear, excessive in so far as my expression takes on its own being with which I am unable to immediately identify myself with — which goes beyond me, excessive in so far as other people are too much for me and I am too much for them. It is lacking in so far as I deal with emptiness, lacking in so far as I can never say enough to express myself, lacking in so far as I can never get recognized enough and can never provide enough recognition for the other that would satisfy their desire as a yearning fleeing this very lack.

I let it (imperfect reality) behind as I reflect back into myself. But only language expresses the ‘I’ that I am, or the objectivity (as object of consciousness) of the nature of the ‘I’. The ‘I’ is me as particular ‘I’ at this moment, but also the universal ‘I’ that can denote all particular ‘I’s. The moment I say ‘I’ the meaning is on the side of my particularity, and its objectivity on the side of its universality (its being for others). The manifestation of the ‘I’ in language therefore is externalization of particular meaning as it is raised to objective universality, as well as the vanishing of the particular ‘I’ that is meant. The vanishing-externalizing as coincidence of particularity and universality remains, in other words, the universality of the ‘I’ endures/persists through negation of meant particularity.

When I utter ‘I’, I am heard or perceived, and thereby I am in unity with those for who I have a real existence, as a universal self-consciousness. But the temporal passing of hearing/perceiving means the real existence dies away. But this fleeting of real existence, the negation of the ‘I’s positing is the real existence of the ‘I’. The ‘I’ includes the moments of its positing and negation. As (now/positing) real existence, it is not (has passed/negation), and through this vanishing it is (now/negation of negation). The vanishing is its remaining, and it is itself as a self that passes over into another self that has been perceived and is universal.