Dream Analysis 1: The Math Test

Patient A. dreams she is taking a math test, a test that she is very worried about. She also has a biology test later, but she is not so worried about that. A fat black woman, presumably an administrator of the test, tells her that she cannot use her math book to help her. The test is difficult, and as she looks at one of the problems she sees that the numbers and letters are gibberish. However, this gibberish of symbols is assembled in such a way that it resembles a diagram of Sternberg’s triangular theory of love. The testing ends, and Dr. Nowzaradan from the show “My 600 lb Life,” now her math professor, says “I hope you all used your math books.” Patient A. worries that she won’t do as well on the test since she was told she couldn’t use her book.

Patient A. dreams she is taking a math test, a test that she is very worried about. Patient A. has recently been studying for the GRE test, particularly the math part, so it is logical that the idea of taking a math test would appear in a dream. Examination dreams are a common form of anxiety dreams that Freud talks about in The Interpretation of Dreams: “having done something wrong or failed to do something properly, we expect to be punished by the event—whenever, in short, we feel the burden of responsibility.” Often, these dreams occur in patients that have long since passed all the tests they need to take. So, the source of the anxiety is not so much the test itself, but rather something deeper that takes the form of the test in a dream. However, that this test likely relates to an actual future event for Patient A., one that she is somewhat justified in worrying about, is an exception. Although Patient A. is very smart and will likely do well on this test, she has always had an excessive anxiety about tests throughout her life, even on tests that she found herself with perfect scores on. She also reports that she has had such dreams long before she decided to start studying for the GRE test. It is probably safe to say that there is more to this than just that she had a math test on her mind in the days prior to the dream.

She also has a biology test later, but she is not so worried about that. Patient A. is good at science, especially biology. I am not quite sure what to make of this detail, other than that it suggests the anxiety is not fundamentally about “taking tests” in general, but something specific to the “math test.”

A fat black woman, presumably an administrator of the test, tells her that she cannot use her math book to help her. In her job, Patient A. (who is white) regularly has to deal with people in bureaucratic roles that fit this racially-coded description. This is a form of the racist “DMV worker” caricature—black women as lazy and incompetent, occupying government jobs from which they cannot be fired, seemingly deriving some kind of satisfaction in just how unpleasant they can be. Incidentally, Patient A. has had to deal with endless bureaucratic complications in getting a correction/update to her driver’s license in the past year, which often leaves her at the mercy of particular DMV workers who often do not seem to understand the actual state laws/bureaucratic processes they are supposed to implement. In other words, this represents a sort of arbitrary or possibly illegitimate authority.

The test is difficult, and as she looks at one of the problems she sees that the numbers and letters are gibberish. However, this gibberish of symbols is assembled in such a way that it resembles a diagram of Sternberg’s triangular theory of love. I have attached an image of this triangle. In the dream, the math test is not a math test at all, but rather a puzzle of love. Patient A. reports not being able to trust her boyfriend, who in the past had lied to her about his previous relationships. Not being able to trust her boyfriend undermines the “Intimacy” aspect of the triangle of love, which throws a wrench into the schematic of the whole desiring machine. In the dream, the test essentially asks her to mathematically solve the issues of her relationship. Of course, she lacks access to “the book,” which would help her decode the meaning of the gibberish on the page. Thus, she is powerless to figure it out. Since Patient A. loves her boyfriend and tends to want to avoid confrontation with most people, especially him, it makes sense that her dream would resist and censor the latent content message of her relationship anxiety by presenting it in the manifest form of her math test.

what-is-sternbergs-triangular-theory-of-love-1.jpg
Sternberg’s Triangle

The testing ends, and Dr. Nowzaradan from the show “My 600 lb Life,” now her math professor, says “I hope you all used your math books.” Patient A. worries that she won’t do as well on the test since she was told she couldn’t use her book. In the previous days before the dream, Patient A. had been watching the reality show “My 600lb Life”, which, incidentally, my wife and I are also familiar with. For those that aren’t familiar, Dr. Nowzaradan has a very important role in the show. He performs the gastric bypass surgery for the patients, but perhaps more importantly, he is the one that reviews the patients’ monthly weight-loss targets and whether or not they are met. In doing this, he often scolds the patients who are unable to control their own eating habits. This part of the show is a recurring “moment of truth”—the patients often pathologically lie to themselves about their eating addictions, but they are unable to trick the doctor (who to them is seemingly all-powerful) when it is revealed on the blind scale of Justice just how little weight they have been losing. The Doctor then asserts that the responsibility for the weight loss is entirely on the patients’ own choices. For the (presumably-not-600lb) viewer of the show, Dr. Nowzaradan scolding his patients induces a feeling of “perverse” satisfaction.

(It’s also important to note the obvious truth that weight-loss and body image issues have a different meaning for women than they do for men. Women, even at a healthy weight, tend to insist that they are “fat” and need to lose weight. This is not at all the same for men that aren’t overweight, who would perhaps tend toward the opposite, and insist that they need to “bulk up.” We do not need to dwell on this point much more, other than pointing out that Patient A. is not an exception to this general tendency of women to pay attention to their body image in such a way.)

Rather than scolding the Patient A., the Doctor assumes a more friendly role. In the dream, the Doctor tells the patient what his patients on the TV show would always like to hear themselves: that their failure to achieve their goal was not their fault, but rather the fault of the test itself. That she did not use her book in taking the test, when in fact she was allowed to all along, means that she is not responsible for whatever her score is. Her worry about not doing as well on the test conceals her wish that she be held not responsible for it.

When we put these pieces together it makes sense to interpret this dream as a fulfillment of Patient A.’s wish that she not be held responsible for the problems in her relationship with her boyfriend.

The Thing that the Incels Desire

The incel—the pathological incel—is mysteriously drawn to repeat the trauma of his own suffering. The incel is drawn back to the scene of what we will call The Thing. The Thing is the object of the incel’s desire. The Thing involves the physical act of sex and it involves what we would call “love”—but it cannot be reduced to either. The Thing is beyond signification, but it is Real. It is empty, but it is filled by the incel subject’s fantasy. The Thing is something that, if the incel were to have, would make him cease to be an incel. For the pathological incel, The Thing contains a traumatic reminder of his own misery. The Thing taunts the incel by showing him what he does not have, and it suggests (wrongly) that others have The Thing that he does not. The Thing is presented as good, but the idea of The Thing being accessed is experienced as suffering and evil. The excessive goodness of accessing The Thing in its immediacy is intolerable, impossible. The Thing is the object of the incel’s intense desire and it also brings him face-to-face with the horrific truth of himself. The Thing, in its deepest core, also promises to contain the most sinister riddle: the code to what exactly it is that women desire.

This description of “The Thing” as it relates to the incel’s pathology may seem abstract, obscure, or a needless indulgence in Lacanian terms, but to see its relevance we may look no further than Elliot Rodger’s “My Twisted World” manifesto. For Elliot Rodger, the archetypal incel, The Thing is heavenly. Whenever he is talking about the “heavenly” things, he is talking about The Thing. (Keep in mind what one must cross to reach “heaven.”) Here is the scene of The Thing:

After I left the campus I drove around downtown Santa Barbara to explore new areas. I went up and down State Street, the main common area of the city where everyone frequents. Countless restaurants and shops lined a magnificently designed street with wide walkways. It was absolutely beautiful… a true paradise, for those who were thriving there. I can only imagine how heavenly it would be to walk with a beautiful girlfriend down that street. My life would be complete if I get to do that. It would be the epitome of gratifying perfection. To have a beautiful blonde girl by my side, to feel her hand clasping my own as we walk everywhere together, to feel her love! That is what I want in life. Instead, I had to watch other men experience my idea of heaven while I rot in bitter loneliness.

For Elliot Rodger, fantasy surrounding The Thing is particularly symbolized by blonde girls, but the Thing itself isn’t simply the blonde girl, or simply sex-qua-fucking with this girl. To say that The Thing is “to feel her hand clasping my own as we walk everywhere together, to feel her love!” comes closer because it includes the desire of the other, but that does not encapsulate it adequately either. The Thing is situated in this scene, this street in downtown Santa Barbara, “the common area of the city where everyone frequents”. Rodger describes The Thing psychogeographically, as if it is embedded in the terrain, which comes in his account before the nameless, anonymous blonde. Dante’s Paradiso and his beach-blonde Beatrice. The Thing is tied to a place, signified by a place—and a public, social one at that. It is where one is recognized not just by a single other, a partner, but by all others, the Big Other of society. But the thing also isn’t simply the place in its inert, materialistic immediacy. It is the place as saturated with the fantasy, it is the place as it is with the presence of the blonde girl, the place as it is with all the people there, the place as it is with everyone belonging and playing their part: it is the Scene.

We must also pay close attention to the ending of this paragraph, which is a perfect representation of the horrific aspect of the Thing, the Terror, as it relates to its total experience. This Terror comes out of The Thing, as its consequence, an afterthought, a closing punctuation. The Terror follows The Thing like its shadow. It reveals itself as the hole, the emptiness that characterizes the real truth of The Thing. It comes after the Scene, like the ending of Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain,” when the Alchemist, Jodorowsky, the author himself, reveals that the whole thing was a fiction all along, and smiles a geeked up smile with shroomywide pupils—he is seeing something that you aren’t, or rather he’s seeing the absence of The Thing you see, which is to say he sees nothing.

The excess of heavenly goodness in The Thing means that it becomes experienced as suffering and evil. It is simply intolerable, unacceptable. Approaching the goodness of The Thing is a violation of morality, an injustice:

Sex is by far the most evil concept in existence. The fact that life itself exists through sex just proves that life is flawed. The act of sex gives human beings a tremendous amount of pleasure. Pleasure they don’t deserve. No one deserves to experience so much pleasure, especially since some humans get to experience it while some are denied it. When a man has sex with a beautiful woman, he probably feels like he is in heaven. But the world is not supposed to be heaven. For some humans to actually be able to feel such heights of heavenly pleasure is selfish and hedonistic.

We know, of course, that Rodger is not simply talking about “sex,” but The Thing. And anyway, if The Thing is so evil—and not just evil but “the most evil concept in existence”—inducing such suffering and misery, self-evident proof of the fundamental flaw of life itself … why does he always return to it? Here is another scene in which the horrific reality of The Thing reveals itself to Rodger, exciting him so intensely that he acts out:

Another incident happened on the following day, near the same location. I went to the Starbucks at the Camino Real Marketplace by myself, like I usually did every morning. I ordered my coffee and sat down on one of their chairs to relax. A few moments later, when I looked up from my drink, I saw a young couple standing in line. The two of them were kissing passionately. The boy looked like an obnoxious punk; he was tall and wore baggy pants. The girl was a pretty blonde! They looked like they were in the throes of passionate sexual attraction to each other, rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone. I was absolutely livid with envious hatred. When they left the store I followed them to their car and splashed my coffee all over them. The boy yelled at me and I quickly ran away in fear. I was panicking as I got into my car and drove off, shaking with rage-fueled excitement. I drove all the way to the Vans at the Fairview Plaza and spent three hours in my car trying to contain my tumultuous emotions. I had never struck back at my enemies before, and I felt a small sense of spiteful gratification for doing so. I hated them so much. Even though I splashed them with my coffee, he was still the winner. He was going home to have passionate heavenly sex with his beautiful girlfriend, and I was going home to my lonely room to sleep alone in my lonely bed. I had never felt so miserable and mistreated in my life. I cursed the world for condemning me to such suffering.

Rodger experiences The Thing traumatically. His account is unambiguously unpleasant for him; it does not seem fun. And yet he comes here to order his coffee, like he does “every morning.” Presumably he always sees people like this, not just here and but the many other places where all the “beautiful blonde girls” congregate with their “obnoxious punk” boyfriends. He does not avoid this. Not only is he not a complete recluse but he instinctively seeks out places he can assume the tortured voyeuristic gaze. For some reason, he is compelled to always come back to The Scene of The Thing, to experience the trauma of The Thing over again, this hellish, humiliating, hours-long shock-experience that affects him both emotionally and physiologically—an instinctive compulsion that comes into contrast with the pleasure principle.

So far I have described the concept of The Thing in the Elliot Rodger case and tied it to the repetition compulsion. We also see this dynamic in play in a virtual, discursive space like the r/Braincels subreddit, as well as other “Manosphere” sites, particularly those with comment/message boards, in which the experience of The Thing is fragmented and distributed across a collective.

In incel/manosphere internet spaces (scenes) like r/Braincels, most posts have certain characteristics:

  1. Anecdotes of women’s sexual activities that serves as a reminder of the unjust distribution of sexual pleasure in the world. Women are gushing with eroticism, it is flowing out of them constantly. Stories about women that are out there in the world, being sluts and having some sort of heavenly utopian fulfilled sexual life, a utopian life that is real but always absent to the incel subject, always behind closed doors, the pearly gates. Women are just out there, all of them sluts, getting their heavenly holes filled, and someone is enjoying it, but it sure ain’t you!
  2. Anecdotes of women who cheat on or want to cheat on their weak “cuck” boyfriends or husbands. Women say one thing but mean another. They are liars and hypocrites, and no matter what they say (such as when they say they like guys with a “nice personality”), their small brains are programmed in such a way that their insatiable sexual appetites override their limited capacities of reason—they will cheat on you the first chance they get once they meet a stronger, taller, more attractive, “bad-boy” male. One recurring thing is links to posts from the “relationship advice” subreddit, which often includes stories of various “cuck” men in relationships with women who are cheating on their boyfriends or husbands.
  3. Anecdotes of stronger, more attractive “Chad” men and how they are desired by women, and satisfy that desire. The Chad will always melt the walls that these “sluts” put up to keep the incels out. Whereas incels and cucks, who together are the majority of men, hopelessly throw themselves at the feet of women, the Chad enjoys women throwing themselves at him. One recurring type of post includes pictures of Tinder conversations between women and a (presumably fake) attractive/buff/male-model Chads—the Chad goes straight to the point and says he wants to fuck them, or otherwise treats them aggressively and disrespectfully, such as opening a Tinder conversation by saying he wants to rape them, and the women are shown to still be interested, flattered, confessing to deep-down rape fantasies, giving out their numbers, and so on, presumably leading to, of course, something heavenly.
  4. Analysis of the particular ways in which the incel subjects, the forum posters themselves, are deficient, discussions and comparisons of all the qualities that they have that characterize their lack, and how that means they will never be able to possess The Thing. This entails a special attention to the eroticism of various body parts: bone structure, jawlines, height, shoulders, penis size, and so on. It also can include racial comparisons. For example, the black incel laments that he is not a “Tyrone” (the name for “black Chad”). However, the sometimes-charming intersectionality does not extend to women: the existence of “femcels” (female incels) is denied. This policing of the borderlands of the conceptual incel includes such things as a quasi-scientific analysis of why it is impossible for femcels to exist to support the claim that even the ugliest women still have men chase after them (and so, by calling themselves “femcels” these women are stealing an identity that they don’t deserve…).
  5. Presentation of the horrific, unspeakable, “black-pilled” truth—the Terror. This is the real truth, the truth that evades being articulated in polite language. It is both heavenly and hellish. This is a terrible truth that you know, but you perhaps didn’t even know that you knew—what Rumsfeld would call an “unknown known.”
welcometoreality
“Welcome to Reality.”

Is this supposed to turn us off from sex? To dissuade us from trying? To show us our hopelessness and inadequacy and turn us into ascetics so we live alone in the desert like the early church fathers? Or is the feeling that one gets from this scrolling-feed kaleidoscope of psychotic, deranged, and fragmented texts (looking beyond the usual political disagreement with the sexism and all), not a kind of strange arousal? In a sense, I get the impression that I almost wish the world was like this—oozing with desire out of every disgusting pore, needlessly and effortlessly cruel, the feeling Bataille must’ve gotten when he thought about his ex-wife fucking Lacan, just dangerously and preposterously horny. Who are these mythical people who are actually having this heavenly sex, this sex in which the participants are in total agreement with the fantasy of the other, and nothing is kept secret, in which all pleasure is brought to the conscious light of day and retains its naughty allure? I would like to meet them. This fantasy world is a space that, like the Scene of Elliot Rodger’s Santa Barbara, is completely saturated in erotic energy, even if that erotic energy is always accompanied by the terrible, traumatic, humiliating realization, the sadistic morality that comes after the feast, that The Thing is entirely inaccessible. Though the images themselves are not (usually) pornographic—and often the incels/manosphere discourse tends to be explicitly anti-porn—the texts sure are, at least in the way that romance novels targeted at old ladies are. When the “arousing” aspect of this experience is considered, the formation of a community/subculture that has its own rules, language, and hierarchy seems like a logical consequence of this collective-desiring-creature and less like a weird, freak aberration that somehow exists in the “post-patriarchal” society we like to think we live in. And so we can maybe come closer to making sense of why these people keep coming back, coming back to The Scene of The Thing, posting, posting and reading these infuriating reminders of their own impotence, grasping on to their own psychic condition, grasping as if it were the last thing in this “twisted” world they had to call their own.

Letter from a French Incel, PhD: Response to “The Aeneid for Incels”

The following is an email I received in response to my Jacobite article “The Aeneid for Incels” back in May.

 

Hello Mike,

I have just read your “Aeneid for Incels” piece.

Although it seemed all too “mild-mannered” to me, i.e. you need to spread a lot of academic drivel to arrive at a key point and do barely tell it right, but by the same way you make it palatable to bourgeois bohemian types who fancy themselves to have a higher human value, it was also one of the most interesting reads I’ve seen on the infamous Elliot Rodger affair.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am French, born and raised in Paris, but have fled this city—where a disenfranchised middle-class son cannot have roots unless he sucks the right dicks—to get a try elsewhere. This was a good choice. I managed to pull from a master degree in philosophy to a PhD program. Now I can write my name with the famous three digits put after. However, although this allowed me to develop my intellectual abilities and master many social cues, hard analytical paradigms and rhetorical tropes, this is not the most interesting part.

No: the most interesting part is that I have been an incel. My first fuck happened just before I turned 20. Although I was a rather athletic guy who knew the secret entrances to the much-fantasized unofficial Paris Catacombs, my notch was a 4/10 (and I’m gentle) fat black girl whom I didn’t even intend to fuck before we became inebriated. She later resented me (I think I was a honest 6/10) for having allegedly “abused” her in her inebriated state, although both of us were inebriated. Later on, I paid 150 € to fuck an escort who was tired from “work” and merely waited for the hour to pass. This was cruel. She was below average, too, yet she had a value, and a high one, on the sexual marketplace. I, on the other hand, was worth nothing on the market, so much nothing that I had to pay a pricey sum to get a non–seduction-processed notch, and even then, I was just another customer to someone who would barely remember each customer at the end of her day.

Only much later, in the course of my doctoral studies, did I meet a girl who actually desired me. This led me to start treading down the PUA way. It was difficult, yet less than I had imagined it to be. Then I stopped being an incel, I almost went overnight from “shitty worthless little white guy” to “fucking shitlord hooking with and fucking 3 girls at the same time.”

Now one of these girls became the only one. We have married, and she’s pregnant with our second child. Doesn’t look very much “incel,” does it? Yet I was. And I know for sure I will never throw off this aspect of my past, just as no sane individual accepts having part of his dearest, closest-to-the-chest personal history mocked, stigmatized, spat upon and treated as if below the mud.

I also wrote for several Alt-Right websites, then for Return of Kings. (It is fun that you mentioned ROK on the article, as no one on ROK ever approved of Elliot Rodger or the “PUA hate” movement. Why is Elliot Rodger supposed to “represent” ROK better than thousands of expatriated men who strive to pick up girls? Just a nasty Leftist caricature. If, say, ten per cent Muslims kill but 0.001% so-called masculinists do, they will defend Islam against “intolerance” yet make unfair generalizations and show the worst intolerance towards people who never claimed to be “masculinists.” But I’m straying from the point.)

Let me get it straight. You reached the heart of the issue when you wrote: “It’s not just about literal sexual intercourse, it’s about sexuality in its deepest, most fundamental sense. It’s about Eros.”

Of course it is. And of course is there something social here. But what is it? The incel issue is exactly the same as the prole, or proletarized issue. You were born a middle class white guy, and you grow up to find out that no one wants you. Recruiters do not think of you as “interesting” even when you accept getting paid like shit. Girls do not think of you as a potential sexual partner, you’re a forever orbiting beta male at best. You’re supposed to have experience to work, but you never had experience, so how do you start? Likewise, it seems like you are supposed to be already sought after to get sought after—but you’re not.

The crux of the point is, you’re disenfranchised. You are a legitimate son, a rightful heir, employee, partner, citizen—and you are not acknowledged as such. To the contrary, you are at best ignored, at worst supposed guilty of whatever “oppression” or “ism” or “phobia” the almighty Left will throw at you. You are of no value, no one wants you. To be “of value” it seems like you have to play an inauthentic role, accept shit tests and humiliations, be treated like dirt and get scraps. You are socially dis-integrated. Isn’t that what being an incel is on the seduction/sexual plane? An incel is just like someone without a job. (Incidentally, I got a job. I even have so much work it becomes stressful at times. But, once again, I refuse to despise and throw mud at what I was, at what many deserving, legitimate men are.)

Being socially disintegrated is even more cruel when criminals, liars, thieves, and invaders receive positive attention and you don’t. And then, when you finally succeed, you are expect to bury your origins and pretend you are part of the Cathedral’s chosen as if the other ones (you know, the ones just like you were before) were nothing, or monsters.

Even my own father, who tries hard to be a good bourgeois bohemian (and, of course, a Leftist), does not have a clue when I try to tell him that Alt-Righters are courageous, fair, honest, decent, hard-working, not to say virtuous or meritorious. He doesn’t even understand that people who never get acknowledged unless they are inauthentic crave recognition for their true deeds. And such is Eros—sexual recognition.

There is a French writer called Yann Moix who said that, when he became famous and acclaimed from his writings, he saw women’s way of looking at him change. When he was “nothing,” he was nothing in their eyes. Certainly not someone they would open their legs to, much less desire. Then, when he gained fame, he saw these women notice how cool and interesting and intelligent and spiritual he was. He then pretended to seduce some of them, just to break their hearts later. Revenge is best served cold. He also fucked some of them to “next” them, that is, replace them right after.

The top tastes even better when you come from the bottom!

What matters is not to fuck. What matters is being desired. Being desired is being integrated into sociability. This is what matters. Or, at least, having these girls do their best to fake desire, which means that you matter, that you’re integrated—and who knows, perhaps their faking will lead to a spark of true desire.

Abolish the sexual oligarchy and the deregulated marketplace. Perform some justice. Kick the invaders out and punish those who abused from their position, whether they are douchey chads, politicians, or privileged boomers. Then, perhaps you will solve the incel issue.

Things are not that simple because the bourgeois bohemian class and world became autistic and showed itself unable to listen and talk on an equal foot with non-liberals. They need to make elaborate, and ultimately worthless, theories on why people elected Trump. Why don’t they simply ask said people? Perhaps because they can’t even stand the answers. They can’t consider these without putting a distorting filter, accusing, slandering, caricaturing and reproducing a heap of double standards and intelligent-yet-idiotic norms such as forbidding their own to go to the point without academic drivel.

BTW, if a bit of “let’s deconstruct liberals” seems interesting to you, I can provide some ROK pieces, most of these written from my desk.

IMO people such as Jack Donovan, Paul Waggener or even many ROK writers are much closer to reality than bourgeois bohemian autists who need to put a filter between said reality and their closeted world. Want the heart of the problem? They’ve stolen the West, and they want every other Westerner to make it to bobolandia or disappear in silence as his name is covered with filth. Then they do not understand. LOL. Incels are no more absurd than the Dark Knight‘s League of Shadows. But here am I wandering off the point again.

Please, keep up with the good work. Thank you for having read my non-native, although highly alt-polished English, up to this point. I just wish Jacobite Mag leaned closer to Social Matter.

Take care,

[Redacted]

(and yes, I’m a white man named [Redacted], if this needed to be mentioned)

Thursday, May 24, 2018

I’m terrified of writing and the ancients knew why

I’m not necessarily the biggest Eve Peyser fan but I read her latest piece for the Vice “Power and Privilege Issue” and actually related to it a lot. At still under 2,000 followers I don’t come close to approaching the public attention she gets, and I haven’t been published across all the magazines in the Condé Nast portfolio—but the basic mechanisms defining the “contemporary writer” are all the same. Dissemination of a personal authorial brand through social media, a digital platform for the text, knowing how to make people mad in just the right way to increase followers, and a looming, horrifying death-paranoia fundamentally bound to writing itself.

When I think of writing-in-itself, I always think about the myth of Arachne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Arachne was a shepherd’s daughter who boasted that her skill in weaving was greater than that of Minerva. Of course, in the world of myth such a contradiction between the mortals and the gods demands an immediate resolution, so Minerva and Arachne agree to a weaving contest. Minerva weaves a beautiful image that depicts the gods in all their splendor and majesty, whereas Arachne weaves a savage, iconoclastic depiction of the multitudinous deceptions and crimes of the gods—and wins. But this victory is short lasted, as Minerva transforms Arachne into a spider, weaving her webs forever.

The weaver metaphor is particularly apt because it makes material and substantial the tools that the writer uses. The text is actually raw matter, which the writer “weaves” together in an elaborate, systematic process. The text is not just told, it is shown. The image is concrete. It is not abstract, but actual, present.

Arachne depicts the gods as they really are, which is to say, behind their endless masks. This is the unspeakable, forbidden true form: the gods come to us not as refined humans but as ferociously horny beasts! Their truth is that they are always in flux, transforming, becoming something else in the world. Minerva’s depiction is one in which “the gods all look like their own images”—“how regal Jove seems!” In other words, the view of superficial appearance, of PR clichés, of the banal and uncritical acceptance of the surface, of gloss and dross. Arachne is the better writer because she is the penetrating critic, the philosopher. This is her hubris: that she takes it upon herself to show the gods their own truth. And while Arachne’s text depicts the truth of flux, of eternal becoming, it is itself, once complete, static and dead.

And with the world wide web are we not all like Arachne, helpless spiders “mercifully” hanging from our own threads of our ever-growing texts? The webs we weave are the artifacts of our demise—each is evidence of our transgressions against the gods, the unwoke and the all-too-woke, the forbidden knowledge. We are not allowed to die, or to be forgotten, but we live through a first death from writing and are denied a second. Cursed with immortality we wander about the banks of the river Thames by Rotherhithe, pitying ourselves, grasping at Christlike innocence…

This is why I relate to the Peyser piece. I am horrified of writing, of attention, of the web of text I’m hanging from right now, growing. At first I was flattered but now I’m horrified by all the haters who incessantly send the strangest threats in weird digital whispers—there is mythic truth in being called a “bugman”—they’re the real scholars, accumulating and categorizing an archive of utterances, hideous and unpoetic, like lawyers. And yet I’ll keep doing that shit, as the ancient wisdom goes, there’s no point in trying to trick fate.

The Sublime Justin of Ideology

Last week I wrote a blog post criticizing Justin Murphy for advancing an intellectual project that gives platforms for various petit fascist tendencies under a cheap veneer of academic reason and sobriety. My criticism of Murphy is not that he engages with dangerous subjects from an outsider perspective—after all, I’ve written for Jacobite, which has the explicit goal of trying to corner that market—but that he uses a sort of mobile network of meaningless academic-philosophical signifiers to obscure what is, at the essence, advancing an online brand of disingenuously latching onto and shielding far right apologia.

I wrote the piece, which says that he must be “cancelled”—intended not in the sense that I want him fired from his job and ostracized from society, but that I want to start a sort of public discussion in which the contradictions of his “philosophy” are brought out into the open and resolved in a way that, hopefully, advances to some kind of higher understanding of the role of “public intellectuals” (if we can call ourselves that) and the relationship of responsible thinkers with the fringes of public discourse. From this, ideally, we attain a more necessarily adequate understanding of what the contemporary public system of opinions actually is, which has obvious current political urgency, and so on and so on.

But in any case, it seems Justin himself wants to be fired from teaching at Southampton. All the better if it’s over something stupid and insignificant, something that makes it look like he’s the common man speaking truth to power and the petty overreaction of the triggered SJWs—like picking a fight on twitter over his right to use the word “retard” online and doubling down on it when challenged by students at his university.

Challenging the PC-prohibition on saying “retard”—it appears apolitical enough, leftists and rightists alike often use the term casually, whether or not they implicitly accept understanding it as something problematic. It’s not like Justin is being challenged for the ostensibly political issues, such as sexual abuse transgressions, or voicing earnest support for Trump (He’s careful to avoid those: “I didn’t vote for Trump and I’m still no fan”). But, like the Iraq War, something being “bipartisan” is hardly a testament to it being “apolitical” (as if that’s even possible). If anything, it’s a testament to the depth of its ideological saturation.

The apolitical ideological fantasy is exactly what shields the underlying reactionary tendencies from being approached and challenged. Here, the fantasy is represented by the subject—the imaginary regular guy, implicitly white and male (but if, and when, pressed it could go other ways…), neither Democrat nor Republican, naïve and innocent, a complete tabula rasa—that is besieged by the Other, who isn’t like us, doesn’t talk like us, the grotesque and excessive SJW, who imposes a tyrannical morality of resentment and suffering over the very essence of language. This ideological fantasy is what shields the subject—Justin himself, as well as potentially all of us as spectators—from the unfathomable Real, the impenetrable, excessive, horrific desire of the Other…

Anyway, it should be no surprise that pushing this thoughtcrime transgression got him 30 days paid vacation leave from the university, which would likely otherwise not want to bother with working out these administrative procedures. No matter, according to this blog post, aptly titled “What am I doing?” in which he defends his apparent desire to leave academia for a new career as an Intellectual Dark Web social media personality. He goes off on a fascinating tangent recounting his family history:

Now that I’ve mentioned it, my family looms large in what I’m doing now. The bastard brat of an Irish-American roofer, I was never supposed to enter the official cosmopolitan intelligentsia — and when you sneak into a place, it looks very different than it does to those who are supposed to be there. I’m only here because I learned early how to hack social firewalls and I made up for my modest IQ with extra piss and vinegar (two things I did inherit amply). My dad and brother both have what the DSM calls Oppositional Defiance Disorder; I’m pretty sure I’m on that spectrum too, but I was blessed with enough self-control to sublimate my rebelliousness into a patient, longer game. Through intellectual work I could eventually prove that all those institutional authority figures were wrong, so I would do that instead of acting out and getting punished. My dad never finished high school, running away to hitchhike and eventually join the Marines. My mom, also Irish-American, also had no education and little earning power, but that didn’t stop them from having four kids. Two of my siblings are recovering heroin addicts.

That’s who I am, I am these people — and I’m quite tired of acting like I’m exactly the same as every other rootless hyper-educated citizen of the world. The typical cosmopolitan professor today — if she was giving my mother personal advice in 1986 — would have advised my parents to abort me. She would be disgusted by the latent racism and sexism she would have found embedded unconsciously in their vernacular. If my parents were “smart,” they probably would have divorced each other at some point, in search of greener pastures. But they didn’t abort me, and they spoke how they spoke, and they didn’t break the family, all for reasons I have been too educated to understand. Until lately. The last time I visited my family was in the run-up to the US Presidential election. My grandmother, a former teacher who is educated and fiercely intelligent (and disagreeable), told me she was going to vote for Trump. I articulated my reasons for why that upset me, and she looked me in the eyes like she never had before, with a coldness unlike her, and she said, “I do not care what anybody thinks.” I was horrified and upset at the time, but this was one of my best friends growing up, and I never, ever would have become a successful academic without her. I didn’t vote for Trump and I’m still no fan, but her words on that day have been echoing in my head like crazy since then. I may have recalled these words every single day since then. All of my own traits and accomplishments that I like and value the most about myself, I got from my family. They have backbones far stronger than most people I’ve met in my extensive travels among the international intellectual class. I haven’t yet made sense of all this, but sometimes life forces you to make broad wagers, on ill-defined questions you don’t fully understand. I needed to give you all of this background, but in conclusion, all I can really say is that I have already invested far too much into academic respectability, and not enough into honoring my family. And I’ve never been good at half measures, so now I’m going to see what happens if I bet the farm on “I do not care what anybody thinks.”

There’s a lot going on here. This appears to be divulging a ton of personal information, and therefore feels intuitively to be in bad taste to take a critical approach to it as I am doing. But this is not divulged with confidentiality in a therapy session, nor is it in a diary—rather, it is a public blog in a pinned tweet on his public twitter profile with thousands of followers. With this in mind, I think it’s fair to talk about this as I have talked about other aspects of the public “Justin Murphy” persona, and as such call this what it is: symptom in the form of a torrential sentimental vortex of symbolic-ideological clichés. This passage is presented in the context of a defense for being called out and professionally scolded for a (unprofessional) social media breakdown, and with that in mind the symbolic components should appear far more striking and excessive. The working-class Irish ethnic heritage; the status as bastard son; the military family background; the sense of grit and authenticity, opposed to the effete world of “rootless” (!) intellectuals; the lingering haunting possibility of abortion, the original sin; heroin addiction; and the sudden, unrequested assertion that it’s “not really about Trump,” an obvious red flag—it’s not about Trump, it’s not about Jordan Peterson, it’s not about my Father!

(That was the code word, I’ll wrap this up for today.)

The Massive House

Like Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, Sam Kriss tells me he is done with politics. He welcomes me into his massive house, where I see a group of preening aristocrats sipping tea iconoclastically. Anna Khachiyan is among them: “Mother!” I call out. She grimaces.

Sam is becoming an idiot. He is becoming Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, who “sees the world from the vantage-point of infinity.” Sub specie aeternitatis. Before, Sam was merely an interested vector of desire, a squirming, pulsating mode of substance, but now he has transcended that. His ideas are now perfect and adequate. He sees from the perspective of reason itself, the endless stupidity of politics reveals its grotesque naked form in a full kaleidoscopic spectrum of impossible colors. Reason tells him to become a poet. The Thames is his Ister. I admire the impressive view of the Canary Wharf skyline. I suspect that I am an idiot, too.

“Do you mind if I smoke in here?” I ask. I think about my mom back home, who would forbid it. “Yes, please don’t.” he says. Sam is now castrated, which is a good thing. The place looks like Barry Lyndon. I imagine Sam terrorizing girls at the Verso Loft with the inspired tyrannical madness of Stanley Kubrick. He bought them $10 Frida Kahl-adas, and they have the audacity not to drink them. That was then. We’re both tired of politics.

I notice that the aristocrats seem to be drinking something peculiar, something other than tea. “What are you drinking?” I ask. “Hemlock and sewage,” they reply, “ironically.” Stav from “CumTown” raises his pinky ever so daintily as the glass approaches his lips. “Damn neoliberalism,” I say, “depriving the working classes of this luxury.”

“As Marxists,” Sam begins, gesturing vaguely, the words slow and the “r” lazy and British. I hear it drawn and stretched out like it goes on forever: “Aaaassss Mmmmaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhkkkksssiiiissssttttssss…” I hear it from the psychedelic perspective of infinity. It’s the voice of Reason, the voice of God. It’s the implicit assumption that underlies all knowledge. “As Marxists, we…” We. Recognition. Class solidarity. He knows I’m here and for once I feel welcome in the massive house.

On the massive walls, in Barbara Kruger font: “TODAY, TO ABANDON THE WORLD OF POLITICS IS THE LAST, THE ONLY, AND THE TRUEST POLITICAL ACT.” I am astonished. Between the Earth and the Sky, between Gods and Mortals—Poetry. Could this be the most radical communism of all? Could Sam have completed what Benjamin promised in his unfinished Passagenwerk? Is this the foundation of the proposed materialist dialectic of intoxication, lost forever to Benjamin’s untimely death? Has Sam completed the system? What secrets are hidden within the walls of the massive house?

Sam is packing up his bags and everyone else is gone. He’s going to stay in the Côte d’Azur for several months at least, and has no idea when he’s coming back. He tells me he hates France now, though. Theory is over. They’re naming a street after that bastard Owen Jones in Paris’ 4th arrondisement. “Rue Owen Jones.” They’re naming it after him because he fucked the fathers of all his haters, just like he said he would on Twitter, and now Corbyn is the Prime Minister. Europe is saved. But Sam doesn’t care. Politics is over.

I am alone in Sam’s massive house. I realize that I am Prince Myshkin, that I am Nick Carraway at the end of “The Great Gatsby,” that I am Judge Schreber with sunrays coming out of his anus, that I am Stephen Dedalus, that I am the Starship Pequod in the “Moby Dick” anime. I understand with an idea most perfect, adequate, and eternal. They’re just like me. But most of all, I realize that I’m a big idiot.

Murphyist Microfascism

Justin Murphy is a fascist. He’s not a proper racist, or a proper misogynist, or a proper anti-Semite. He’s not a Nazi or even a bigot. He’s not a screeching demagogue or a violent terrorist or a crass, acidic ironist. But what he is, simply, is just a proper structural fascist. He’s polite and fluent in the manners of the academic Left, which makes him difficult to pin down. His fascism is chic-Deleuzian. Beneath his ostensibly post-political attachment to “nomadic,” “barbarian” online movements lies a younger, more nuanced iteration of the “Intellectual Dark Web” brand of politics. Petersonian, anti-SJW, postmodern, authoritarian performance art.

And thus, Justin should be cancelled. Not cancelled violently, spectacularly—not in the chaotic, unproductive “punch nazis” sense. His person is no immediate threat to public safety. He shouldn’t be #cancelled so much as his superpersonal essential characteristics cancelled, in the Hegelian meaning, aufgehoben—sublimated, negated in the process of reason coming into awareness of itself—cancelled in that the internal, underlying contradictions come to a resolution and produce some kind of higher knowledge. In other words, his art project should be cancelled, and it should be cancelled in the form of art.

Justin’s official, self-professed political ideology is apparently “Catholic libertarian communist.” But what is this, other than a fanciful collection of paradoxical terms? How are we supposed to interpret this? Is he any of these things? How much does he talk about Catholicism proper, libertarianism proper, communism proper? There is no intended value to these labels other than to negate each other and establish an implicit, tactical ironic distance from each of them. This heterodox political label is a stylistic allusion to the online communities whose energies he seeks to tap and a mask to conceal his true politics, whatever those true politics, if they exist, happen to be.

Justin calls himself a communist precisely to say that he is not a communist. It is always to separate him from “those” communists, the intolerant ones, the difficult ones, the joyless, preposterous, angry, absurd ones. He has transcended the stupidity of the campus Marx study group. He never is a communist in the present tense, but always was one. Someone who was something always has more to say than someone who never was in the first place. (Leftists wonder why the New York Times will always be more interested in the opinions of now-woke former Bush administration officials than theirs.)

Justin isn’t really a Marxist, not even in the sense that one could be a “Deconstructionist” Marxist. His suggestion for a feudal communism (“Make Communism Elite Again”), ridiculous and nonsensical on the surface, creates an obvious ironic distance that conceals the phantom kernel of seriousness—a proposal for technocratic authoritarianism, which is all that can possibly remain after feudalism and communism are totally abstracted from their historical conditions and put side-by-side. This distancing effect is also at play in the political-scientific analysis of Kekistan, which uses his academic discipline’s ordering methodology to come to a conclusion exonerating (rather than a more nuanced recognizing-and-overcoming) the iconography of Kekistan of its fascist-ironic—which is to say, contemporary fascist—overtones.

This technocratic-authoritarian kernel of seriousness attaches itself to the nomadic-barbarian tendencies of contemporary internet avant-gardes and hides among an amorphous, ever-shifting array of absurd virtual surfaces. It seeks to take advantage of the de-centered rhizomatic nature of these networks—it will seize anything and everything: feudal communism, Kekistan, Deleuzo-Petersonianism, and so on—using these non-contradictory names to stand in for the nameless absolute darkness at the unspeakable center: hierarchy, order, fascism.

Murphy is a true Petersonian at the core in that he deploys a series of symbolic-mythological masks to conceal what is fundamentally an unspectacular retreat into assumed hierarchies that undercuts radical opposition (in other words, the SJWs) to those hierarchies. For Murphy especially, these hierarchies are distinctly fascist, rather than simply conservative, in that rather than referring to an organic body of tradition, the political project unscrupulously attaches to any viral movement without any attention to internal logical coherence. There is no interiority to the signs it takes up, other than that unspeakable tyrannical center, which is not so much an interior as it is a void, an absence.

The question that remains is how to find an adequate ground for a critique of the ideology that saturates this authoritarian rhizomatic assemblage. How does one contradict a system of seemingly total non-contradiction?

Mike’s Spinoza Reading List

Original Spinoza content:

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theologico-Political Treatise, or the TTP)

The Ethics

People who are unfamiliar with Spinoza should read the TTP first, and then move on to the Ethics. If they start reading the Ethics and find its “geometric form” impenetrable, then they should move on to some of the secondary literature. Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics is the best for this. It situates Spinoza’s works in their sociopolitical context in the United Provinces during his lifetime and provides a clear, readable analysis of key concepts such as the unity of metaphysics and politics, political anthropology, and Spinoza’s theory of the state and democracy. In contrast to Balibar’s more “Marxist” introduction to Spinoza, Deleuze’s “Spinoza: Practical Philosophy” situates Spinoza as a predecessor of Nietzsche and gives an accessible overview to the core ideas of his influential reading of Spinoza. But beware: Deleuze has an agenda!

Tractatus Politicus (Political Treatise)

Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect)

Principia philosophiae cartesianae (Principles of Cartesian Philosophy)

The Political Treatise, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Principles of Cartesian Philosophy should be read after the TTP and Ethics, pretty much in whatever order that interests the reader. Their subjects should be pretty clear from their titles…

Core contemporary applications of Spinoza:

Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly.

Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza.

The first two are the most accessible, but all four are essential. Negri’s take on Spinoza is the most “savagely” radical communist one, but it is a very difficult text. Macherey’s book is a powerful response to Hegel’s influential misreading of Spinoza (a misreading I see repeated very often).

Overview of scholarship:

Duffy, Simon (2009), “Spinoza Today: The Current State of Spinoza Scholarship.” Intellectual History Review 19 (1): 111-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496970902722973

Wiep van Bunge (2012), Spinoza Past and Present: Essays on Spinoza, Spinozism, and Spinoza Scholarship.

Politics:

(In addition to the Balibar and Negri books.)

Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries.

Frederic Lordon, Willing Slaves Of Capital: Spinoza And Marx On Desire.

Ruddick, Susan (2010), “Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze.” Theory, Culture, Society 27 (4): 21-45.

Psychoanalytic:

Kiarina Kordela (2007), $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan.  Argues against the Deleuze/Israel/Negri/Hardt conception of Spinoza (the “Neo-Spinozists”) as well as Zizek’s lazy dismissal of Spinoza as the “philosopher of late capitalism.”

Jacques Lacan (1932), De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paranoid psychosis and its relationship to personality). This was Lacan’s doctoral thesis, very early work.

Spinoza’s life:

Theun de Vries, Spinoza in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1970). Only available in German.

Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life. (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Spinoza’s reception

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. 

Other assorted suggested reading:

Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. 1968 (Trans. 1990).

My “to read” list:

Jon Miller, Spinoza and the Stoics. 2015.

Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity. 2017.

Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology. 2014.