Transcription
Hello and good morning everybody. It's me Julian and welcome to another introduction to philosophy and theory live stream lecture. I'm currently also live on Discord. So hello to everybody there.
And I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, I want to talk about Bonnie Blue. I want to talk about Only Fans. I want to talk about the hype surrounding testosterone and masculinity and I want to do it in a way that not only practices the critique of ideology but perhaps also tacidly introduces you to two key psychoanalytic concepts. One of them being uh the notion of symbolic castration which is really important within Lanian psychoanalysis and secondly Maruza's idea of repressive desublimation and then I want to use both of those ideas symbolic castration being the process by which you feel like you've lost your desire your will to live as it were uh which can also be a good thing I'll explain later uh and repressive desublimation being the process by which you believe yourself to be free but nevertheless remain on a fundamental level repressed. I want to take those two concepts and talk about the Lanian theory of desire and and perhaps even use it to sort of give you a quote unquote hope core element at the end of the day. Okay.
But I want to begin by talking about because I really do think that often it's most fun to talk about the things we're not supposed to talk about. I want to talk about Bonnie Blue, the notorious, infamous adult content creator who quote unquote was so extreme that she was banned from the Only Fans platform. Before I begin, I want to say that to my minds, Only Fans is actually the perfect example of repressive desublimation. Which is to say, when you create adult content on Only Fans, it's very easy to feel like you're empowered, like you're taking agency of your own life. you don't want to be working as a wage slave anymore, you're an entrepreneur, etc. And and and whilst we shouldn't in any way, I think, suggest that sex work is demeaning necessarily, you know, like I don't think it's about punishing people for doing sex work. I think it is an element of repressive desublimation to suggest that your freedom taking control over your desire and your career uh uh takes place therefore by using your body and selling your body. to my mind is not a liberation from the capitalist incentive structure but perhaps further acceleration of it a more extreme version of it. If the Marxist adage was you know the capitalist is free only to the extent that he sells his labor the only fans adage is you are free but only to the extent that you are willing to sell pictures of your feet etc.
But I want to talk about Bonnie Blue because I think Bonnie Blue is actually a super interesting symptom of our contemporary ideological impass. I don't know if you're familiar with Bonnie Blue, notorious all over the internet. I think the most quote unquote infamous thing she did was to record a video in which she set a world record for sleeping with more than a thousand men in 24 hours which is also kind of a beautiful inversion of the male obsession with a number and how many part sexual partners you've had. It's like, you know, Oscar Wild already put a singer on this, I think, quite well when he said that like every man wants to be a woman's first and every woman wants to be a man's last, which of course is sort of a misogynistic notion that is perpetuated within contemporary patriarchal societies. The idea that the woman must be virginous and pure, uh, but that the man can be promiscuous as long as he settles with the proper woman, etc. And Bonnie Blue sort of does this consistently. Like a lot of her content, I think, finds a way of exploiting very specific desires and fears and the place in which they overlap. It's also very important to note that Bonnie Blue is not the sort of stereotypical liberal progressive feminist who says that her sex work is her emancipation. Instead, it's important to see her as like the other side of the coin when it comes to Andrew Tate. like she's an Nigel Farage voter, very right-wing, uh, features on Andrew Tate's podcast, etc. She's taken that kind of what you might call cynical fundamentalism, the sort of I'm going to follow the logic of our contemporary depraved attention economy and simply taken it to its most extreme logical conclusion.
In this sense, there's a certain similarity, I would even argue, between figures such as Bonnie Blue and um uh was it the the guy who ate meat something king? I've already forgotten his name. Do you remember >> the meat king? No. What was his name? Someone will remember in the comments. Um uh, you know, huge testosterone body, etc. and and but one of the things that I think is really interesting about Bonnie Blue is that the discourse on her content creation, her adult content creation focused very much on the way in which she would work with amateur male performers. Of course, if you want to film a scene with that many men, you can't hire a thousand men. And so basically she would put out a call so that random men could just sign up to partake in the filming of of this content which which was also part of the the uh channel 4 did a documentary about this which was very controversial in which they actually followed the production process of the shoot and and there's there's an infamous scene uh which full disclosure I have not seen but I very much enjoyed reading about on Wikipedia this morning in which one of the men's the participants mothers shows up during the stream to like extract him from making a huge mistake. But it also coincided, I think, with a certain cultural fear and bargaining awareness of the fact that quote unquote ordinary men, normal men around us, nevertheless appear to be quite willing to act as what you might call predators. That was the Pelico rape case, for example. the idea that there were all these men throughout French life who considered themselves ordinary nice guys. And of course, it goes back to the point that often it's precisely the nice guys who are the ones to be perhaps feared the most who nevertheless participated in these atrocious acts. Of course, there's a difference between participating in an adult film content shoot and and sort of the organized drugging and raping of an individual. But I think that culturally it points towards a certain discomfort, if you will, that we're currently having, an awakening to the idea that ordinary men everywhere partake in these types of fantasies in a way that I think can still be quite shocking. In fact, recently there was another scandal about, I think, a website that gave men information about how to like drug and take advantage of women, uh, including the possibility of of sexual assault and rape. and and so many people had gone to this website which was really very shocking that there's sort of an innate curiosity about this and of course there's different ways to interpret it. You know the sort of standard liberal progressive mantra is you know young men have been corrupted by the patriarchy etc. And then the right-wing version of it is men aren't real men anymore. They don't know about family values and how to be a good father. It's sort of two sides of the same coin. And I think the moral outrage that we have from the liberal side paired with the reactionary tendency on the right to suggest that everything went wrong when you know men were allowed to I don't know when when men stop wearing ties or something like this.
So to my mind, the reason I wanted to talk about Bonnie Blue this morning is isn't because she's necessarily very interesting like as as a as a person or as a phenomena. Um but but because to my mind it's symptomatic of a broader trend that is happening right now which which very much to my mind relates to the idea of symbolic castration and repressive desublimation. So, I'm going to give you a brief definition of both those terms, but then I'm also going to talk a little bit about the testosterone craze, what it says about contemporary masculinity, the ideology, uh, the ideological, if you will, impetus that lies that lies within the sort of push towards a certain normative notion of masculinity. Uh, and then I also briefly want to talk about two movies that I saw. One of them or one of them is a TV show. I saw back rooms and I saw Peacemaker. uh both of which have narratives about men escaping into libidinal spaces, alternate realities in which they experience a kind of wish fulfillment except there's sort of an inverse that takes place by which in back rooms it's a horror alternate place that comes to take on the you know illusion of a fantasy whereas in Peacemaker minor spoilers he goes into an alternate utopia that turns out to be a dystopian nightmare but I want to give you a brief definition of repressive def sublimation and symbolic castration.
So let's begin with symbolic castration. Loll's basic argument is this. Symbolic castration means that you don't know what you want. You don't know what you desire. You don't feel alive. You feel like on some level your desire has been taken from you. And here it's actually worth focusing on the word casttoration as such. Some of you longtime viewers may know that I use like an example like a that that works like this. Let's say that you have phantom limb syndrome. In phantom limb syndrome, it feels like like you've lost your arm or your leg, but it feels like it's still there. Like you can still feel that it's there even though it's gone. But with symbolic castration, the fallus, in this case, the literal organ, not the symbolic fallus, the literal penis is very much still there. but it feels like it has been rendered impotent. It feels like it is quote unquote going unused as it were. You can even see that there's sort of a narrative about this that takes place within certain uh discussions about pornography and and oninism which is the idea that you know it it makes you weak because you're not using it correctly. You're simply giving in to instant gratification instead of going out into the world and finding a sexual partner yourself. And in fact throughout the 19th century there was this very strongly ingrained belief this ideological belief that that homosexuality was a result of excessive masturbation that you know if you lacked the verility to God or to the world and were simply happy pleasuring yourself as it were you would essentially become a homosexual. This is also the ideological way in which homosexuality was therefore equated with a kind of lesser uh lesser masculinity. In other words, something to be feared, something unhealthy, something to be eradicated from within the culture. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
And so symbolic asteration is the feeling that you have the thing as it were, but you have no way of accessing its use or your desire. And if you broaden that into like a more general metaphor, if you will, you could say that symbolic castration is there for feeling like you don't have access to true desire or fulfillment. You are not the active agent of your desire. And and what happens and this is where links to repressive desublimation is that desublimation is the act by which you're supposed to become free. which is to say, you know, the classic notion of sublimation is that it's the transferral of desire onto another object. Uh I don't want to like get ahead of myself, but like here you can see also the repressive element that lies within certain fetishistic notions. It's the the the you know the well-known joke, pity the man who only wanting the foot must nevertheless make do with the woman. the transferal of desire, the fear of the woman, if you will, onto a fetishistic idealized object, which is a particular substance thereof. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
To make it a little bit more simple, repressive deslamation is the process by which you feel like you've become free. Like in a permissive society, you would say it's very easy to be happy. It's very easy to have your every wish fulfilled. It's like you can go on the internet and you can play almost every video game and you can watch every movie and you could watch if you you know if you watch pornography you could find every single different variation of any possible sexual fantasy or desire that you might have instantly gratified or fulfilled. It's like we live in a world in which if you can think it, it probably exists and if it doesn't AI will create it for you. And yet this quote unquote freedom, and this is actually where I think I agree, although for very different reasons with the sort of right-wing emphasis on, you know, uh people have lost agency and autonomy because they're just sitting on the couch, etc. and and but I'll I'll explain that later. this quote unquote freedom that you have within a permissive society to quote unquote do pretty much anything as long as you don't question, you know, the fundamental constraints that are nevertheless placed upon you within the imperatives of capitalism and and the need to sell your labor doesn't actually make you happy. It's it's a it's a pseudo happiness. It's something that actually I think can it's sort of a trap that it's very easy to fall into, right? It's like you don't have real struggle. You have simulated struggle. You could spend your whole day trying to accomplish kind of a pseudo task that makes you feel happy but also somehow somehow empty inside. I think we're facing like a massive crisis of desire in that sense where we don't really know what we want or why we should want it. And it's not even that, you know, what we're doing isn't real, you know, like I'm not going to blame somebody for playing video games or something like that. like you should do what you enjoy, but there's I think an underlying nagging sensation of am I enjoying myself in the right way? What is this really for? There's sort of a crisis of purpose and meaning that is very much attached to our desire and our inability on a certain fundamental level to feel like we are in control of our desire.
It's also why within Lanian psychoanalysis the tacet or if you will overt task of psychoanalysis is for you to understand the hysterical part of you know what do I desire and why do I desire it so that you can then take control over it. You can actually become the active agent of your desire which means to take responsibility for yourself. Like the Nietian adage that to be free is to become fully responsible for oneself finds a Leanian twist in the idea that to be fully free is to take responsibility for one's desires to say this is what I want. This is not what I've been told to want. You could even say like for me this is something I've talked about before is that you have to dream your own dreams. You can't make do with other people's dreams. secondhand notions of what a good life looks like or what success looks like I think have to be questioned and discarded so that you can answer the fundamentally more important question for yourself. What does a good life look like for me? And of course that can take a very that that looks very different for different people.
Okay. So repressive desublimation is the process by which you desublimate your desire. In other words, the process by which you become the free agent of your desire. However, it remains nevertheless repressive because you're partaking in a kind of pseudo permissiveness, selling yourself on only fans or seeing yourself as, you know, like Andrew Tate who thinks of him as a self as an entrepreneur, but he's also like hustling out other women allegedly. I think it's really important to note that within our contemporary permissive society, there is already a reaction to it, which to say the quote unquote MAGA movement already makes the you know pseudocritical argument that we live in a liberal permissive society in which meaning has been lost and that therefore to really be free we have to return to traditional family values, masculinity, strength, purpose, militarism, uh, etc. In other words, I think one of the things that the MAGA movement, if you can even call it that, does is that it stages a kind of return to communal meaning and symbolic identity. This is basically take on on symbolic castration and repressive desublimation, which is that we're faced with a crisis of symbolic identity, namely not just who am I, but who am I to others? and feeling like it's difficult to find a symbolic identity in which you can feel like yourself. It's also why within Marcus's critique, even such supposedly progressive notions as like LGBTQ plus, etc., which are about the emancipation of the individual, uh, uh, are nevertheless tacily a form of repressive desublimation because you've received kind of a freedom to be yourself as long as it functions within the central coordinates of the existing ideological system as we know it. It's sort of the same way in which corporations sell or used to celebrate because of course that moment passed the idea of you know um African-Americanowned businesses or femaleowned businesses etc. It's nevertheless bourgeoa ideology but it's wrapped within the sort of perception of emancipation and progressivism which for maruz would be a form of repressive desublimation. And what the MAGA movement does, I think, and did quite effectively is that it already pointed out the false nature of repressive desublimation. And it presented its own, if you will, pseudo revolution, which was a return to quote unquote authentic, you know, uh, uh, values of biologically determined necessities, etc.
Which brings me to my next point. the emphasis on testosterone, the sort of trend of like taking tea as it's known. Even the sort of like the the game that is played to determine whether celebrities are are natural natties or if they're use or if they're on the juice, which sort of to my mind is actually the inverse of how people used to misogynistically look at women and say like try to deduce whether or not their breasts were real. This fixation that we currently have on body optimization and the lengths to which people will go to quote unquote optimize themselves to conform to a specific mostly heteronormative ideal of aesthetic beauty masked as a form of repressive desublimation. In other words, I'm doing it for the status which means that I'm a realist who knows how to play the cynical game of social advancement. This to my mind is perhaps like one of the most symptomatic things you were helped and and and I want to briefly say I think it's actually quite important is that research shows increasingly like the re the scientific consensus is actually establishing that taking testosterone isn't nearly as dangerous as people thought it was. That the very emphasis on not prescribing it to men for a long time was perhaps also an overreaction. However, from a medical perspective, testosterone is not like a silver bullet. It's not a miracle cure. If if anything, you could say that testosterone is a drug of repressive desublimation. Instead of confronting the way in which you are, you know, uh maybe sad and depressed and anxious and overweight and feel like you have a lack of freedom and you don't know what to desire in in instead of addressing the sort of social structural ways in which we induce this in people by creating a world without safety nets, a world in which people are working multiple jobs or trying to get by. a dream that is sold to them that is about the sort of um you know increase of desire and pleasure or the capitalist ethical ethical maxim of it which is to say forgo your pleasures so as to enjoy the pleasure of accumulation. Once again the kayazmic maxim is the accumulation of pleasure compared to the pleasure of accumulation. All of this goes uncritiqued. Instead, we focus on this like one miracle cure, which is testosterone, which does in many cases give a lot of men a quote unquote will to live, renewed energy, sex drive. Like they want to partake in life again. They want to be a a father, a husband, you know, a brother, a friend. It it's being sold and touted as this miracle cure that is supposed to bring men back to life so that they can shake off the trappings, if you will, of the liberal permissive society and become real men again, which is another way of saying that they can take control of their desire. I think it's very important to note that testosterone has been presented as this miracle cure for what is fundamentally like a structural endemic societal impass. It's a form of repressive desublimation. Yes, it will give you access to a different way of partaking and participating in life most likely of not true for everyone but in many ways only if you nevertheless conform to a specific way of viewing life as such.
In fact, I think it's very important here that um to go back to my previous critique. There was a when when JD Vance went on Joe Rogan, JD Vance said um that you know liberal societies actually induce a drop in testosterone that liberalism coincides with reduced male vility. And he sort of presented it as like an aobaros argument like chicken and the egg which is when you have lower testosterone you become more progressive but also when you become more progressive you end up having lower testosterone etc. It's also why for example in another podcast uh RFK Jr. uh uh said that you know Donald Trump uh had had testosterone that was datike godlike that no one had ever recorded levels of testosterone as high as in Donald Trump etc. this amazing amount of ascusing. By the way, it's very interesting how men will like debase themselves and emasculate themselves to like please the perceived alpha so as to like, you know, gain curry favor with him. And it's very vulgar because in that clip, uh, RFK Jr. then immediately says to his interlocutor, "Trump is going to like that I said that." which is to say he sort of cynically partakes in this game of flattery, saying something he knows not to be true simply so as to serve himself, but he nevertheless tacidly remains somehow quote unquote in charge because he can admit publicly that he is simply doing it so as to play the game. That's the reification of this ideological cynicism in which you can submit to the master whilst nevertheless feeling like you are secretly the one who has bested him. Once again, repressive desublimation. I am free. I am so free that I can kiss your ass but secretly I am the one who is winning. And I think this is also why like certain authoritarian types like Trump actually enjoy this process by which the goons the stu the the people working for him have to debase themselves on his behalf whilst nevertheless feeling like they tastly benefit enough from it that they can continue to partake in doing so. It's a very delicate balance or ecosystem, if you will, of of of mutual debasement that takes place that also mirrors, of course, the way in which men amongst themselves will sort of try to sexually humiliate each other, accusing each other of homosexuality so as to sort of both bond and at the same time create this various forms of hierarchy between them. Anyway, I didn't mean to get off track too much about that.
My point was therefore this argument that JD Vance makes that you know to have lower testosterone makes you more liberal actually goes back to that 19th century fixation on the idea that to be quote unquote uh verily you know repressed to not be a verile man going out into the world is akin to homosexuality. that you become someone with liberal ideals and identity politics and and non-heteronormative desires because on some level you have failed to be sufficiently masculine or a man. Of course, the most extreme ex version of this takes place within Nazi ideology in which anything that does not conform to the promotion of masculine verility tied up with the idea of militaristic nationhood uh uh becomes unhealthy, something to be eradicated, sickness as a metaphor as it were in which homosexuality becomes sort of criminalized and of course sort of by but thereby also you know minorities become criminalized etc. I think it's actually quite important to note therefore that the emphasis on masculinity whilst presenting itself as this sort of harmless version of men becoming free and alive to the world and taking control of their desire nevertheless functions as a tacitly ideological if you will way of of of of re-entrrenchancing and consolidating essentially exploitative right-wing reactionary power mechanisms that therefore combine with a militaristic idea of the state like and it's sort of overt right you don't even have to like be very versed in psychoanalysis or philosophy to see that like when Pete Heget does his like bench pressing etc like with with the troops next to him the renaming of the department of the defense of the department of war this sort of like uh this this embrace of a kind of if you will out andout performative masculinity coincides with the kind of jingoistic politics that we see within the contemporary manga movement that all serve the continued grift and and and sort of exploitation of power of a very select few at the top.
So this is presented as a revolution for male desire and tastyly also for women, right? That women who have been misled into the to my I actually agree to some extent the the the sort of liberal progressive notion that to be a free autonomous woman is to be a corporate agent wearing suits and being in the room where it happens etc. The critique thereof, which is a which is a I think there is a genuine leftist critique of is sort of remodeled into this reactionary recasting of the family unit as the woman has to be at home taking care of the family in the kitchen and this is where she is at her best since it since it you know it the misogyn misogynistic notion that this corresponds with her biological you know affinities and that the man goes out into the world making both the sacrifice of selling his labor so as to provide for the woman whilst being a real man who can do the difficult jobs on which the world relies. Any criticism thereof is then immediately cast as some kind of like immoral uh uh weak sigma mentality. Uh and I think that's to my mind something that anyone here will recognize. I think it's sort of quite prevalent online today.
And and so I want to briefly go back to the idea of symbolic castration. Remember the idea that symbolic castration is the feeling like you have the thing but you lack your desire. You lack the way to partake in the world. Of course the the the the emphasis on masculinity revolves around the problem of symbolic castration. The fear of emasculation. The paradox of course as Lon already points out is that men partake in performative masculinity if you will not for the gaze of the woman but for other men. Men fundamentally fear emasculation and so they have to perform their masculinity to other men. This also creates a certain paradox which that women are precisely the quote unquote agents of emasculation which say women are the one who can quote unquote rob the man of his verility either by rejecting him by mocking him or simply refusing to accept his performance. This means that we end up with this weird almost aggressive stance towards women in which they have to be both idealized this these sacred pure feminine beings whilst nevertheless being feared and resented because they're the ones that both have to fulfill this impossible role of you know pure sexual identity if you will whilst nevertheless being the ones that know the truth if you will of the male onlogical insecurity which revolves around the question am I really a man.
And I'm going to repeat an example I've used many times before. I just think it's very apt from the British television comedy series Peep Show in which Mark, the protagonist, worries about his manhood, his vility. How can I be a bloke? As it were. And his friend says it's very easy. Every morning you look in the mirror and you say to yourself, you the man. Motivational slogan. But Mark gets it wrong in a beautifully hilarious way. In the morning he gets up, he stands in the mirror in front of the mirror quite nervous. He points in the mirror, looks at himself, and says, "You're a man. You're a man. You're a man." And here we have the perfect, to my mind, kernel of truth within performative masculinity, which the onlogical insecurity about what it means to be man as such. Am I sufficiently man? The man therefore has to prove to himself that he is a man by means of staging it for other men, which nevertheless therefore actually entrenches the problem. As Lon puts it, in the performative aspect of masculinity, man therefore becomes quote unquote feminine, subjecting himself to the male gaze. This means that the more it is performed and dressed up, the more it is actually hollow from within.
Now, for Lon, this this doesn't mean that there is a true authentic masculinity, some kernel of a secret of masculinity that some men have access to. Of course, this is the implicit idea within most of the content online about testosterone and masculinity, which is that, you know, I too have this fear and I've worked through it, etc. and so can you. I if anything, today's contemporary performative masculinity isn't about signaling that you are the alpha male, but it's actually about opening up to a certain fundamental vulnerability about what it means to be a man and how you can quote unquote overcome it, which usually leads to, you know, selling supplements and boosting testosterone, etc. But I think it's quite important to say that the quote unquote liberal emphasis on quote unquote female emancipation has actually been reified within the male influencer space almost in its inverse form which to say the contemporary alpha influencers aren't simply telling you that you have to be an alpha. It's actually part of the sort of confessional culture in which men are talking about male health as being in crisis and male mental health which if you look at it like when it comes to like fentinel overdoses when it comes to suicide rates etc again predominantly feature men. The crisis of desire therefore is one that is currently within the contemporary discourse very much focused on men. Perhaps the paradox is also that men precisely in their quote unquote freedom face the very problem of what to do with themselves. Whereas many women remain fundamentally unfree within the constraints that are placed upon them within the patriarchy. They don't even have the if you will luxury of overdosing on fentinyl. I realize I'm being sardonic here. It's a very it's a very serious issue. But my my main argument here is that the new ideological reification of the discourse on masculinity focuses on quote unquote male health. This is also why within the maha movement there's this emphasis on progressives and liberals failed to cater towards the true crisis which is the crisis of masculinity. And so to make America healthy again, both as a Christian, you know, capitalist, uh, uh, nationalist, uh, you know, their its destiny is to quote unquote fix the men, to help them become fathers and soldiers and businessmen and and and uh, and spouses again. So once again, I think it's actually quite important to see the contemporary boom when it comes to these sort of masculine identity discourse as actually being sort of a an ideological throughine with the liberal progressive emphasis on the idea of uh identity oriented health whether it's caregiving towards women or towards minorities etc. This in the same way that like contemporary racists see themselves as like identity politics warriors which is to say they say the true repressed minority in this nation is you know the white identity. In the same way that the the discourse of masculinity today takes on the form of the truly underserved community when it comes to health crisis both mental and physical are the men. It's a continuation if you will in an inversed form not simply an antithesis to it.
Now, this leads me to an argument that I haven't actually made so far, but I think is absolutely crucial if you want to understand use of symbolic castration and the idea of repressive desublimation. And this might actually surprise you a little bit because JIKI's argument is that symbolic castration is actually a good thing. On some level, the crisis of symbolic identity, who am I and what are my desires, is actually a good one in some sense. In order to become the active agent of your desire to take control of it, you have to grapple with what it means to be free and the discomfort of feeling alienated and alone within your desire. Symbolic castration, therefore, isn't something that should be fixed by means of, you know, returning to a non-castrated place of pure identity. Instead, the point is to traverse it, to go through it, to go through the problem of symbolic castration so as to castrate oneself. This is the khjekian leanian ethic if you will that the free subject is the self-castrated subject. The subject who is the agent of his own symbolic castration who does not feel to be the victim of it.
Now I want to briefly illustrate that by talking about backrooms which is a film that I saw last week. Absolutely wonderful film. Uh it has its flaws but I think you can make the argument that in some ways those flaws actually make the film more interesting rather than less. So, in back rooms, the the basic premise is that we have a middle-aged man, uh, African-American man who wanted to be an architect, but something went wrong in his life. He's divorced, and he is living at his workplace, which is a small business that sells antique furniture, but not like pretty art deco modernist furniture, but the sort of like infinitely commercially reproduced uh uh cheap furniture of like the 1980s. the kind of decor that you'll find in in in a motel, etc. Um, and and so he's living in this space, which is also his workspace, which is also this kind of like hell, if you will, this limbo of a kind of 1980s uh aesthetic that that has run a drift. And and one night he wakes up and he finds that the lights are flickering and he discovers a crack in the wall, a portal of sorts that leads him into an alternate dimension, the so-called back rooms. and he begins to explore them and the back rooms and and many of you will probably already know this they're based on a popular sort of like creepy pasta phenomena about like libidal uh not libidal good for audience that liinal spaces I'll get back to that uh, you know yellow walls carpeting throughout nothing overtly creepy save for the empty spaces in their expansion as such and and the YouTube channel that was associated with this that became a phenomenon in its own right of sort of like the spooky exploration of these spaces Now, Backrooms is an adaptation of of a YouTube phenomenon, which is an adaptation of a meme meme, if you will. But the my basic point, sorry to get off topic, is that he traverses these spaces and he's frightened by what he finds in them, finding shadowy figures, fragments of his past. U also objects that are surrealist that seem to mean nothing. And and he nevertheless finds himself almost comforted by the back rooms. He ends up wanting to live in them. That's one of the the plot mechanisms is that he realizes that it's a place in which he never has to change. And it actually reminded me very much of an unfinished short story by Kafka called Dabao or the burrow in which we have an unnamed creature that spends its entire life creating these underground tunnels and passages that it can explore so that it never actually has to go out into the world and live. It's it's sort of it's it's free but to the extent that it has trapped itself in the maze of its own creation. Although be precise you could say it's a labyrinth. I love Gilemo Del Toro's observation by the way that the difference between a maze and a labyrinth is that a maze is something that you're supposed to escape. Like that's the goal. But a labyrinth is something where the goal is to enter into its heart to encounter your own destiny yourself as it were your monster your other your shadow. And in a sense, you could say that the back rooms therefore function as a form of repressive desublimation. He goes into them and escapes his own pathetic, if you will, reality, his own failure by this almost narcissistic explor exploit of creating a space, a a liinal space that is an infinite refraction of the multiple layers of his own consciousness. And he finds himself fully trapped in it, losing his mind. And that's what Kafka was writing about in the story the burrow. The very desire, the fantasy, the temptation that we have to escape into an alternate reality, a kind of labyrinth of our own creation in which we find only ourselves refracted back to us. It's also why Kofka in one of his diaries wrote that, you know, it's a temptation to become a mole, but it's a temptation that he must resist. He has to go out into the world instead of just burying himself into his own pain. melancholy, you know, which was one of the sort of obsessions of the 19th century. Melancholy is this, which is to say the state of melancholy is to fall in love with one's own pain, to become paralyzed, unable to move forward or to let go the of the past, but to create a kind of false infinity of like this infinite regression into one's own the the nurturing and tending to one's own wounds, falling in love with one's own pain. And I think Kafka understand that almost understood that more than almost anybody. The kind of libidinal satisfaction that we can derive from tending to our wounds. And for Kafka, this is also what writing was. As he put it in his diaries, writing is a way that he could exempt himself from life. But it was also something that he thought was profound and beautiful. Like he said that everyone has their own way of escaping the underworld. Mine is by writing. Which to say in a sense writing was how Kafka castrated himself. He he created symbolic castration for himself. a kind of limitation that meant that he had to write constantly and take notes. But it was also a way for him to be alive. He could look at the world not as an ordinary participant but as someone who stood at at a certain remove. He could write about it. He could think about it. And so Kafka created this trick, this escape if you will. He burrowed. He tunnneled. But instead of tunneling to escape into this alternate dimension, he tunnneled within the alternate dimension of social reality. As such, he found a labyrinth which was the world that he could traverse and and write about. And I think this is actually one of the sort of unspoken truths about the backrooms movie, which is that it's not just that we have, you know, reality and the escape into fantasy. On a fundamental level, reality itself functions as a fantasy. We access it through a symbolic network, a fantasy frame. This is how you have to understand Lon's maxim that reality is structured like a fiction. Reality is a backroom. Going out into the world is like creating this quote unquote network of meaning that you're projecting through your unconsciousness in which you find yourself, but you also get lost in it. The back rooms in a sense are therefore like a metaphor almost for the idea of either escaping into the the the the false security of repressive desublimation or castrating yourself of going out into the world in some way.
I will give you one hint of caution though. What makes it complicated today is of course that the sort of MAGA alt-right movement suggests that to be a real man is of course to castrate yourself, to do difficult things, to choose discipline over laxness, to you know to uh be storm the beaches of Normandy instead of storming your local Costco. This this sort of ideological reduction into the idea that masculinity revolves around a certain grit or toughness is something which we should always be wary of. Kafka's idea isn't to you know make himself to harden himself against the world but precisely to be sensitive to it. It's like in P your sensitivity is a gift. The fact that you are overwhelmed that you can't make sense of the world that you feel things that are contradictory and irreconcilable with what you have been told life is. This is the nodal point. This is the real. This is the truth of social reality of which you can become the agent and the explorer. Your goal can be to actually find this nodal point to become true. Let me put it like this. What is the discomfort of going to the gym or storming the beach of Normandy compared to the true discomfort of confronting the real within our socio symbolic framework? That was Kafka's goal, not to become a man with a barreled chest. One of Kafka's fixation growing up was that he felt his chest wasn't sufficiently developed and so he would actually like send in money to these ads and magazines to get various like fitness devices to try to like expand his chest to be more verile. And there's a certain point at which Kofka realizes that this isn't what it means to be free. What it means to be free is to give himself completely to his writing to his self if you will um castration on in that way and to truly feel alive. His very inability to live, at least his inability to live according to a preconceived consensus of what normative success was, allowed him to live an unimaginably rich life, both in his imagination as well as in the world that he traversed and inhabited.
Now, I want to briefly talk about that in relationship to Peacemaker season 2 in which Peacemaker finds an alternate dimension, an alternate reality that gives him everything he wants. A happy family, personal happiness and success, the woman that he desires, loves him back. He's fully satisfied. Everything in this alternate reality is a wish fulfillment for him. And yet, he misses one crucial detail. It's so funny. In fact, I think as an audience, we could also be, you know, accused of missing this detail. This perfect world, this utopia that he inhabits in which everything revolves around him and his satisfaction nevertheless has one fatal flaw. It turns out to be an alternate reality called which they dub Nazi world in which the Nazis won World War II and the US became like a white supremist state. And at a certain point, you know, a woman from the other dimension comes in and she says, "This is your perfect life. You didn't notice the giant Hitler mural, the fact that everyone had mine comp on their like on their desks, that there's no one of color, that women don't wear pants, etc. In other words, he entered into this fantasy space of absolute wish fulfillment, not realizing that the quote unquote happy life that he was presented with nevertheless had a deep dark obiscated secret which was the elaborate network of prison camps in which every person of color was being held so that they could provide like I don't know like an economy or labor for the white minority living in this gated bliss. Of course, James Gunn is here providing like a characteristically ironic, beautiful satire on contemporary politics in as much as I think he also managed to do with Superman, which actually perhaps one of the better quote critical satirical pieces when it comes to the like the genocide in Gaza, etc. Um, but it's it's it's very well done because it it sort of shows that the question therefore isn't just can I get what I want, but do I really know what I want? Do I really know that what I've been presented with as bliss is blissful? I think that's really important. That moment in Peacemaker which he looks around him and suddenly realizes that what he perceives to be heaven is in fact a kind of perverted hell. That is the moment of consciousness, the moment of awakening. This is why uh why why Marx for example says that it's not enough to wake up to one's condition. One can't go from blindness to seeing. What one can see is the way in which the very desire to be free is itself a way of being blind. Which to say one has to take a secondary reduction by which one cannot just look at the world in a normative way. Is this good or bad? Am I getting what I want or I don't want? But how is this being presented as good or bad in the first place? How do I know my desire in the first place? It's also why like the critique the the ideological critique of a certain west western neutered like watered down Buddhism revolves around the way in which this form of like pop Buddhism nevertheless perfectly functions as a supplement within contemporary capitalism. When you are confronted with your inability to desire within a permissive society, of course, a quote unquote ideology of traversing desire and living without desire would present itself as a further commodity to you that can nevertheless sustain your desire precisely by not desiring it. It's Lon's maxim that you know the hermit is the one who denies the body until he becomes denial embodied. And whilst Buddhism is of course an incredibly rich uh um religious
And and ethical uh um body of work and live tradition, the reduction of it to a supplement to our anxiety within the liberal society is therefore nevertheless taskally ideological. In order to see that one can't simply engage normatively with what is being presented. One has to take a certain step back.
The crucial question therefore to reiterate is not just what do I want and why do I want it or how do I desire and why do I desire it but rather what has to take place in advance or a priori for this desire to emerge in the first place and what the reactionary sort of ma version of it is is cynical. It says everything is a grift everything is a lie everything is a sales pitch. In other words, if you know the truth that everything is cynical, you yourself can become the master cynic, becoming the master salesman, the master viral, you know, masculine performer yourself. It's a fundamental cynicism. Therefore, that presents itself as an ideological critique, which is another way of saying that the right-wing critique is leftism for dummies. It is the critique of ideology for people who can't see beyond their own noses.
Instead, one has to take a step back. One has to take this further reduction and this is what repressive deslamation offers us as a conceptual category. How our very quote unquote freedom what is presented to us as the conditions of our own emancipation nevertheless is that which tasty keeps us unfree. Therefore paradoxically to be free is precisely to once again practice the critique of ideology to castrate yourself to find something worth living for a cause that you can dedicate yourself to. And the quote unquote modernist Kafka-esque, if you will, although I'm using Kafka in a different way, mode of self-castration is precisely to make the exemption from life a form of life, which is a continuation by other means of philosophy. For what is philosophy if not to be outside of life so as to be more in it? To radically exempt oneself from living so as to achieve a richer life. This is the inversion that Plato preaches when he talks about the philosopher is the one who prepares himself to die. The staging of a symbolic death is therefore a form of self-imposed castration. This is what it therefore means within the Lanian ethic to quote unquote be free and live a rich life to understand your desires and thereby to become the master of them. Not and I cannot stress this enough to simply say I am not fulfilled. I will become the master of my desire. No, precisely to see through the extent to which becoming the agent of your desire is itself a desire that can be sold to you. Hence the quote unquote critical reduction that has to be practiced by which in order to become the active agent of your desire, you first have to understand the structural dimension by which desire is imposed upon your even within yourself.
I'm the I feel like the way I'm presenting that is a little bit complicated. So I'm going to try to conclude here with one more example. So what does it mean to be free? Fundamentally what it means to be free therefore is to sublimate your existence. Not sublimation as in transferring your desire from one thing onto another. either in the Freudian sense of I take my sexual frustration, I put it into my work like, oh, I'm so sexually frustrated, so instead I'm going to climb a mountain or become president. Not that form of sublimation. Instead, what you might call the desublimation that occurs within the creative intellectual act. When you take a camera and you go out into the world, you start seeing the world as a place in which you which you have an active stance. You see the world in terms of images. You have to take up space. You have to interpret your reality. You have to frame it. You become aware of the extent to which the way in which we perceive the world and inscribe it and disseminate it is therefore constitutive to the quote unquote acceptance of hedgemonic reality as such. You enter into the world precisely by introducing a kind of barrier that allows you to access it more fully. A writer goes into the world, wants to write about it. An artist looks at their experience of the world and wants to sublimate it. But strictly speaking, it's not sublimation. It's not I'm taking my pain and turning it into something else. It is nevertheless a tacit act of desublimation. I am taking something and I'm not just expressing myself. I am expressing the inexpressable. I am accessing the kernel of the real, the if you will fantasy element within the supposedly neutral or objective reality of social experience as such. And this is what I'm expressing. It's why art is the lie that tells the truth. That is what it means to be an active agent. Not to simply correspond to the existing and prevailing incentive structures even and perhaps precisely when they are sold to you as a tacit form of resistance to the status quo. But precisely to inhabit those gaps, those cracks to find the uncomfortable, the inexpressable, the thing which cannot be said or which cannot be thought. To try to find another way of articulating it and thereby to actualize your agency as an impossible subject. For that is what subjectivity is. It is an impossible dilemma of desire. It is not possible to be in full correspondence with your desire in as much as it is not possible to be an authentic agent. Therefore, there is no self. There is no underlying true desire. And as soon as you realize that, then the very problem of desire as such, which is a refracted version of the problem of subjectivity, becomes the gateway to living a free and rich life. This means that when you find the thing that allows you to essentially as Loll Zik put it enjoy your symptom to love your symptom like yourself. When you find the thing that is impossible that you can nevertheless enjoy doing and becoming incrementally better at each and every day you find a kind of life. This is a self-castration. Therefore, it is finding something that is absolutely worth living for and it is something that is of your creation that hopefully also creates value for other people. In so doing, I think it's incredibly important without wanting to like succumb to the false security of like a self-help mantra to say that to live a rich existence is precisely to embrace this problem of subjectivity. Not simply to seek to overcome it or to provide a miracle drug or cure for it, but to be radically open and honest about it. And to realize that therefore all forms of creative and intellectual expression, be it art, be it writing, you know, be it even the idea of emancip emancipative collective politics and representation is a way of trying to traverse this gap, this impossible core of subjectivity.
Democracy even as a political project is not about the ideal union of a society that achieves its highest goals, its destiny etc. but precisely a radical attempt to represent this very agonism, this very constitutive conflict that exists within the impossibility of representing the diverse views of many through the representative notion of one. As soon as you accept that, when you realize that the whole point of democracy is that it is impossible to make quote unquote everyone happy, that's when you realize that democracy is the political, if you will, extrapolation of the problem of the impossible desire of the subject. You go all the way back to antiquity, democracy was never presented as a perfect system. It was presented as an honest system, as a truth procedure by which a society sought to realize the problem of what does it mean to be a society in the first place? I think it's very important to see that because so many young people today look at democracy and they see it as a fundamental failure and they're like, well, it's not effective when it comes to being a political system of governance or representation. It's much more effective to have the common sense leadership of an erratic fool we call, you know, master. But that temptation to succumb to a kind of patriarchal security in which we can submit ourselves to a figure of authority is precisely because we lack the if you will courage and philosophical honesty integrity to confront the problem of impossibility, the problem of ambiguity, the problem of contradiction. Democracy is a political system that tries to elevate impossibility into its own goal. As soon as a democracy has full consensus, it's no longer democratic. I think this is very important to note. And so when we can elevate the idea of ambiguity and contradiction and impossibility and when we can relate it to the notion of subjectivity and desire, we can also then understand how it connects to the idea of living in a just society and in a society that is representative of its people. Not so as to become fully multicultural, you know, and the the melting pot of different identities, but against this precisely the idea of a society that stands in solidarity with the impossibility of what it means to be subject. That is what it means, I think, to be free. To live in a free society is not simply to have the right to express every opinion that you have or to sort of repressively desublimate yourself by selling your feet picss on the internet, but it's to have a society in which we can have an open and honest conversation about the impossibility of subjectivity without succumbing to the temptation of a fetishistic disavow, a repressive desublimation, which implies bowing down to the perceived comfort of a repressive patriarchal figure of authority who gives us the comforting illusion that we can have everything as long as we don't think for ourselves or act for ourselves and correspond to the existing ideological norms. That is what it means to be free. It's not just about you. It's about something much bigger. And when you see the connection between philosophy and aesthetics and ideology, I think you start figuring out the pieces of the puzzle that can be profoundly liberating in your own life. Thank you so much. I've gone on way too long. We're going to continue this discussion on Discord with some of our patrons. If you'd like to learn more and access all of my lectures and ebooks and seminars, do consider becoming a patron. Or if you simply want to support this project, become a patron. I really appreciate you. See you next week.