Your finger on my pulse, my finger on your lips

Every age gets the psychic plague it deserves. It is an ecstatic matter of inherent trangression. In the hook of a deadlock, the subversion of power invisibly changes into spiritual labour. Pleasure falls back upon a painful reality principle, and the sublimation of suffering turns into a superficial, depraved and disgusting desire.



The matter is historical.

In the late nineteenth century, the enclosed spaces of the European societies of discipline made themselves prey to pervasive claustrophobic anxiety. Foucault analyzed the conditions of this logic in his genealogical works, but recognized as well that it was already passing away. Today, we are privileged to inhabit speed-of-light societies of control, and the neurotic revolt runs accordingly in the other direction. In the mediamatic age of the instant, the sick have become inexorably those who reject orbital space and flee back towards the earth.



It is not a dream of pure isolation. It is rather a broken body which sings.

The heart gets caught in the mouth, teeth in the veins, the light in the lack, and the sad ghost of the age becomes a machine. It twists into inorganic life, connects to the hypermaternal breast, and starts rewriting a series of spectacular metaphysical wagers.

In the first place: distinguishing surface from depth. In the second place: sealing off depth and making it sacred. In the third place: sculpting out of sensitive skin an interrogative transcendent eye to watch over the depths. In the fourth place: transferring to the commanding discretion of this extimate vision the terrorist Kantian power of an indifferent God. In the fifth place: forgetting completely the entire process. It truly is a cool operation.

The subject is now surrounded by the symbolic utterly, reminiscing profoundly about his time in the womb. He kills the daylight, turns the radio on, and begins to turn tricks for his own private audience. It is quite a show; this hideous parodic strip-tease. To the greasy coloratura of Pierrot lunaire successive layers of lack are torn in turn from the flesh of an organized body until nothing is left but perfect evil clean bones.



What progeny is now to be predicted?

In his masterpiece Hamletmachine, Heiner Mueller presented a brilliant vision of the pure control subject at the terminal stage: “I am not Hamlet. I play no role anymore. My words have nothing more to say to me. My thoughts suck the blood of images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the scenery is being taken down. By people who are not interested in my drama, for people, to whom it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me either. I’m not playing along anymore.”

The narcissism contained in this statement like the birdman of paradise still hugging his knees. The patient has long-since died on the table, but the internal bomb still somehow remains undefused. The studio audience went home three hours earlier, to drink insouciant Chilean wine with nonchalant wives. In the absence of action, menacing laughter just grimly rings out regardless as, strung out in a BokLok somewhere, Hemingway carefully positions the shotgun inside his mouth...



It is really a ruse.

A subject truly serious about subjective destitution possesses neither the need to express that fact, nor the agency to record it. It amounts to an act undertaken coldly and silently, an act moreover which works by undertaking the subject, and not vice-versa. It is structurally impossible for someone to simply and willfully decide to commit subjective destitution; the logic is rather that subjective destitution itself moves to commit the subject, and moreover to an awful decision always-already made.