I will pile your dead bodies on the dead bodies of your idols.
Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.
(Inspired in part by Julian De Medeiras’ great video on the subject)
Feudalism finished, and capitalism promised to do away with every injustice, to abolish long days toiling for another man in the fields, to abolish being bound to a scrap of land. Of course, it didn’t. Democracy and capitalism decires all of those things, and we all accept our civic duty of feeling very bad about the fact that these things haven’t really gone away at all (and that whatever freedom we have from feudalism’s abuses is funded by intensified suffering in the global south).
Desire seperates itself from its own object. Lacan’s objet petit a is my favourite formulation of this idea. (excuse me while I butcher this particular philosophical concept). The object of desire is always implicit to relations, always searched for, never attained. Never can we even really admit what we are looking for.
The truth is alienated from the product, the thing we reach for is never the thing we want. We scrabble for signifiers of things, rarely real knowledge.
Somehow, in the tangle, desire begins to run on fumes. The idea of a thing, the phantasm of a thing is enough to fuel desire and passion.
It’s much the same with porn and sex. Porn and Sex, I was assured by the staff at my bible-belt, conservative, evangelical demi-fundamentalist teachers, were all addictive. They would ruin you, and suck you in. “Everyone on death row started out with porn” is a real thing that a real adult with immense authority (both literal and moral) over our particular group of 7th grade boys once said to us. “There’s a natural firebreak in your brain before porn progresses to raping someone, but if a fire rages hard enough, it can jump that firebreak.”
I’ve never been anywhere as obsessed with porn and sex as that school.
The first year of university is usually somewhere fairly infamous for a lot of sex. The guys in my flat had copious amounts of it. One cheated on his girlfriend. I won’t say they were moral paragons, but they weren’t nearly as concerned about sex as the man who once preached to us, telling the story of how he would never ever go into a car with a woman alone, or into any airport bookshop (?) ever because both circumstances were times he would be obsessed over sex. This man needed an accountability group for going into bookshops, that’s how cripplingly obsessed he was with sex and porn. And this was a man who had a wife! Presumably he got plenty of at least mediocre sex.
We don’t need sex as much as we need to obsess over sex. Our culture runs more on an obsession with sex than it does any real sex. Ask anyone who’s opened dozens and dozens of tabs, skimming through hundreds of strangers fucking each other under studio lights. Eventually, they don’t find one that they really like that much, and they orgasm, le petit mort, and the desire subsides, and that’s enough for now.
That is porn driven by desire. That is a ghost of a thing a shell. When shame rots through something like the emotional and physical urge for sex, you end up with this. When we don’t allow ourselves to interface with this desire, it is forbidden. We desire to desire. We seek the mystical, long dead atlantis of our sex. We quest like Indiana Jones instead of like Buddha.
Somehow, in trying to kill a thing, we have rotated our hubble telescope so that it faces earth. We have become Tom, from Tom and Jerry, and really it’s embarrasing.
To experience only through mediation sucks. Not that I’m claiming that there’s such a thing as immediacy, but when we layer on these coats of mediation onto a thing, we drown it, and we drown ourselves.
It becomes a fetish, almost. The drive to avoid oneself becomes something to jerk off to.
And that’s kinda like being on your phone. You’re smart, you get it. Don’t try so hard, don’t care so much. But really, you should probably care more. It’s a Hegelian thing (that, unfortunately, was my attempt at a joke).
