Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression

[Disclaimer:

This was written a year ago, during a very violent time (apropos my intellectual opinion towards my own neuroticism). It is not intended polemically against anyone but myself, and even then parts do shift into vulgar, abusive absurdity. It is to be taken seriously but not personally; as a reflection of my own evolution not as a serious psychological evaluation. It signified a great turning point in my life and many of its tenets still hold true for me but do not hold for others. I request that no one takes offense on their own part, but I suppose I cannot preemptively barricade against such a reaction from taking place.

Lastly: the awful attempt at creating a topological map of the depressive's various parts, towards the end of the piece, should be disregarded as little else but experimental bullshit.]




Life as a polemic. Madness as a course of action. To be bold in one’s proliferation against the fatuity of life. To relegate all hubris to disgrace, yet to alleviate fascistic nay-saying with arduous affirmation. To laugh openly but sincerely, with all snorts telic in nature. To write a foolish statement (there’ll be a lot forthcoming), incorrigible in print, for the sake of dialogue, disjunction, in short: a didactive cacophony (viz. the very thing that the shift from Master Discourse to University Discourse was meant to engender, instead of dancing behind a nebulous show of hegemonic multiplicities, in which we can all choose our personal ‘masters’). To see that everyday Lacan’s “Il n’y a pas de Grand Autre” is written in ink but forgotten in practice - praxis now tripping up in its acephalous state. To realise that there is little that is protean in humanity, throughout history, but in its language and semblance. And in that last statement, the truth of which can only lead one, inescapably, to an urge to defecate upon the universal sense of ‘Man’, to fall into despondency, to wish to tear what is “All Too Human” from within you - in a sense to be anti-homo - only then, in that state, to turn one’s eye to the world with a new voice, a brash and unreasonable one, petulant in humour, tenebrous in tone, vulgar in its love, and incisive in its supervention: that is what is necessary of us; that is the price we have to pay.


*****



Neurosis as the Language of (Self-Indulged) Oppression


‘I’ vs. “I am - ‘I’ as the subjective point as such, infinitely small, and “I am” as the panoply of egotistical classifications and referential facts (the ‘hooks‘, once could say, that connect us to the contemporary flow of language, the sociological corpus).

Of the latter we could say: in which Sartre’s principle of “Bad Faith” serves as a paradigmatic evaluation of all that alienates pure subjectivity from itself, man from man. It is neurosis, a narcissistic one at that, the illness of our myopic standing par excellence, now so brilliantly embellished with the quasi-truths of positive science, that continues to haunt us (and we are all willing in its endeavour).This is not the ‘ego’ per se (fear not, we are not moving into the asinine realm of the New Age), but a lack of distantation from it, a lack of humour, an obsession with its faults and tics. This is to say that its purpose has been forgotten: the ego as the finite emergence, a vessel from the infinity of nonsensical formlessness to the finite nature of experience, each individual’s unique form of Kenosis (the meat on the cross as the exemplum of our nature as it should be, the active “guide to life” that we have so long repressed).

Neurosis, and the physician that aids us to indulge in it as nothing but a symptom that encompasses and circumscribes the entire ‘I‘, treated by ego-affirmation and/or various medication that moves us further from all visceral evaluations into the realm of arbitrary and physical pathology, is the blind spot, the complete removal of negation between Subject(ivity) and Ego. Of course, the neurotic, the narcissist (which we all are), is incapable of measuring or grasping anything in a fair light, of expanding upon the world of ideas; he is incapable, dilapidating with his face pressed against ‘himself‘ - and it is here that we can extrapolate the individual symptom onto our contemporary world as a whole, to realise neurosis as another method of suppression, a sort of necessary factor to the current state of globalised capitalism. The subject, the anonymous power of voice as such, has been castrated, duped into taking his place at the riverbank, either ecstatic or disembowelled by the reflection that greets him, whilst history and politics rages in the heavens above - what better way to keep each world citizen in his place, to mute him, than to have him entangled in the realm of doubt, despair and despondence, always measuring his life by idiotic standards and relations, always of the same popular vein (when even the act of measuring is ridiculous) - what better way to shun revolutionary potential, than to turn him into a neurotic consumer, to avert the danger. For what is revolutionary potential but subjectivity proper?:

“Is […] a radical gesture of striking at oneself not constitutive of subjectivity as such? And does this not imply that the time of subjectivity is a priori the time of a state of emergency: being a subject means that things can never ‘return to normal‘? In every ‘normal run of things‘, the subject who participates in it escapes the traumatic abyss that lies at the heart of subjectivity and ‘regresses‘ to a substantial mode of being, that is, reduces itself to a subordinated moment of a higher substantial order.”
- Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p.398,
ISBN: 978-1-84467-598-2

What is neurosis (at least in its primary state, before it is perpetuated by narcissistic attention) but a natural fit, a burp in the machine that we so quickly wish to transform, through a clever twist of hermeneutics, into the ghost in the machine, as if the mistake itself was proof of, or the spirit itself. It is to be so terribly fixated on an ‘undesirable’ aspect of our own being, whether Imaginary or Symbolic, a form of desperate cathexis - in a sense, isn’t a neurotic the embodiment of desire, caught up on itself: Lacan’s drive that perpetually circles the phantasm of objet petit a, knowing it as shit, in truth, oneself as shit, but caught in the pleasure of misery?

The original neurotic break, the spark of emotion, the traumatic encounter, the occurrence of memento mori as event, the intellect’s revelation of life’s asinine and oppressive truths . . . all these things are something outside of the formation of a neurotic process, a process that dirties the original purity of these events, yet they are directly involved. If perpetuated-neurosis is a crime against life, a cowardice, then how else are we to react to the ‘break’, what path do we follow and where does it lay? Perhaps it is a neighbouring path, close to that of the neurotic, or perhaps one that shoots off obliquely from any that we know. . .

Deleuze and Guattari write that “Desiring machines work only when they break down, and by continuously breaking down.” (Anti-Oedipus, p.8). Our moments of “breaking down”, our spurts, false-starts, stalled engines, are but elements of the process of living, creating (and let us be careful here to separate ‘process’ from ‘system’ for the time being).

What is a break in conscience, in spirit, in strength, in confidence, but an opportunity to freshen and reappraise? Here production splits, attempts to ostracise itself from the slowly petrifying self, tries to continue (in a Deleuze/Guatarri-esque “flow”). Obsessive reactions to these events are but frightened gropes in the dark (and even more so are obsessions that need no event, no excuse nor reason to begin) - they are attempts to keep. When a machine breaks, it, unless wrapped in the shroud of final-death, comes to continue its flow, modified or not, similar or no . . . The broken down machine is but a failure in a concatenation of necessary, live failures. It is not the truth of the self, not something to be focused on as a possession nor as a characteristic (as I wrote before: this is not the ghost in the machine), but a heuristic progress (perhaps not directly telic, but by no means hermetic). It is at the moment that the engine stalls that the ego fits itself perfectly over all production, labelling all perspectives as “I am” and claims all to be a process of itself - it forgets its form to be, merely, an epiphenomenon of what came before, and instead turns everything into a tautological process of self-reference, immediate identity (here we once again find a lack of humorous distantation). Neurosis, narcissism: in essence a killing of all life (behold, the Zombie!). The many lines of action, of living, burn into an infinite loop of questioning. Idle we become . . . and “idleness is the beginning of psychology” (Nietzsche). Here: neurosis (perpetuated), as an idiotic detour.

Here is the trick of our self-subjugation; here is our willing movement into slavery: to create the inner domain, an incredible, personal and stubborn topology of psychological being. This is far from condemning psychology as a whole, but instead to attack the individual elevation of our caricatured spirits into spurious existences, that which we can spit out in ridiculously self-indulgent sentences (our pedantic ‘feelings‘) which the psychiatrist/therapist validates with his pen and paper (audience), a nod of his head (affirmation/conformation), his time (capitalist interest): “Yes, yes, all feelings and opinions are valid.” These ridiculous feelings, once healed by the natural dialectics of social existence (cf. the fact that various studies in the last few decades have consistently confirmed that cases of mental illness (especially those of schizophrenia) are rarer and last for shorter periods of time in third-world countries), is now turned into the possession of a newly created demographic, boxed, eventually a part of the capitalist market which (as with many other processes) feeds and strengthens it, giving the neurotic a place in the mythos of our time (the neurotic/narcissist as a member of an established Zeitgeist).

A neurotic seeks pleasure in security, of which can be said:

“. . . there is none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”
- Henry Miller, Sexus, quoted from p.xvi of Mark Seem’s Introduction, Anti-Oedipus, ISBN: 978-0-14-310582-4

‘Perpetuated’-neuroticism is here an eternal escape from the world, a buffering and defensive construction between our miniscule desires and the traumatic world. Bluntly put: it is cowardice.


*****


To digress, let me ask: what, specifically, of the depressive?

If we are to declare a perpetuated-neurosis as a fault, an oppression/self-suppression of subjective force, then is the depressive anything but a farce, a romantic - a failure? No. To claim such a thing would relegate the importance of position, a sort of intrinsic element in the idea of the depressive, but in a sense directly external from his psychological ‘essence‘ - something who’s potentiality we must not refuse. The fault to be found in the depressive is in his inability to see himself as a symptom embodied (a symptom of ‘political’ or ‘social’ truths, or perhaps even simply as a symptom of himself: personality as proof/symptom of man’s original failure (read “Sin”, if you are so inclined)); instead, he is focused on his own symptoms. A depressive in-action, his fists raised against oppression (or the establishment) is a tank, a stick of dynamite that feeds off personal pathology instead of feeding into it, as a Subject. Unfortunately, such depressives are few and far between. The average depressive is far too busy raising his fists against himself and his own phantoms. He says: “I know I must do A, but in fear I focus my attention on its shadows . . . A1, A2, A3, A4,” ad infinitum. Here is where the ‘language’ of the depressive and the methods of psychology must be altered.

Let us be careful though, or more precisely let us be distinct. The great danger of pursuing this theme (the subject as depressive tank) is to find oneself reversing the circular motion of a depressive’s psychic neurosis, its repetitive distancing from Action, and to lead it instead towards blind Réssentiment. To take Nietzsche’s words to heart, we must not create false morals in reaction to oppression, but move into the space beyond, as a conquering of oppression. In short, the lesson can be encapsulated by Žižek’s disagreement with how we commonly blame capitalist crime on “greedy individuals” - no, it is not in them that we must find our blame, but within the fabric of the system (in Žižek’s example: capitalism itself).

The depressive as subject can thus be split into three positions, or elements, points of a moving triangle that are unfortunately lost in an imbroglio of undecided and unfocused lines. They can be shown as being point a: Subject(ivity); point b: Subject (as-Identified-by-“Position”); and point c: Subject (as-Identified-in-Neurosis).

All three parts are infinitely shifting, lost to each other by a lack of immobile coordinates. They can be described as three dancers: the idle one that observes and lives vicariously through the others, as if the audience member somehow appearing on-stage (this is a); the one that shifts his feet in awkward discomfort, a shameful despair upon the stage (caught up in the glare of the Big Other), because the floor is continuously moving from his feet (and was never there to begin with) (this is b); and the one of energy, the maelstrom that has no eyes to look out of its own, but eyes on-itself as it were, in-loop, all-ignorant (a kind of false being-in-itself) (this is c). As these pieces, the dancers, eternally shift, it is important to note that this is only in relation to each other - the stage remains the same, unmoved by these meretricious dramatics.

It doesn’t take much to understand why a would take shelter in c, as an avoidance, a way of refusing to be identified with the devastating truth of b. “I am” does not wish to entertain the element of death, of abyss (and here is where Heidegger is right in pointing our that life is inauthentic without the admittance, constant knowledge, or mortality).

Freud talked, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of a child’s repetition of a traumatic experience in an effort to master them (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.13, ISBN: 978-0-393-00769-5) - here is perpetuated-neurosis! For is not neurotic behaviour this attempt, an untenable one (yet we persevere in it nonetheless), to master fate itself; is it not some bastardised notion, a nihilistic and antagonistic attempt against amor fati. Horse-blinders, myopia, parochialism, a case of idiotic nystagmus in the soul, a smoke-screen against truth. A perpetuated-neurosis is nothing but defence; any pain that is perceived or experienced within the bounds of such an illness is ultimately requested (“Victims be clear/You’re all volunteers”) - there is a protective pleasure in it, albeit an artificial one.

Here we can point at the neurotic, the Subject-as-Identified-in-Neurosis (c) and say, nay shout: “Now I have you, nihilist!”-

But once again, let us be careful where we tread. The dance consists of the three elements, c must be unmasked of its content but not eradicated in its form. Whilst such neurosis is the denial of a (the) traumatic situation and responsibility of living (a fear of action, cf. the Henry Miller quote above) it is also a source of energy per se. Although a chooses to lose itself in c’s movement (and isn’t that what c is in essence?), this is only because it is first confronted by the truth of b, before cowardly picking the shelter of neurosis, before, in a sense, adjusting the shape of c to fit the defensive narcissism of its fear. b is the mediator and c is the conclusion, the retroactive warning signal, a violent reaction in the ripples of b’s movements . . . a is nothing but the referential point of ‘vision’ that loses itself in a Symbolic position (or more precisely a lack of one, a fear of it. . . b) and the Imaginary volatility of c.

c is on a circular path, acting as a spurious “solid ground”, b is in free fall (this is according to the depressive - it is possible to imagine this formula reverses in the case of the “well-adjusted individual”).

The depressive here has a choice between two distinct positions: the Existentialist-Depressive-Identified-within-(THE LACK OF)-Position (in vivo) or the Self-Preserved-Depressive-Identified-within-Neurosis (in vitro).

This is the important factor, the choice, why the depressive cannot be rejected as a “ridiculous neurotic”. As a depressive, one should have the advantage of being able to become aware, and to commit to b’s freefall - others are potentially blind, lost, with a a joining the flow of c’s rotary motion but with b as the basis for its (still, but not acknowledged as being, spurious) ground - the distinctions blurring, lost in circular reasoning, immediate-identity, infinite stupidity, with no mediation truth (a neurotic that is not avoiding a traumatic truth, who is narcissistic for no ‘cause’ nor ‘reason’, is an ordinary, well-adjusted human being: a machine).

All the depressive must do, is to turn his position into an advantage, a process of truth, instead of being immobilised by what he sees.

“For the depressive, the habits of the former life world seem to be, precisely, a mode of play acting, a series of pantomime gestures (“a circus complete with all fools”), which they are no longer capable of performing, and which they no longer wish to perform. There’s no point, everything is a sham.”
- John Los

Here is a perspicuous summary of the subject confronted with the traumatic truth . . . Step two: Embrace it.


*****


So what is the answer to neurotic behaviour? Action. Volatile expression. The violence of the absurd. A commitment to one’s social and historical standing (fate) no-matter for any cynical analyses of the “concept” of society itself. . . .

Nothing can come from a sedentary life (nothing begets nothing), but only from the walking fire of liberated subjectivity. We must not fall short, and if one does so, we must pick ourselves up again.

As Jöns masterfully proclaims towards the end of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in his commentary of Antonius Bloc’s pleas for salvation, the knight’s neurosis:

“In the darkness where you say you are, there is none to listen to your lament. You are reflected in your own indifference.” [italics/emphasis added]

Jöns proliferates to the final moment (and even then muted only “under protest”) whilst Antonius was dead long before, unfecund, already at the moment he began his game with Death (and is this not another way of naming the moment in which he became aware of himself, identified in his words, in his ultimate position: I am mortal?) . . . What is painfully true, is that many of us do not even shift our wills, observe the truth, even in our dénouement. . . .


*****


In the spirit of proliferation (and as mentioned above: “foolish statements”, because there’s always room for more), here follows a list, a manifesto:

to be at war against anything that supports idleness.
to be at war against “scientific positivism” as an ideology (which, I must clarify, is far removed from scientific thought, method, and the scientist as individual as it can be - perhaps one could say: to clarify between the Versuch that is a healthy scientific sense of adventure or the Wissenscaft that is scientific progress, and the flagrant bullshit that is the public opinion and use of scientific theory).
to be at war against the world of “opinion” (where all attempts at truth, the dialectics of progress, the creation of new ideas, has been relegated to the field of the meretricious attachments, the ownership of past truth-processes already validated and integrated into the world of “opinion”).
to be at war against repressive psychology.
to be at war, period.
to be militant in action and word, in vivo, not only in the scholar’s test tube (defended, in its imaginary state, by all manners of scholastic and historic quotes).
to be without criticism, leaving that to the dilettanti of “opinion”, whilst instead bringing critical-analysis to the foreground.
to be able to see ego only as the epiphenomenon of the subject’s process - once again to treat all engine farts as part of this process.
to be able to refuse Homo Natura as an a priori category, or nature itself as a pre-existing condition - there is but movement and reaction (Nature’s balance has always been constitutive of its reactive element).
to . . . ah yes, to fuck!



- Amor Fati.