The once-revolutionary awareness of dreams that existed has been overshadowed in contemporary times by hyper-defensible, definable, provable, and enunciable attempts to explain them (away), heavily painted by scientific movements, and ironically enough, in response to an expected disappointment with this biologically and chemically determined approach, the antinomy of the scientific movements: hyper-mysticism. But whether deciphering dreams by side-stepping the most-likely convoluted or completely senseless narrative for a mechanical and bodily narrative, or settling the convoluted and senseless narrative within a predetermined divine narrative, these will both divert from the work of those engaged in psychoanalysis, where the challenge lies in differentiating dreams from both science and fantasy, with the, instead, secured interest in acknowledging the inherent inhumanity within us that is continuously being concealed.

Do dreams have inherent meaning that deserves our deciphering attention, at the very least? Executive coach and private advisor to founders, CEOs, and top executives, Dr. Julie Gurner, seems to think not. Dr. Gurner once tweeted out—and it resulted in 7,000,000+ views—“there is no real meaning to dreams. Dreams are random neural firings. Your brain makes up a story to make sense of it - using memories, experiences, fears, concerns, etc. Dreams have functions (memory, threat simulation, etc.) but no real meaning.”1 In this swift dismissal, Dr. Gurner seems to misrecognize her own acceptance of the Freudian position, unfortunately. While Freud, of course, dabbled in symbolism in his arguably rightful magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams, assigning predetermined annals to this or that appearing dream object, this is not the true takeaway from psychoanalysis. Instead, the Freudian opus provides the same truth that Dr. Gurner stumbled upon: dreams do not mean anything; they are, as she bluntly describes, “random neural firings.”

Yet I believe Dr. Gurner begins to misrecognize her own extraordinary discovery when she argues that the “brain makes up a story to make sense of it.” The brain is surely the body in the midst of random neural firings. However, ‘I,’ as what exists ephemerally surplus to the body and the brain (no matter how much I demand that ‘I’ exists neatly in the site I call brain), is a being who is not equivalent to the body but as a psyche that happens to have a body; perhaps a relation of two described in no other way than as a Hegelian dialetic. The body makes no inherent meaning of dreams because the body does not reveal itself to us in any unmistakable manner. The body remains a mystery that we continually decipher through the tools of our psyche; the foreigner in our head as the translator of the body. This translator tool that is our mind continues to make meaning of the meaningless dream, almost in defiance of Dr. Gurner, perhaps regardless of Dr. Gurner’s findings. The mind has no choice but to attempt meaning, to patch up the holes that appear as morphing bodies, changing lands, animals with two heads, animals who can speak, teeth falling out, sexually charged prohibitions, and all else you or I may dream.

Yet, what do we do with Dr. Gurner’s final line? “Dreams have functions (memory, threat simulation, etc.) but no real meaning.” If the dream possesses a function, then is that not the meaning? It maintains memory, threat simulation, or, as Freud himself says across several moments in his turn-of-the-century work on dreams, “Dreams are the guardians of sleep.” However, in one of these moments, Freud makes the addition when directly discussing the function of dreams: “we see already that dreams are not disturbers of sleep, as they are abusively called, but guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances of sleep.”2 Yet, if we are to take Freud seriously here, then we must follow his train of thought to its radical conclusion: the very ‘disturbance’ the dream guards us against is not an external noise, but of the absolute alien presence of our own existence. We are, from the start, split from ourselves, with a psyche that must continuously forge meaning over the void of its own non-meaning. And this latter duty is the function not of the brain but of the mind, the distinct remains of all that we attempt to capture in isolating the thinking mind.

Dreams are not only guardians of sleep but just as much guardians of what it means to be human. In other words, dreams ensure that chaos, uncertainty, messiness, beauty, ecstasy, and childhood delight are never to be escaped, not even in our sleep.

Perhaps, it is only in these dreams that we catch a glimpse of the full breath of infinite possibilities within us, leaving us with just a hint of what subsequently propels us into making new discoveries and creations, even scientific, for instance, such as Dr. Julie Gurners, revealing that our creativity has no bounds, even going so far as to creating theories denying our ability to create the very same theories.

In the realm of dreams, where our deepest desires are both tantalizingly close and forever out of reach, forever dancing on the edge of fulfillment, we find a profound truth about the essence of being human. In the unfulfilled climax of our dreams, we discover the endless abundance of creativity, propelling us forward in our waking lives and reminding us of the profound richness within our existence.

We may fall asleep to escape human reality, even for just a moment. But we dream because even in sleep, we are prohibited from ever escaping fully. At least, if we are lucky, in the escape, we have the chance at a dream that eludes even our wildest dreams, one where we never run out of material to find something meaningful. Because in those moments we dream, we are given the sole opportunity to experience human life as entirely inhuman: the greatest muse for a truly human life.

“There is something in masculinity that sees non-separation from the point of view of separation while something in femininity sees separation from the point of view of non-separation.” (Badiou 2013, 62)

Introduction

At the risk of sensationalizing, while paradoxically finding comfort in living in a time when hyperbole increasingly resembles reality, it would be remiss not to note that the entire world happens to have an opinion on the divide between man and woman.

The binary between man and woman (arbitrarily) begins with those who privilege a determinacy based on genitalia. For them, the binary is just that: a binary; we are either men or women, and our subjective feelings about the associations with either end of the binary do not change our position as men or women. There is a certain biological essentialism in which the gender divide is viewed as fixed by genes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy, or, to put it simply, by innate biology.

The opposite pole of the debate includes folks who privilege subjective choice; their position on the gender divide is a rejection of the binary itself in favor of gender as a socially structured/identity-focused approach, in which subjective experience and self-identification are heavily emphasized. On this latter side, the binary itself dissolves into a spectrum, where the poles marking its ends are less a stable home base than guide rails for one’s fluid affiliation, while also marking the points of divergence for those who reject the binary altogether.

This rigid distinction between Two positions taken in relation to gender is, of course, somewhat reductive, as an entire universe of opinion exists between genitalia-determinacy and subjective choice. However, for our purposes, we examine these Two general categories because they largely represent the Two primary structures of the fiery debate.

What we find here is a classic meeting of Two settled positions—a thesis and antithesis, if you will—that refuse to give ground to one another; men and women can only be conceived in one way, and the opposition will do inconceivable harm to the superior and necessary way of life if any ground is ceded. However, this meeting of opposition has not led to any synthesis, but instead leaves us muddling through, with no clear guide for moving forward. This, in turn, becomes an opportunity to break ground and write a new path for this binary argument.

I have no interest in paving new ground in this debate by crowning a winner (which, in fact, would be no new ground but a retracing of steps). Instead, my curiosity lies in offering a perspective that may help us reconsider how we approach the ‘issue’ itself. As stated, what we have between these Two positions is a fundamental stalemate: one side holds tightly onto birth as that which reveals to us our place in this sexuated pair, and the other holds tightly onto freedom of choice, where birth and environment play a factor, but the last word on one’s own gender identity results from enunciation, even if said enunciation travels against the grain of gender assigned at birth. In attempting to pave new ground, can we find that these seemingly opposing sides, rather than being irreconcilable foes, may in fact share a common essence that opens the door to a more nuanced and perhaps liberatory understanding of gender and sex?

On both sides of this debate, we find not only a duality of thought regarding the relationship between men and women, but also a duality of shared adherence. In other words, these Two opposing positions not only differ but also share ground: first, the idea that each individual must be taken in isolation when defining their gender, and second, the notion that each individual defines their gender expression in accordance with their own foolproof perception. The binary finds common ground when the essence of being a man or a woman ultimately rests on the individual’s self-recognition—‘I’ am a man, ‘I’ am a woman, ‘I’ am trans, ‘I’ am non-binary, etc. Certainty becomes possible when one believes oneself to be transparent to oneself.

Therefore, this duality raises Two questions we must investigate. For one, are our claims to identity ever to be constructed without recourse to that which identity rejects: the Other? I argue that identity should not be taken in isolation from the influence of what we identify with. In other words, to claim identity is to claim identification with that which is already external to us: a meeting of what has not yet been formed (the self without identity) with that which has already been claimed (an external object with which we identify), thereby creating the self. This thereby addresses our first shared ground: if the recognition of one’s own gendered identity is taken to be only about oneself in isolation, it ignores the external identification marker by which the self comes to be—a position that both poles in this debate share.

Secondly, and this is the critical question of our time, can we truly be transparent to ourselves? For this, we turn to the third great wound to humanity. The first wound was the Copernican slash: the Earth is not the center of the universe, displacing humanity from the cosmic center. The second wound was the Darwinian jab: humans are not distinct from the animal kingdom, but descended from other animals. The final wound, and the most potentially devastating, was the Freudian cut: the ego is not master in its own house (Freud 2024). This final wound, revealing that the ego is not sovereign but subject to forces beyond its control, radically destabilized faith in self-mastery.

What the Two popular positions on gender determinacy share is a faith in the individual as the final authority on sexed identity. To be sure, the more liberal side of the debate often recognizes the decisive role of environment, culture, and social influence in shaping the self, yet even here, gender and identity at large are still transparently grasped as something the individual chooses or claims for themselves as what is most intimate to them and only them despite cultural influences. The consideration that identity is influenced through external factors does not seem to extend in any meaningful way to the masculine-feminine debate since once the self has been identified as ‘me’, the external identification point of reference is dropped, or rather, repressed. The same certainty in the self resides in the conservative counter-argument, even though gender is formalized as what has been chosen for them at birth, perhaps by a divine external point. The biological determinant resides neatly within a divine determinism, one that the conservative subject identifies with.

However, if man and woman exist as unique points of identity that seem to hold intimate meaning for the self and the political landscape at large, then we must take the categories seriously and uncover precisely what makes these positions so unique.

The very fact that individuals can experience profound certainty about their gender while remaining locked in social conflict, misrecognition, and a constant inner ambivalence reveals the limit of self-transparency. It is here that Freud’s insight proves indispensable. For if the ego were truly sovereign, identity claims would be settled rather than inflame the question of man and woman. Thus, we cannot reject Freud’s claim but instead work to understand not only the ego’s failures but also how these failures result in a relational positioning forged in and against the presence of others.

Man and woman are not merely internal specifications but relational vantage points from which we interact with the world at large. In other words, to be sexed as a man or woman is not first a matter of what one knows or declares about oneself, but of how one is formed through—and continually undone by—the encounter with others, in which relation itself precedes identity.

From Birth to ‘I’

To relate to another is no milquetoast encounter between Two but a radical rewriting of the infant entering the world, slowly discovering both the world and itself, without any neat separation between the Two. Entering the human world is to enter a speaking world, where the primary requirement is to no longer cry, no longer defecate, no longer touch oneself inappropriately, but instead to communicate and develop the ability to reject what is inappropriate. In asking to use the potty, a little child is rejecting the act of defecating right there, right now.

To accept this life of prohibition (which, if you are reading this, you have done) is to live in a world where ultimate satisfaction is forever out of reach. It is a life in which we accept our parents’ plea to ‘use your words.’ We give up what Freud once called polymorphous perversity (2016, 94): the intense sexual bodily pleasure belonging to the infant, obtained through our interactions with the (m)Other, yet it is ultimately an autoerotic enjoyment. This innate, primal enjoyment, according to Freud, is relinquished to enable the self to evolve into a law-abiding adult. We not only give up this life of childhood (sexual) pleasure, but we also give up the memory that this ever existed. However, Freud observed among his patients that one does not forget something without it reemerging in mysterious and symptomatic ways. Our relations with others, then, become our only means of retrieving even a morsel of what we once believed we had; I am lost without that part of myself that once gave me an enjoyment only the Gods know of. However, I cannot retrieve what is lost on my own, so I must be able to recover this ultimate satisfaction from another, perhaps through another. We can even settle political movements that seek a return to greatness, or utopian futures built on nostalgic pasts, within this human reality of desiring what is believed to be lost.

The point is not to debate whether polymorphous perversity is a ‘real’ or provable past. The point, rather, is that to exist as a human being is to continually conjure myths of what we are not able to achieve in order to reckon with our incompleteness, to reckon with the failures to realize some primal enjoyment, or to reckon with the impossibility we continually find in the absolute comfort of our enunciations of identity, such as man and woman.

The designation of boy or girl becomes not only an identity gained, but a loss we must live with; what could it have been like if I were not limited? Of course, genitalia play a part in this. While both boys and girls are brought into the world and asked to let go of the past to transition into human reality, boys can look to their anatomical member as that which gives them a ‘leg up’ on the girls who do not have this luxury, even if the luxury in question is a complete fantasy. Furthermore, both boys and girls depart from this starting point and make claims for themselves, certain that they must articulate to themselves and others that ‘I am this.’ Both determinacy via genitalia and subjective choice are not to be ignored, of course, but to be understood as effects of a certain human truth, that of loss and its generative powers.

As they age, some experience this loss as transitioning to the Other, building new gendered identities in its space, fabricating a heightened machismo or femininity to escape the admission that they may have an interest in a life of feminized masculinity or masculine femininity, or any other way we declare an identity as ‘this’ or ‘that’ gendered self.

Of utmost importance here is that this is not simply an intellectual exercise but a material inquiry into the cut of reality that produces a loss and the imposition of this loss to relate to others. Every person, from birth to death, is forced to form relationships with others to construct their identity. ‘I’ become ‘me’ by finding a point that excites me in this world I have entered and identifying with it. Therefore, this inquiry responds to the material truth of human reality: how do we orient ourselves as we enter this world, where we are compelled to orient ourselves as sexuated beings (of loss) in relation to those who pre-existed us? Moreover, most importantly, what does this orientation have to do with our debate concerning man and woman?

Man’s Fantasy, Woman’s Non-Existence

Lacan’s formulas of sexuation

(Lacan 1998)

From 1972 to 1973, French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and Freudian revisionist, Jacques Lacan, constructed an understanding of man and woman, or rather, of masculine and feminine subjectivity, that takes up this very idea of separation between the sexes, not based on conscious knowledge of oneself, whether self-recognition of bodily organs or identity, but based on ideas of how we respond to loss by relating to our external reality (Lacan 1998). That is to say, gendered reality, in this psychoanalytic understanding, is primarily located in the position we take in response to being separated from ourselves and separated from others. Male and female positions cannot be understood solely as individuals realizing their individuality without a thorough understanding of exactly what identification as an external point is.

Our first identifying marks as human beings allow us to enter the world of identification itself. Lacan explores this by presenting the convoluted chart we see above. However, before we go any further, let us define the pieces of this chart.

Starting with the top Two sections, the left represents masculine subjectivity, and the right, feminine subjectivity. These formulas categorize Two distinct ways in which we relate not only to another person (there are as many ways to relate as there are relations) but also to the very act of relating to others. Or, in fewer words, how do we orient ourselves to our castration (something we will come to)?

The symbols in the formulas are defined as follows. On the masculine side:

∀x is the universal affirmative, meaning All men are…

∃x is the particular affirmative, meaning There is at least one man that is…

On the feminine side:

/∀x is the universal negative, meaning Not all women are…

/∃x is the particular negative, meaning There is not at least one woman that is…

For both male and female subjectivities, we see Φx and /Φx as the phallic and the negated phallic functions, respectively. For the purposes of this essay, the phallic function is the human subject who is castrated: to live a life prohibited from polymorphous perversity, or rather, prohibited from living a life without prohibition, full stop (McCormick 2023). In other words, to repeat, being prohibited means being forced into a life in which we must find a way to relate to our fellow human beings, in the hopes that, through them, we may unconsciously endeavor to retrieve what we imagine was lost in the process of becoming a functioning (or not-so-functioning) member of society.

Castrated beings are not a subset of humanity living without genitalia, but instead, a constitutive experience demanded by our human reality for humans to transition from newborn amorphous creatures into speaking and sexuated beings, metaphorically being cut not from genitalia, per se, but from a life where we are not constantly using others to regain a sexual past. To be a human subject (particularly a neurotic human subject—which you very likely are) is to be castrated.

To be castrated, then, is to enter the symbolic world that is reality, and inherit the ability to communicate, just as our parents and primary caregivers did, so that we may no longer make it known that we are in desperate need of the breast, for example, to not only nourish ourselves, but also to find enjoyment through it. We no longer communicate through cries but through words, to communicate with those who impose communication on us.

To put it a bit more succinctly, to transition from a crying, babbling, unrestrained infant into a speaking, lawful citizen of humanity is to accept that life itself is at a loss. To enter the world of words, we give up what life could have been without them. This animalistic life that could have been, a direct relation with our needs, with instincts, with sex, with the body, and most importantly, with others, is for(e)gone not as something we surely know we once possessed and threw away, but always as something we could have had, something we lack, and therefore something we desire.

To enter human reality is to accept this prohibition. In this context, the highly contested Freudian discovery of Penis Envy (Freud 2024, 173) is not to be understood as the misogynistic missing privilege of the woman but the universal missing object for all; woman does not have it, and man, who believes his penis provides him an advantage, especially does not have it. Most importantly, those who believe in their identity as fully inscribed are distanced from it in every enunciation of this belief. Man and woman become popular categories that ultimately represent how we relate to not having ‘It’. Therefore, returning to Φx, this symbol represents the experience of being a castrated human, never knowing how we should relate to others as we are constantly faced with the reality that “there is no sexual rapport” (Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel) (Lacan n.d., 19), yet forced to continually attempt to do so within this uncertainty.

Accordingly, the formulas are as follows.

For the male side:

∀x Φx: All men are castrated (All men are forced to find ways to overcome the impossibility of the perfect relation).

∃x /Φx: There is at least one man who is not castrated (There is at least one man who is not forced to find ways to overcome the impossibility of the perfect relation).

For the female side:

/∀x Φx: Not all women are castrated (Not all of the woman is forced to find a way to overcome the impossibility of the perfect relation).

/∃x /Φx: There is not at least one woman who is not castrated (There is not at least one woman who is not forced to find ways to overcome the impossibility of the perfect relation).

Both masculine and feminine subjectivities are constructions via Two contradictory formulaic statements. The statements represent how someone relates to their own castration and how that orientation, in turn, structures relations to others and the world at large. For example, the masculine position states that all men are castrated (the relation one takes to castration—all OF man is castrated). The second statement asserts that at least one man is not castrated. The feminine position states that not all women are castrated (the relation one takes to castration—not all OF the woman is castrated). The second statement states that there is not at least one woman who is not castrated (there is no woman who is not at least somewhat castrated).

These contradictory statements establish Two mutually exclusive and fundamental positions. Each castrated human being may adopt a position in any given moment in relation to the loss that inaugurates them into human reality and, furthermore, shapes their ability to relate to others.

The man, imagining himself in relation to the sole man who escapes castration—he who can enjoy with no limitations, escape prohibition, and develop relations with others without any difficulty; perhaps he never lost the perversity of childhood and never had to desire—sustains his identity as ‘man’ through an identification with the ultimate man; if he exists somewhere out there as un-castrated, so can I! Unfortunately (or fortunately), this ultimate man exists as a fantasy, serving as the external point of reference for all men, allowing them to fix their identity on him in the hope that, through identification, they will transcend their limitations. This ‘man’ appears in fantasies of machismo, in celebrities gawked at from afar, in athletes achieving greatness in their sport, etc. Yet, these representations of true men are always just that, representations; (hu)man is castrated.

But why can we confidently say this uncastrated man must be a fantasy? The following paradox exemplifies precisely why: “Christopher bore Christ; Christ bore the whole world; where then did Christopher stand?” (Freud 2024, 109). If all men and their knowledge are circumscribed within reality, can he who circumscribes, as what has not been circumscribed, be known? In other words, if Christopher exists as the external point from which all men gather to relate to each Other in his shadow, does not our knowledge of Christopher, and our wish to relate to him too, negate his existence as an authority outside all knowledge? This must mean that Christopher, Christ, and all men are castrated beings, unable to find certainty in our claims of Oneness, and surely unable to ever truly be the external Man that all men aim to collapse their identity into.

In this sense, masculine wholeness is never achieved internally (since its reference is always external) and is therefore propped up by the act of defining and delimiting Other identities, most notably the woman, who, in being defined, stabilizes the man’s fragile ego. That is all to say, the very act of defining ‘woman’ is built on the man’s inability to find comfort in his own identity, and therefore he must find comfort in another’s so that he can, consequently, hope to find comfort in his own. If I can lock down ‘woman’ as ‘this,’ then I can find comfort in knowing ‘man’ is ‘that.’

However, the ingenuity of these psychoanalytic sexuated positions is that the male position is not solely a position a biological or self-defined male can take up. Any human being who approaches their incomplete self by seeking completeness through objects or Other people (consuming commodities, consuming partners solely to find a whole self, or staking their identity on the claim that they can define Other identities) would be within the realm of male subjectivity. Self-identified women who claim they know what a woman is, or even LGBTQ+ folks who find certainty in an identity, are still within the realm of masculine subjectivity. This is not to say these people are ‘wrong’ about their identity. They are only capable of recognizing themselves because they begin from a place of misrecognition; I cannot contain my entire self in these words, therefore, I must try even harder to articulate to the world that this is who I am.

Now, where does this leave the feminine position? Do we attempt to define woman and contradict the very critical stance we are building against the male position? The feminine position, in this psychoanalytic re-telling, is not one of defining the woman, but of settling her within her inability to be fully defined. The feminine position indicates that not all women are castrated, yet there is not at least one woman who is not castrated. She, whether 1% or 99%, is attempting to construct her escape from castration, yet there is the radical acknowledgment that there will always be something which escapes this construction, forcing her to accept that no matter how much she defines herself or builds perfect attempts at rapport with others, there is always, and will always be, something missing. She accepts castration in the most revolutionary understanding of ‘accept.’ Within her formulas, there is no external point to identify with because there is no external point she can identify, fantastically, as The Woman, and therefore, to take up this position is to accept not only one’s own castration, but the world’s. This would mean that in every relation between Two, the perfect sexual relation is impossible; there will always be something lacking.

The point here is not that this seemingly depressive realization of the feminine should leave us apathetic and damned to fail forever in our pursuit of bringing Two together. The lack of the ultimate relation does not preclude social bonds, but is the very reason they can exist. This is the importance of the feminine position and the failure of the masculine. We can find this non-relation not as an impossible impasse but as the scene of impossibility that can do nothing but create new possibilities, especially in how we structure our relations with others. The man, in his attempts to close the non-relation for the ultimate sexual relation, is attempting to end humanity itself, as the end of the social bonds is the end of everything. To put it another way, we are not motivated by that which ‘is,’ but rather by that which ‘is not’; a fundamental negativity that demands to produce ‘something.’

Moreover, this is the real difference between a man and a woman: a man believes in his identity because he imagines an external Other who fully identifies with it, and thus, he may be able to do the same someday. In contrast, a woman knows her identity is always a failure. She will experience life beyond the words she utters, but can never experience that experience as anything more than a surplus or excess to her restricted life, where every attempt to articulate the excess fails. The man, then, is ultimately in a regressive position that uses Other people, Other objects, and the ability to define others, all for the narcissistic purpose of completion. His lover is never loved for their otherness but loved for what they can do for him. The woman, though, reckons with the separation between the Two, which must exist as separation for the Two to come together in the first place. Whether a person is in possession of a penis or lacking one, accepts the man-woman binary or rejects it, they take up a position in relation to relation itself; they take up a position in response to being castrated.

Even though statistics tell us the world is divided approximately 50/50 between man and woman, I claim that in our capitalistic epoch, where every object, experience, partner, and more is commodified to make the promise that they will complete us and grant us the identity we so deeply desire (‘I will finally be enough once I get this job, find a soulmate, make enough money, purchase these clothes, etc.), the world is instead a world of masculine subjectivity. Even looking at the UK Supreme Court ruling that legally defines a woman via her biological sex (Hatton 2025), we find a masculine plea for defining the Other as a desperate necessity. It is especially significant to note that there is no worldwide rush to define man, only woman. We treat man as a fixed category because, at some level, the signifier ’man’ is always associated with an external point of reference for predefined masculinity. However, woman remains undefined, indefinitely. This is the genius of the one question Freud could never answer: What does the Woman want (Was will das Weib) (Jones 1955, 8, 14)? The brilliance is not in the question but in the non-answer. What does she want? What am I to her? These questions are not reflective but are structuring of our relations with others. Only in the non-answer do we find the room to create and construct our own answers. The ethical dilemma we face is whether our answers will be certain and put an end to our development as human beings, or whether each answer will accept its own impossibility as the final word on the issue.

In this sense, ‘woman’ appears less as a stable category and more as a symptom of the masculine position itself (Lacan 2019). Woman is a point at which the limits of proclaiming the perfect relationship between people will be exposed. Woman is what emerges when the masculine fantasy confronts what it cannot name, domesticate, or totalize. She functions as the experience of the failure of the perfect relational experience, the place where the masculine order encounters its own impossibility. In the capitalist epoch, she exists at the very point at which capitalism cannot collapse into itself; she is what cannot be commodified, what cannot be possessed. She is the symptomatic point of the man’s driving fantasy that he will be the man, sans castration.

To be absolutely clear, to say that ‘woman’ functions as a symptom of the masculine order is not to diminish her, but to recognize that feminine subjectivity marks a point of structural excess rather than just lack. Far from being subordinate, woman names the limit of our ability to form a final relation with another, and therefore occupies an existence that allows new and continued relations to bloom in the aftermath of man’s continued failure. The feminine marks the anxiety of the masculine position’s demand that there be an uncastrated man for the group of all men to feel at home in their own and that there be a single definition of woman.

With no external referent for the woman, she opens herself to the possibility that forming a relationship is not a narcissistic effort but an act of real love: Two coming together to figure out what to do when neither knows how to address their castrated selves.

To close out, these sexed positions reveal how their forced ability to relate to others may play out on the bottom half of the chart. The masculine subject ($), as split by the cut of castration, goes after objet a, or the object-cause of desire, by accumulating objects. Whether it is partners, capital, commodities, definitions, or anything else, he hopes (unconsciously) that, if he accumulates enough, he will attain his identification as the uncastrated man and the ultimate relation (e.g., billionaire accumulation, shopaholics, those who collect sexual partners like baseball cards).

The woman, though, represented by La, can go after the symbolic phallus Φ (the object underneath $ holding up the man) in the hopes that she will possess the ultimate object and find identification and enjoyment as the man is imagined to have, thereby giving up her position in the feminine field (again, think penis envy), or choosing the S(A), which represents the castration of the world at large, the representation of the fantasy that a man exists who escapes castration.

Taken all together, this formulation shows that separation between man and woman does not have to be one that isolates us but instead reveals to us that our ability to come together as man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, or anything else, is always the coming together of an individual and an object peculiar to us, with which we will decide whether this is going to be an object we must form the perfect relation with or an object that gifts us the ability to constantly evolve our relation through time. It is not an empirical difference but one that exceeds empiricism and the ways we relate to this very exceeding.

This is also not a formulation that elevates woman over man. ​​The woman also has a castrated, frail ego, but it becomes a point of pride. She does not seek to overcome it but recognizes it as the very reason overcoming is possible.

If one is to reinscribe these stances into the contentious political debate that constantly presents the question ‘what is a woman,’ then we are now able to articulate that the question itself is not driven by anything but the impossibility of fully inscribing woman within our speech; there is always something missing in every declaration of ‘woman is this!’, causing this debate never to end. Yet, perhaps a new politics does not see this question as one with an answer, but one where the ability to pose answers shows that the final answer we so desperately crave to the world’s issues is not one we will discover, awaiting us on a fishing rod dangling within reach, or surely not an answer we already know, but an answer we must create in lieu of any answer that has been predetermined for us. We must create something new, something for all of us castrated beings, in response to the truth that is our distance from the ultimate sexual relation. Perhaps our task is not to uncover what a woman is, but to make room for what has yet to be named, and to let that unnameable remainder guide us toward a different way of living together.

And perhaps most importantly, the question ‘what is a woman?’ seems to be far less important than asking ‘what does the woman want?’ The former elicits definitive answers, while the latter leaves room for desire as something that is never extinguished, always propelling us forward, and forever ensuring that no answer is perfect enough to end the ability to ask the question itself. Only by asking ‘what does the Other want’ do we continue to grasp the very ability to construct relations with others.

References

1. Badiou, Alain, and Fabien Tarby. Philosophy and The Event. Translated by Louise Burchill. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

2. Freud, Sigmund. The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Mark Solms. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 1. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.

3. Freud, Sigmund. The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Mark Solms. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 7. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.

4. Freud, Sigmund. The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Mark Solms. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 17. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.

5. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition. Translated by Ulrike Kistner. London, U.K.: Verso Books, 2016.

6. Hatton, Ben. “UK Supreme Court Rules Legal Definition of a Woman Is Based on Biological Sex.” BBC News, April 16, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t.

7. Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume 2: Years of Maturity. New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1955.

8. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

9. Lacan, Jacques. “L’etourdit: A Bilingual Text.” Translated by Jack Stone, Anthony Chadwick, and Cormac Gallagher. FREUD2LACAN, n.d. https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/L’ETOURDIT-final.pdf.

10. Lacan, Jacques. Translated by Anthony Chadwick. Jacques Lacan Seminar XXII 1974-75 R.S.I., 2019.

11. McCormick, Samuel. “‘Subversion of the Subject’ -- Part 2.”, May 12, 2023.

Reducing sexuality to biological necessity or something “natural” (whether what is natural is determined as traditional heterosexuality or a wider spectrum) may explain our sexual identity to us in comforting way, but it utterly fails to explain why human beings linger in kisses, why they become attached to gestures, voices, textures, fantasies, pain, or why desire so often persists right where fulfillment becomes impossible. The answer to this dilemma is not one of identifying merely another certainty concerning what sex ‘is’ but, instead, recognizing that the only certainty possible when it comes to sex is its imposition upon us as the very experience of uncertainty.

One may feel certain in one’s politics, one’s occupation, even one’s habits, with a reasonable degree of assuredness, yet sexuality continues to resist this same coherence. Of course, the easy rebuttal to this is that most are certain in who and what they are attracted to. However, are we certain in why? Why this sexual attraction? Why this sexual/gender expression? Why at this time? To put it simply, what we often attribute to birth, genes, and human nature is what we often fail to find a true origin for. My goal here is not to wade through the thicket and pluck the original fruit as a means to provide the reader with the origin of sexuality. My only goal here is to float the very idea that human nature, itself, may inscribe within itself the impossibility of knowing itself. In other words, the discourse around sexuality persists precisely because it is born as a response to the encounter with what never fits the context at all. The site of sexuality is the locus where meaning breaks down and sexual enjoyment insists. This also means that our sexuality is not necessarily connected to a sexual instinct but is the very place where that instinct goes missing.

However, this is not to say all human sexuality is reduced to this one ‘thing.’ On the contrary, human sexuality is irreducible, full stop. In the inability to reduce sex to something known and perfectly identifiable as ‘that,’ it becomes ever-present in our reality as a plurality galore. Sexuality exists as a kind of mode of being but also a kind of knowledge; sexuality is a way the body insists around the breakdown of knowledge.

For this reason, sexuality has perhaps never truly belonged to the development of the human adult at all. We speak of sex as though maturity finally clarifies it, yet we quickly discover that becoming an adult often means only learning how to conceal the profound confusion that has followed us since birth.

For example, a group labeled as de-transitioners has appeared as a growing population of those who transitioned from their birth sex to one that does not align with it, but then transition back to their birth sex, identifying no longer with anything but their original assignment. Yet, in many public cases, they begin to identify with more than just their birth sex, they find themselves, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, as pawns in a conservative agenda to align knowledge of sexual expression and desire as perfectly aligned, one-to-one, with genitalia at birth, and these de-transitioners are used to show the transgender folks that they are inherently mistaken and must realize the error of their ways via the de-transitioner. Yet the conservative logic falls apart simply by the existence of those who proclaim the impossibility of identifying with the ‘natural’ way to relate to sexuality. In other words, if the conservative logic is innate knowledge of sexuality via birth anatomy, how does their logic explain those who refuse what is supposed to be innate? Simple, they pathologize. Pathologizing is the go-to move for any failure to wrangle a world into the ropes of our own personal comfort, refusing to live in solidarity not just with others but with the very idea of difference itself.

Yet, this does not let the more popular liberal positions off the hook when it comes to sex and sexuality. The ‘born this way’ rhetoric is surely not wrong in the sense that our identity as told through our enunciating that “I am this” is a misrepresentation of some ‘true world,’ but rather they absolutely borrow from the same conservative logic that sexuality is innate and knowable, just a wider spectrum of what can be known than the right-wing counterpart.

Whether sexuality is determined by anatomy or by assuredness in ourselves and what we want, the logic of sexuality is the same: what I want and who I am have been predetermined, and I am simply a receptacle living out this determination. Whether that determination was made by God, by anatomy, or by genes, there is a certain theological residue swimming through all of them. The liberal ideas of sexuality do not escape the naturalness argument, they merely widen the net for what is natural. Yet, what I propose is that human sexuality is fundamentally unnatural. Or rather, the very experience of sex for all humans is queer.

There is a fundamental contradiction persistent in the (in)exsitence of sex. What I mean here is that there is no resolution to sex. LGBTQ+ folks will not simply adhere to reactionary movement championing man & woman as the paradigm, nor will those who loudly support the latter easily accept a spectrum of various sexual and gender identities precisely because our certainty in what sex ‘is’ can only become such a hot button issue, argued with conviction from both sides, if it is reckoning with absolute uncertainty. That is to say, the very discourse on sexuality comes to exist because the essence of sexuality itself resists discourse. Furthermore, what resists discourse does not escape our attempts at control without, in turn, structuring discourse.

In the end, sexuality may just be the name we give to the wound opened by being human; the place where knowledge fails is where the body speaks in a language we never fully learn to translate, no matter the attempts made. And perhaps this is why every attempt to finally settle the question of sex inevitably returns us not to resolution, but to the unbearable and necessary truth that there is something within us that forever exceeds what we are permitted to know about ourselves: something enjoyable, something uncomfortable, sometimes private, sometimes public, never knowable in its entirety, but always attempting at the very feat.

Perhaps all we can say with certainty is that what is sexually enjoyable about sex is the very continuation of the failures of knowing what is enjoyable. And so the political question of sexuality may ultimately not involve how to finally classify human sexuality, but whether we can learn to live in common without demanding that what is most intimate, excessive, and unknowable in one another first become legible.

Accuse me of wading in my transference, sure, but I still think about my therapist’s laughter almost a year after I ended my time with him.

My therapist, who self-identifies as a Psychoanalyst, laughed perhaps three or four times in the two years that I was seeing him. My therapist’s laughter was never at me nor was it ever with me, always somewhere in between. Never one, never the other, always somehow both, always somehow what was needed, what I was intrigued by, and what stays with me—like love, or a painful splinter in my foot.

I do not remember the exact tone nor the narrative behind every single instant that he laughed. What I do remember, though, is the texture of being interwoven. I was not the comedian getting off on an audience making me feel grandiose, but instead I was the child who did something silly, maybe made a fool of myself, and instead of scorn, insidious mocking, or being lectured, I received a soft chuckle, sometimes extended through the entire walk from the couch to the door, making me feel as if in my silliness or role as jester, I did something right, maybe even extraordinary, but most importantly, never replicable.

That is what I remember most about my therapist’s laughter: it was never a laugh that I could tell my friends and family about afterward, because it was never a laugh in response to a joke or anything intended to be funny. It was a laugh at this very moment for this very creation between the Two of us that was never supposed to be.

The laughter is the most memorable aspect of my time with my therapist. I’m still laughing at my blunders even if he is not.

What begins as delight seldom reveals itself as a possible dependence. The loop feels too soft for that, too frictionless, too ordinary. Nothing in the gesture of a thumb moving upward suggests compulsion, it resembles leisure, curiosity, or even work.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes TikTok worth examining: not because it is uniquely sinister, but because it conceals its demands beneath the language of pleasure. Something so pervasive, so deeply embedded in the zeitgeist—something that appears harmless because of the joy it brings so many people—ceases to feel like a choice and begins to resemble an imperative. Yet those calling for criticism of the app are often dismissed either as out-of-touch boomers incapable of understanding TikTok, or as pretentious outsiders scolding the young from afar.

But perhaps even the often-dismissed criticism of TikTok from these out-of-touch elders gestures toward a truth they themselves cannot fully articulate. If they seek an easy dismissive explanation, none exists. This habit, now inseparable from everyday life, may instead be another manifestation of the difficulty of being human among others. Whatever the explanation may ultimately be, we can first begin with the effects, which themselves are difficult to ignore.

There are several strong empirical studies on TikTok. To begin with, The Washington Post gathered a sample of 800 U.S. TikTok users to share their data with the organization for a full month and found the following:1

1. “After a month, more than three-quarters of the users who had typically spent roughly 30 minutes per day on TikTok were now spending nearly twice that much time on the app, on average.”

2. A few months later, these numbers, for many, tripled or even quadrupled.

3. Users can easily watch 260 videos in as little as 35 minutes to form a habit on the app.

4. College students self-report an inability to think on their own.

5. “Our brains seem to respond to TikTok videos personalized to our tastes in ways similar to how they react to money, food, and other pleasurable substances,” said Marc Potenza, a professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

It’s not just the Washington Post, a mega-newspaper owned by modern-day baron Jeff Bezos, that reports this (we should never have the Washington Post as our only source precisely because of its allegiance). Pew Research Center2 reports that nearly 4 in 10 American adults use the app, a number that has doubled since 2021. More than that, 1 in 5 teen users reports being on the app “almost constantly.”

However, as with much STEM-based research and reporting, we rarely are privy to the ‘why’ but become acquainted intimately with the “what” and perhaps even the “how.” But even this evidence-based research will, once in a while, brush up on the ‘why.’ In a National Institute of Medicine published study,3 Baylor Institute’s James A. Roberts and Meredith E. David note that social media may provide an everyday escape for its users. Yet the brushing is short-lived as the focus of their study privileges findings on the “flow state” that both TikTok and Instagram allow—a flow state which “is achieved when people are so engrossed in an activity that little else seems to matter to them, and they will often continue the activity despite its negative consequences.” Furthermore, this flow state—“immersion in a world created by the social media application”— was associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety. Yet we are met with the ultimate question again: ‘why?’ Therefore, the not-so-simple answer may not come from the simplicity of evidence-based findings but instead from a theory that builds the ‘why’ in lieu of any convincing reason for ‘why.’

To begin with, we must interrogate this mindless-scrolling phenomenon not by focusing on “mindless,” since habitual users clearly use their minds quite a lot. Each video may be packed to the brim with information to consume: a creator’s energy, digitally transmitted, into a viewer’s jowls. Even if each video contains brief information on a single topic, the next 30 videos each may do the same, and, as noted above, users may run through 200+ videos in a half-hour period. Therefore, our focus should shift to the “scrolling” instead. Why are so many willing to devote time to scrolling, and what is it doing to us?

However, first, let us ask if TikTok is a unique case here? This analysis could just as easily be levied against any social media platform. The point is not that TikTok does something unique that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other popular social media models do not, but that TikTok has clearly mastered the social media landscape, becoming the scrolling machine of our dreams, par excellence.

Perhaps, then, the more important question is not what TikTok does to us, but what it relieves us of confronting, providing us with agency in this situation rather than a mechanical relationship with an other, imposing its will upon us. The endless scroll offers more than entertainment, it provides escape from silence, boredom, uncertainty, and the lingering fear that we are somehow falling behind. Each swipe promises another fragment of knowledge, another trend, another opinion to accumulate, as though remaining still for too long risks some sort of irrelevance. In this sense, TikTok begins to resemble less a harmless pastime and more a modern opium: a frictionless distraction that soothes the discomfort of being left alone with ourselves.

Hemingway once wrote that not only is religion the opium of the people, à la Marx, but so is economics, along with patriotism. He goes on to posit that even drinking can be the opium, or the radio.4 His point being, our vices are never-ending, and TikTok slides in precisely where the vice looks to place itself, becoming an all-encompassing religious, economic, intoxicating, and musically fabulous opium of the people.

With every swipe, we accumulate another piece of knowledge, no matter how minuscule. Whether it is someone’s opinion on global political issues, a new trend to repeat, a mundane act being transmitted over the airwaves, or a celebrity protesting an issue we cannot seem to look away from, we swallow another piece of information. Now the issue is not necessarily with any of these particular video styles, but with the way we move from one to the next, and then to the next, within seconds. Never staying long enough on one idea to digest it, but taking the next consumptive bite before the previous one has even made it down our esophagus. Yet the fear of not consuming overrides the fear of choking precisely because the logic of endless consumption quietly produces its own ethic: to stop taking things in begins to feel like going into arrears; a falling behind that becomes shameful, perhaps even guilt-ridden.

The guilt of not moving on fast enough, conditioned by the fear of ever spending a moment not taking in as much information as humanly possible. Again, this is surely happening on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., but TikTok not only demands the consumption of information but also treats this consumption as the jockey riding on its true horsepower of capitalist consumption. To frame this in the coprophagic language of philosopher Adrian Johnston, the growth of capital is maintained by a giant loop “formed by connecting capitalists’ anality with consumers’ orality. It composes a disgusting closed coprophagic circle in which shit keeps passing from the productive-expulsive anuses of capitalists into the consumptive-incorporative mouths of consumers.” Perhaps, then, the essence of this TikTok capitalist consumption of information and objects is not better represented by propaganda depicting evil capitalists and lowly workers but by 2007’s viral Brazilian scat fetish porn video 2 Girls 1 Cup (highly recommend you do not look this up), where 2 actors take turns fully assuming their bodies within this coprophagic act, producing and consuming as intimately as possible; a representation of what is truly a “shitty political economy.”5

But even without focusing on the economic travesty that is an addiction to accumulating info, objects, and money that keeps the capitalist system pervasive, maybe the addiction is something much more elementary and modern than that: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The endless accumulation of videos, opinions, trends, aesthetics, and fragments of information is driven not merely by amusement but by the anxiety of absence, the fear that somewhere everyone else is witnessing something you are not, somewhere everyone else knows something you do not, or perhaps worst of all, somewhere everyone is enjoying in a way you are failing to. This may never be obvious to the user in the midst of the TikTok act, but it may become quite difficult to escape the moment we put our phones down.

To stop scrolling risks falling behind the discourse, missing the joke, failing to recognize the song, the scandal, the gesture, or the trend before it undoubtedly will disappear. Yet this fear is exactly what produces the harm that TikTok brings: a particular cultural stagnation; a platform that rewards repetition rather than originality. The same dances, audio clips, punchlines, and aesthetics are reproduced ad nauseam, with minor variations to prove it is a singular intervention in the ocean of a truly unoriginal universality. Anxious reenactment swallows creativity whole, where participation matters more than original expression. What emerges is a form of art (yes, art) stripped of reflection and unique communication, privileging a kind of bad art that has no interest in cutting through reality to produce immanent moments of transcendence but instead epigonic uninteresting artistic creation that relies on things remaining as they are, even when the art itself preaches change.

The question of ‘why’ the endless scrolling then becomes ‘what are we left with without it?’ Meredith David, an associate professor of marketing at Baylor University who researches social media use, provides a thoughtful answer: “It’s displacing the time that we could otherwise spend with friends, family, and neighbors, and doing other more helpful and beneficial activities.” Therefore, perhaps it’s not even so much a fear of missing out on what the other may possess, but the fear of having to interact with the other without the shield of distance via the phone, never having to interact with the other outside of our comfort zone, but constantly interacting with the other from the addictive consumption box.

Coming to the end, we find ourselves again facing the ridicule of pretentiousness, where the easy rebuttal is portrayed by the famous Simpsons newspaper clipping titled “Old Man Yells at Cloud.” But it might finally be time to ask ourselves: are we better off embracing a bit of pretentiousness if the alternative is constant slop consumption? The benefit to pretentiousness may just be in seeing how so many of the things that we enjoy sustain our unhappiness, allowing us to build a relationship of necessity with all these little things that bring us momentary happiness but lifelong malaise. And perhaps this is where the problem reaches its deepest point. James Joyce once claimed that “Since 1922 my book has been a greater reality to me than reality.”6 Is this not what is happening with social media, a representation of reality becoming reality itself?

Maybe logging off TikTok will result in extended silence; maybe it’ll result in interesting thoughts of our own. It may lead to more interest in trying these practices regularly. Maybe even new communal spaces (the one redeeming trait this app brings), not built on the back of anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and corporate growth. Or perhaps logging off could even lead us to pick up a book and recover the increasingly difficult act of sustained attention, so that we may discover that our own thoughts are still capable of holding our attention.

“I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots.” - Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop

To begin, this is not exactly a polemic aimed at psychiatry or mental health diagnosis as institutions (not that there is no critique to be made), but rather an exploration of the relationship we have constructed, continue to construct, and strive to construct with the idea of diagnosis. Furthermore, this is not a generalization of how diagnosis is used across the psychological and psychiatric fields, but an inquiry (and perhaps polemic is apt here) into the generalized and harmful use of diagnosis that has infiltrated culture at large.

However, culture does not erupt ex-nihilo, per se, but will always contain a reflection of the very structure from which it is allowed, and so we will take our point of departure from the master signifier of diagnosis: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). This manual, which is not to be thought of as distinct from its global counterpart, the ICD,1 is an ever-growing compendium of mental disorder classification, diagnostic criteria, cultural updates relevant to the diagnosis and treatment of the psyche, and more.

In 2024, the APA released a slightly more accessible guide to the DSM-5-TR called Understanding Mental Disorders: Your Guide to DSM-5-TR. The guide opens with a forward written by the US House of Representatives member from Rhode Island (1995-2011), Patrick J. Kennedy, where he lays out the work he did on the parity law, which “requires insurance providers to cover mental health treatments the same way they cover treatments for all other medical illnesses.”2 What follows in the guide, reflecting the DSM-5-TR, is just that, the claim that sufferers are finally given what they’ve lacked in the same way a doctor deciphers the body and translates their findings to the patient: “the power that comes from knowledge and understanding”3

The very creation of this guide, and of many other public translations of the DSM (whether medical or not), reflects the logic of the DSM itself: a translation of symptoms identified. What this means is that symptoms function, to begin with, as intrusions into not simply our bodies or minds, but meaning itself. In other words, symptoms are nonsense entering an individual’s life of sense; the former disrupts the latter.

This understanding of the symptom is reflected in the second official definition provided for the word.4 While the first definition describes a symptom as evidence of a disease or physical disturbance, the second definition takes a vaguer approach by describing it as “something that indicates the existence of something else.” It is this second definition that I insist is the universal starting point for a symptom. It enters reality as signaling a more to reality; there is something else happening here.

As a matter of fact, while laying out his Science of Logic, German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel writes that to feel pain is the privilege of the human being.5 This is not because we are constantly feeling pain unattainable by non-human animals, but rather because, in feeling pain, the human animal negates the very concept of self (identity as that which is unique to the human). The pain of the symptom disrupts a certain homeostasis (the baseline of unchallengeable identity and self, or that which makes sense).

Therefore, the DSM provides a way to articulate an external point (that is, ironically, simultaneously internal) as the very point from which we can now view this rupture to the self. Once diagnosed, the symptom is no longer unexplainable pain, but the very locus in which this unexplainable pain can be placed. No longer do we suffer from a thought that cannot leave our mind, the feeling that something is out of place, the dread of leaving our bed, or the fear of speaking out in a social situation. We now suffer from OCD, depression, anxiety, etc. None of these are inherently problematic categorizations, and neither is categorizing itself inherently harmful. It can be argued that it is the only act, as we are not able to interact with the ineffable in any way except through categorization via language, at least medically.

However, the important inquiry here is how we are receiving this categorization. Do we directly heed the warning that the DSM provides: “Nonclinical decision-makers should also be cautioned that a diagnosis does not carry any necessary implications regarding the etiology or causes of the individual’s mental disorder.”?6

Despite the DSM’s warning, diagnosis is rarely received as a purely descriptive act. Both patients and clinicians tend to interpret diagnostic labels as explanatory, using diagnoses to identify the cause of distress rather than to organize its symptoms. Once named, a disorder is commonly understood to clarify why one feels or behaves as one does, even when the diagnostic manual itself insists that no necessary claim about etiology is being made. Diagnosis, in practice, becomes the origin.

We see this in the increasing use of colloquial language to refer to diagnoses. Once diagnosed, it is not uncommon to hear the relation between the individual and diagnosis to be articulated in the parlance of possession. I ‘have’ anxiety; I ‘have’ PTSD; I ‘have’ OCD. Not to mention the slippage from possession to identity. I ‘have’ becomes I ‘am’ (I am SO ADHD). These seemingly innocuous (and understandably, often helpful) measures deserve scrutiny as they reveal the relationship we build with the diagnostic system.

What does it even mean to ‘have’ a diagnosis? What are we in possession of in this instance? We possess a symptom, that is for sure. We may possess it at a bodily or psychological level, as part of our being, yet it escapes our very being by being classified as a symptom. By naming it as a symptom, and furthermore, naming the symptom through the language of the DSM, we successfully kill the inhuman essence that presented it to us as exactly that, inhuman. In other words, the word is the murder of nonsense and the giving of life to sense.

The symptom—something that feels like an external intrusion while also, somehow, existing as the most intimate point of our being—is not experienced as an intimate-external intrusion but as a diagnosis. ‘Having’ a diagnosis then integrates this external language in order to erase the very experience of a symptom as nonsense; diagnosis kills what is unknown in order for us to know.

Therefore, the parity law is succeeding; patients are given a language to provide “the power that comes from knowledge and understanding.” To possess a diagnosis, and consequently the power that comes with knowledge, we must give up a relation to the unknown. And yet, diagnosis does not close the wound by naming, it sutures, but the seam shows. Something of the symptom exceeds the label, a surplus that refuses domestication. It is precisely here, in this excess, that ‘having’ becomes being; the diagnosis ceases to be something one possesses and begins to function as something one is. From this point forward, identity emerges as the management of this remainder.

Yet, my claim in this essay is that the diagnostic identity marker will always fail to capture what is external to knowledge. In other words, in the naming of the symptom as symptom, and furthermore as a grouping of symptoms that now allow for the naming of a diagnosis that becomes synonymous with ‘me,’ something is always left out and is surplus to this naming. And if we are constantly collapsing diagnosis into identity, this would mean that the diagnostic identity marker, when integrated into our conception of self, fails to reveal ourselves to ourselves. To put it differently, in the move from diagnosis to ‘have’ to ‘am,’ we see only a partial truth being told. I have something, I am something, yet what is articulated in these moments of possession or being is never the full story; language fails to bring back to life (in full) what it has murdered in its own march to life. Therefore, if language must fail, so must identity; we are never in possession of who ‘I’ am as I articulate ‘I am__.’ However, how can I be so sure a remainder exists? How can I know that the language of diagnosis is not a one-to-one representation of what it is representing, and instead an insufficient translator of an unknown essence? For this, we need look no further than the history of the DSM.

Since its inception in 1952, the DSM has increased in page length by more than 700% and expanded the number of disorders by over 400%. This ever-growing guidebook is often seen as a step towards including all potential disorders. However, viewing this as progress may misunderstand the logic of its growth. Instead of focusing on the content of growth, the fact that it is growing can reveal the importance of what a diagnosis fails to capture. The constant additions and revisions suggest that with every new version, we are a step closer to complete inclusion. With every new symptom or the return of an old one, a one-to-one match will be present, with translation as a perfect slide from symptom to diagnosis. But why hasn’t this happened yet? We are inching towards a century of existence, and the DSM seems to have consumed the vast majority of ruptures/symptoms that appear in our lives, yet its growth shows no sign of halting.

The essence lives on in its death as a spectre of sorts, returning with the next symptom, or the next. Political and cultural critic Mark Fisher elegantly identifies for us that while the DSM categorizes something like a depression as consistent with anhedonia—the inability to get pleasure—the categorization of depressive hedonia might be more accurate, and for our sakes, reflective of the logic of the DSM—“an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing.’”7 This something missing, or something ‘more,’ reveals itself in every new edition of the DSM. Why else do we see, now, so many options in the DSM for non-categorized, unspecified, and other specified options? Along with F-codes that act as diagnostic categorization for insurance purposes, it includes Z-codes that are “Other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention.”8 This is not a system of inclusion, it is a system that functions to constantly chase its own tail, to fill in the gaps that symptoms bring with them. But with every filling, a remainder seems to present itself, leading to the next diagnosis for the person or the next version of the DSM for society.

The most telling example of the need for incompletion to allow for the existence of the DSM is clearly presented to us in its next update. The “Bible of psychiatry” is undergoing a major overhaul, shifting from a hefty physical volume to an online living document that will be easier to update.9 The very inability to achieve full inclusion and to continually update is being woven into very presentation of the DSM itself. By going online and enabling real-time updating, this DSM update does not just include new findings, it includes the very act of constant inclusion. The self-acceptance by APA (perhaps without realizing what they are doing) of this unrelenting forward movement is a self-acceptance of the very reason why unrelenting forward movement becomes possible: an utter dependence on an uncaptured piece of knowledge that remains present (as absence) in every capture of knowledge. In other words, the DSM’s endless revision testifies not to the steady conquest of the unknown, but to the structural impossibility of ever fully capturing the symptom’s essence in language, such that what escapes each edition is not an oversight to be corrected but the very condition that makes diagnostic correction and progress possible at all. Even as knowledge grows, the object psychiatry attempts to stabilize is structurally unstable.

Its never-ending growth, which is now accepted as part of its very presentation, reveals the failure to include some-thing in every consumption of a symptom and in the addition of a new page. The DSM, in every failure, gives life to something more, until its next version, and its next, and its next. In every new version, the something ‘more’ is no longer precisely that, something more, and instead, is pinned down as what is ‘more’ with attempted exactitude. Yet exactitude always results in more, allowing for more attempts at exactitude.

These attempts made by the DSM are not simply growth for growth’s sake, they are in the hope of achieving finality in knowledge. Our identities will not need to be constantly ruptured by symptoms escaping knowledge; they will quickly be consumed by all-knowing knowledge guides, and make the quick transition from intruder to possession and finally to identity. The time from symptomatic rupture to classification and amalgamation is promised to be as minuscule as possible. My psyche is no longer attacking me, the attack has been named, classified, and part of my very being.

The DSM mirrors our own search for normalcy. If the DSM’s project is driven by the fantasy that every rupture can one day be fully translated into a stable category, then the human project is driven by the fantasy that we may exist in a state of homeostatic normalcy that the rupturing symptom denies us. Therefore, diagnosis acts as a footpath towards normalcy. However, the pathway to knowledge only erupts when we are faced with something that disrupts our system of knowledge. Similarly, the pathway to normalcy only becomes possible after we are facing something abnormal. Our future endeavors are illustrated by nostalgia for a past that we believe to have existed before being demonized by the horrors of this or that diagnosis. Yet this past, whether framed as a lack of knowledge or as the existence of normalcy, only comes into view after the symptom has appeared, and the ever-expanding DSM taxonomy both reflects and intensifies this retroactive pursuit of coherence. In other words, it is only after the symptom that we can turn our head back and, for the first time, begin to see what the symptom stripped from us, what could have been. Would normalcy exist prior to a symptom? No. It requires the symptom to base its very differential existence on. The birth of the symptom gives birth to normalcy. Therefore, to tie much of this together, the DSM’s forward march is imagined as the ongoing process of achieving full inclusion and the ultimate normalcy for all beings, yet it overlooks the necessity of the impossibility of both of these goals; it overlooks what linguistic capture fails to include.

The project of inclusion fails. For it to proceed, it always requires the inclusion of an exclusion; one cannot draw a boundary without producing an outside. And one cannot continue to include without an outside that is in need of inclusion. What the DSM excludes, at the end of the day, is its very source of constant expansion. Accordingly, the project of normalcy fails. Normalcy becomes not what we are trying to return to (implying the impossibility of political campaigns such as Make America Great Again), but the promise of a future that can never come to fruition, a future that finds its existence as imagined nostalgia projected.

Today, we see in abundance that the relation taken to diagnosis mimics the relation diagnosis takes to symptoms. While diagnosis captures the essence by always capturing it without fully capturing it, we integrate the diagnosis into our being, without ever integrating our being in full. What begins as a clinical attempt to organize symptoms does not remain confined to the consulting room, it circulates outward, sedimenting into everyday speech, self-understanding, and digital performance. If the DSM cannot fully capture the symptom yet continues to expand in pursuit of doing so, we should not be surprised to find that this same restless logic now animates the way diagnosis is taken up, repeated, and reinvented in the zeitgeist.

Perhaps the most visible contemporary example is the explosion of diagnostic content on algorithmic platforms—particularly TikTok—where short-form videos list diagnostic criteria in broadly applicable terms (’If you zone out in conversations, you might have ADHD’; ‘If you feel empty after relationships, this could be BPD’). But this is not just a TikTok problem, nor is it simply a young person’s issue. Adults of all ages refer to the language of the DSM to refer to what has erupted as ineffable. Younger generations are following the trends and popular ideologies set by earlier generations; the medicalised model of care persists. It is seemingly universal that the symptom—that which enters reality uninvited and unwanted—is not the grounding principle from which discussions emerge about what our relation to said symptom could be. The diagnosis becomes the origin story of the symptom, not its descriptor.

By receiving expert categorization as the cause and, furthermore, integrating it as something one possesses and then as something one is, we ignore the very inhuman aspect of the symptom that goes uncategorized, and most importantly, allows the pain to outlive the diagnosis and, very likely, the treatment. The DSM may explicitly caution against reading diagnosis as etiological, but the very logic of its endless expansion denies its own warning. Movement is made possible precisely because a cause is never encountered, forcing classification to return again and again as a substitute for explanation. In philosophical terms, the lack of a first principle for the symptom’s existence allows forward movement to constantly retroactively posit one in the very space it fails to exist.

Is there an issue with any of this enough to critique a trusted and mega system? Why should I complain of the ability we have as speaking beings to possess a natural translation impulse for that which is untranslated, and even develop entire systems and industries dedicated to this translation? Whether a diagnosis captures 100% or 99% of the symptoms, is it still not of use?

If diagnosis were merely a neutral and progressively accurate translation of symptoms into knowledge, its history would appear as a steady refinement toward truth. Yet the DSM’s own revisions tell another story. One need only recall that until 1973, homosexuality itself appeared in the DSM as a mental disorder. In every attempt to capture the transhistorical nature of the symptom, we end up demonstrating historical contingency instead. What is not understood or tolerated by society must be integrated into a system that classifies the unknown. Even after 1973, homosexuality remained listed, until 1987, as a sexual orientation disturbance.10 In other words, something about homosexuality continued to function as a ‘symptom’ in the eyes of society, resisting full integration, and the DSM responded not by eliminating it entirely, but by repositioning the discomfort that society still possessed with what was foreign to their knowledge within a new classification. Categories of diagnosis are not purely descriptive, but are shaped by cultural anxieties, political pressures, and the ongoing fantasy of normalcy that drives attempts at translation and inclusion.

What the DSM refuses to see is that its entire existence is founded on the imagined existence of a ‘normal’ state of things, which it imagines as complete knowledge, and we imagine as rupture-less life. Perhaps we are in need of diagnoses not to explain away the ineffable nature of symptoms but to explain how we are relating to ineffability. Perhaps diagnosis is not better off as a deviation from some imagined norm that rids us of a life of rupturing symptoms that resist clarity, but as a way to help us relate to a life where rupturing symptoms that resist clarity are the norm. If the DSM’s expansion and cultural authority are guided by the translation of symptoms that mask the pursuit of normalcy, then it may be in our best interest to question if we are to continue to allow what is untranslated to be translated by the same organization that is so unaware of their relation to normalcy and expansion that they still include (as of February 2026) the following provision within their thoughts on child abuse: “Physical discipline, such as spanking or paddling, is not considered abuse as long as it is reasonable and causes no bodily injury to the child.”11

The stage lights, whether a single spotlight highlighting an actor’s soliloquy, the intimate moment of multiple performers, or a bright light illuminating the entire stage, bring the audience to attention, with dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of eyes locked on an exact moment. There is no imposition to look at what the light is bringing to life, but rather an urging—an urging we struggle to look away from, an urging that invites us in, an urging that draws our attention as what we not only want to see, but must see, and most importantly, an urging we experience as our own will to enjoy what the urge has led us to.

There are, of course, theatrical moments where instead of eliciting a mass response of delight, joy, despondency, transcendence, or love, we are brought to boredom. This may be due to the content’s failure to capture our attention, but perhaps it is rather the attention the absence of light draws; the darkness, in those moments, holds our interest to a higher degree than the light. Whether lightness or darkness, I am not drawn to the presence of either in-itself as much as I am drawn to what they beckon me to see through their presence: the lightness brings me to see what is on stage, and the darkness brings me to avert my eyes to anything else.

The director of this phenomenon is not so much light or its absence, but the gaze. Contrary to widespread usage, the gaze is not what sees me, but what allows me to see, by seeing me. What I mean is that the gaze is not the spotlight that makes the stage visible, but the spotlight that pierces me with its glare so that my attention aligns with what it demands my eyesight to see. The gaze is not the eyes in the sky I meet at point-blank with a direct stare, it is the eyes in the sky that give me the map with which I may see; a shared gaze that produces comfort in knowing what I believe to be choosing to focus on is not a mistake.

When I realize my own desire to watch a play, and it transforms into a demand to attend the production, I assume it is a pure desire, originating from an internal point that I may not recognize but is nonetheless my own. However, the gaze’s presence is always that which functions from an external point as an internal claim. In other words, the gaze orients our desires and demands from an external position and, in a simultaneous moment of paradox, the external gaze is claimed as that which must come from within me. However, this is not to say the gaze strips away my free will, but instead, my free will is ordained by an external power, all while I ordain the external power as that which may ordain my free will (and the cycle goes on…).

Let us take a very contemporary example to better illustrate this phenomenon: social media. There are many reasons for social media’s existence. For one, it allows for global connection at a moment’s notice. It, furthermore, creates space for a certain democratization of knowledge and voices that may not be amplified in the world at large. There is, of course, the greed motive of tech companies that financially benefit from users relying on their platforms for work, socialization, political discourse, entrepreneurship, and ever-expanding human needs and issues. However, what I want to introduce into this discourse is that social media serves as the gaze for vast swaths of society. More specifically, it is the par excellence example of our demand for the gaze so we can see, because without it, we lack the very confidence in our own free will. Without the gaze, we are blind; without the gaze, we lack the very imposition from which we gain our free will.

Whatever the very personal and singular reason is that we may share something on social media, we share it to be seen as sharing it for that very reason, to be seen. We share something to be seen as someone beautiful, someone aloof, someone who shares much, someone who shares scarcely, someone who has money, someone who lacks money, or anything else that exists as the reason enunciated to the self.

However, the demand to be seen is not a demand for the world to recognize a free will that already exists, but for our free will to be recognized by the world and authorized as free will. This is the paradox of free will: it is only free will if it is recognized as such by another.

If it’s not free will that we desire to be recognized in the social post, it may be our beauty, our aloofness, our money, our humility, or, in general, our desired image. Regardless, the self-image we desire is realized only when it is discovered by an other. The gaze is the recognizer that gives credence to the self by authorizing it as the self has desired.

There is then an enjoyment in being seen; we demand to be seen doing what it is we are doing. But we can now ask, does the act come first, or is it the gaze? To ask differently, do we post on social media to invoke the gaze, or does the gaze invoke the social media post?

Perhaps what we find in the contemporary is the very change from the latter to the former: rather than the gaze directing us to what we demand, our demands are demanding the existence of a gaze. In other words, we are no longer driven by the stage lights, but are constantly in search of the on switch so that the stage light can shine bright. But why the change?

If the gaze once functioned as an organizing presence that preceded and oriented our desire, then the contemporary demand for a gaze signals something more profound than a shift in media habits, it signals a vacancy. What results is not merely a substitution via technology but a new structure in relation to the gaze: in the absence of a divine guarantor of meaning, recognition, and authorization, we increasingly construct realities in which the gaze can be summoned on demand. The question then is not simply why we demand the gaze, but what it stands in for.

This vacancy of the gaze, rather than marking his end, names the condition under which God’s absence becomes newly productive; the traditional guarantor, in his death, has been displaced, taking on new forms in a world negotiating what it means to live after God.

In the death of God, we demand his presence in many forms. Along with social media, we see the rise in public spectacle, and even the surprising (or not so surprising) increase in demands that God is not dead in this post-God, secular world via right-wing fundamentalist movements. For the latter, demands for God’s presence can only be possible in the midst of his absence.

But returning to social media, the obvious use of invoking the gaze on is among charity performers, who perform for the camera as they provide for those in need. But this narcissistic stain does not exclude all other social media interactions. That is to say, to share something online is always to share with another, whether directly targeted or sent out into the void of onlookers. The gaze is requested in each share because, without the gaze, there is no share, and without the share, there is no gaze. God is brought back to life through the share as the demand to be seen because God no longer sees. Perhaps it is not that God is dead, but now, God is blind; his presence without sight does not satisfy us anymore, and therefore we orient the contemporary around reinstating his eyesight.

The demand for the gaze is charged with urgency, as seen in something like an Instagram story, which has normalized real-time updates so the act can be verified by an audience with ever-decreasing delay. The story ensures others can have access to our act in the immediate, and features such as the story ‘like’ ensure the act can be verified in the immediate, just the same.

What social media ultimately works towards is filling the void of God’s eyes. We turn to our fellow man—friends, family, strangers, foes, and anyone else—to see what God no longer can, all so that we can go on seeing.

It is clear we cannot get rid of the gaze, whether it’s the all-powerful presence of God or the void in which he once existed. So, what we must ask at this juncture is: how do we interact with moments when we are unable to identify and articulate the presence of the gaze? How do we authorize our actions and identity when no higher power fuels our self-authority? Or instead, what if the gaze is only made present because its truth is its absolute emptiness?

While there is undoubtedly use here, as supported by a wide array of neuroscientific findings, we must consider that to conceptualize trauma solely as a neurological disturbance, or as something that ‘lives’ in the organs of the body, is to reduce subjectivity to biological determinism. The issue with a reduction to biological determinism—the theory that human behaviors, traits, and structures are primarily shaped and controlled by genetics and biology—is that it posits agency to change when things go astray, yet does not necessarily theorize agency within its own theory. In other words, whether we are determined by our biology, determined by the environment, determined by God, or determined by any other external imposition, we are not left any room within these determinations to act in defiance of them. However, we constantly do. Therefore, if we are to rewrite the human psyche to include not only some form of external determinism (an undeniable truth) but also agency, not as an afterthought but as structurally necessary, we position ourselves to better understand trauma.

If trauma cannot be fully understood as a biological malfunction, then it must be approached from a different angle, one that accounts for how trauma disrupts meaning, not just neural processes. Rather than locating trauma solely in the brain or body, we can understand it as a rupture in the symbolic frameworks through which we all make sense of our lives. This shift moves the discussion away from empirical intensity alone and toward the structural failure that occurs when experience resists integration. Trauma, then, emerges not as something that simply overwhelms, but as the overwhelming feeling of that which cannot be properly placed.

What makes an experience traumatic is not its empirical intensity alone, but the way it fails to inscribe itself naturally in the reality we inhabit; trauma enters as an intruder, neither welcomed nor dismissed, and it lingers in its intensity and foreignness. Van der Kolk’s conception of trauma as only what is unbearable and intolerable to the body minimizes the Real horror of a trauma and fails to account for his own claim that trauma changes the very coordinates of human existence, both our relations to others and ourselves.

If I am to attempt a succinct definition of this trauma re-writing, it would be that trauma is that which cannot comprehend itself. Trauma is intolerable not only because it overwhelms the body, but because it impedes meaning. If we are to think of the human life as a storybook that is filled out, page by page, every day that goes by, a traumatic event adds pages to our storybook, yet what is traumatic is not the page that tells the story of our trauma, but the accompanying blank page that leaves the victim unable to tell the whole story, forcing them to find an intimate relationship with what continues to be told, ad nauseam. To endure trauma, then, is not to remember something awful and fail to move on from it, but to endure something terrible that cannot be inscribed within our knowledge or idea of self, and therefore never forget it.

Articulating that ‘the body keeps the score’ is a convenient way to note that, if we do not have access to the whole truth, our bodies do, and expertise can ensure it is excavated. However, if the body keeps the score, what does that mean for our understanding of the ongoing match? Perhaps if the body harbors a secret, it does not do so temporarily, but rather, it harbors secrets in perpetuity, even from itself. To truly personify the body would require the transfer of not only knowledge but also what is seemingly always central to our knowledge: uncertainty. That is to say, what if the body itself does not know any better than you or I? Perhaps no one knows the workings of this parasite. Trauma provides us with an intimate, yet horrifying, (body) partner we are forced to carry with us. However, what is traumatic is not the intimate partner, but the partner’s intimacy that continues to remain unexplained; why is this with me, why can I not let go, why this, why me? Is this not the ultimate horror of our own bodies: that which is so intimate and close can suddenly begin to leak a foreign spirit the second we are infected with a traumatic uncanniness.

The objective here is not to flatten out all trauma by reducing the word to one meaning; missing a school assignment is clearly not the same as witnessing death in war or being assaulted. However, it is notable that an individual can speak and be affected as intensely about missing a school assignment as another would about an assault. It is not the intensity of the trauma that is being universalized, but the idea of trauma not being a thing but instead an ineffable horror invading our space of eclectic description, that each and every individual responds to in their own particular manner. The hierarchy of responses that emerges is not simply a matter of individual psychology or personal experience, but is grounded in a shared structural response to what is, for all people, unbearable and intolerable: a human psyche that allows disruption of its homeostasis.

Those who endure such a trauma that they are not able to find the words to describe the trauma (and I mean this extremely literally) are not simply distanced from the right words, but are traumatized by distance itself. In finding new words and new ways to express the wordless, we do not necessarily ‘understand’ the trauma, but make attempts at the failure that occurred at the point of trauma, and repeat. Trauma-informed care would benefit from not looking for the root biological causes of trauma or teaching coping mechanisms to ‘move on,’ but rather, perhaps first begin with an understanding that approaching trauma after the fact must fail for the ability to provide any trauma-informed care to exist in the first place. In other words, trauma-informed care is only possible because trauma can never inform us about itself.

Van der Kolk relies on the work of Charles Darwin, who once wrote that “Man and the higher animals... have instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuition, sensation, passions, affections, and emotions—even the more complex ones such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity.”⁴ Van der Kolk, as a result, assesses humans in a manner similar to that used for non-human animals, who are measured in scans, tested in laboratories, and reduced to observable patterns. The argument here is not to dismiss scientific expert analysis, but to identify how expertise can be used to encourage a treatment model oriented toward regulating bodily systems, one in which symptoms are measurable, trackable, and ultimately targetable. In other words, the issue is not the science itself, but the lens: a framework that evacuates an agency to change by collapsing it into the biological.

This biological reduction opens the door for a particular kind of capitalist solutionism. If trauma can be likened to a malfunctioning alarm system in the brain, then we can invent devices to regulate that system. These devices appear to us as wearables, neural feedback trackers, or therapeutic apps that promise to ‘retrain’ the nervous system. Trauma becomes a product category, and its treatment a commodity. The very system(s) that provide avenues for traumatic events are supported by the solutions we invest in to combat the very same trauma. Science can continue its forward march, uncovering more findings, more discoveries, leading to more inventions concerning trauma, solely because trauma refuses to reveal itself in full, allowing for the space for infinite exploration. Trauma’s existence is rooted in its aversion to final understanding; it is what is constitutively indescribable in any event, allowing science (and us) to search forever for an explanation.

Science offers a legitimizing framework through which the world can claim objectivity, efficacy, and neutrality. There is a shift toward scientific discourse as the primary means of validating all practices. However, this appeal to science, far from marking a break with older, unscientific logic, quietly inherits the theological structure of the past. Science, “which is in principle atheistic, is in fact firmly theist. It depends on the notion of a subject—God, Nature, Spirit—that has laid out the plan of the Cosmos and possesses a pre-existent knowledge which it is the task of the scientist to reveal.”⁵ This theological residue within science reflects the broader fantasy that knowledge is out there, complete, and only needs to be uncovered. This fantasy sustains the illusion that some-One or some-Thing—whether God, Nature, Science, or the Body—already knows. In this sense, the scientist encounters trauma not as something they have found that is unexplained and then attempt to explain, but as something waiting to be found, prepackaged, with a final explanation awaiting discovery if we dig just deep enough.

If trauma is the existence of what cannot be fully symbolized or mastered, then our responses to it cannot be attempts at full symbolization and mastery, but rather forms of relation that take shape within the same fracture of meaning from which trauma itself emerges. At this point of absolute rupture, we not only find the fertile soil from which a traumatic intimacy blooms in all its horror, but surprisingly, we find love. This is not the love of Oneness that we saw proclaimed during the sexual revolution, or a love that aims to master the Other in the hopes that Two can become One, but a true love that comes to life in the exact same way as trauma: an unexpected rupture which cuts into our life and transforms our relation to the world we inhabit, and to the self that we may have taken for granted.

Love, like trauma, confronts the individual with something excessive and inexplicable, binding us to pain as much as to pleasure and resisting any straightforward narrative of cause or reason. We, of course, prescribe reasons for our love (‘meant to be,’ Cupid, astrology, God, etc.), but we do so only after confronting what does not make sense and attempting to patch up the traumatic hole introduced into our sense-making reality.

To further understand love and its role as trauma par excellence, we can examine its powerful staging in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michael Gondry’s 2004 film. In Eternal Sunshine, the protagonist, Joel, decides to erase his entire memory of his recent lover, Clementine, following their breakup, using a new technological procedure. The choice of this extravagant technological service appears rational and even scientifically sound, allowing for successful completion and a life of fantasy without the intrusion of anguish from memories of a broken relationship. The film’s twisted machine, which erases memories, compels the client to relive the memories being deleted during their deletion; it renders memories present that will soon be absent.

However, as the process unfolds, the film reveals that even when confronted with memories of numerous fraught and relationship-ending altercations between the couple, Joel longs for his lover as she is being erased from his life. What comes to bear is that Joel’s yearning for his lost lover has just as much to do with the painful memories as it does with the blissful ones. Joel makes this clear at the end of the film by telling Clementine, “I thought you were a nut, but you were exciting.”

In reliving the past, Joel comes to realize that he longs for the difficult times as much as he does for the joyous ones, because they allow Joel and Clementine to be together again, acting in ways that can be explained away as well as in ways that have no explanation. The fantasy of a clean break fails, and he chooses to return to the loop of love. Joel no longer demands that this rupture be removed from his life, he is drawn to it like an old friend begging him to come back one more time, never to let go.

The film tells the story of Joel’s love not in chronological order, but begins with the end, the moment Joel and Clementine serendipitously meet post-memory deletion. Clementine has also had her memory of Joel erased, and this opening is presented as the first time the two meet, as if it were a meet-cute. Yet, there is something uncanny about the meeting: an eerie avoidance of something, accompanied by an inability to articulate what it is that is being avoided.

The film proceeds to jump back in time to the actual first meeting between Joel and Clementine and tells their love story (all told through Joel’s journey through his memories as they are being deleted). As Eternal Sunshine approaches its conclusion, the audience returns to the film’s opening scene, now aware that this is not the original meeting but a repeat. Shortly after the repeat meeting, due to a rogue employee, Joel and Clementine are presented with the trials and tribulations of a relationship they never had via their confessions of why they are getting their memories deleted, all recorded on tape (from which many people would likely choose not to return to, given this new knowledge). However, Joel and Clementine still choose to pursue each other a second time, accepting their fate as lovers, even though their fate is determined by nothing more than their lack of understanding of what draws them together. Their trauma is what cannot be explained about what continues their seemingly fraught relationship. What cannot be said acts as the glue, bridging the gap between Joel and Clementine, just as it may bridge the gap between any person and their traumatic event: keeping them separated yet attached. Human agency enters at the very moment when we are compelled to act, yet are not privy to why we may be doing so; we become agents granted full autonomy to tell our stories as they unfold.

The technology used to erase Joel’s memory is described as light brain damage on par with a night of heavy drinking. The machine targets the ‘emotional core’ of the human brain to delete memories from existence. Similar to van der Kolk, this machine approaches the human being in a way no different from how it may approach any other animal: by accepting biological determinism; everything we need to know is stored in the body. The memories are compacted in the body’s organs for safekeeping, therefore, the machine—and by extension, the ideology behind it—fails to account for the individual as constitutively distanced from what they are in search of. This mechanistic view treats trauma and love as pathologies of faulty wiring rather than as inherent elements of subjectivity itself.

The irreducibility of what exactly drives us to speak, connect, love, hurt others, continue to hold on to pain, and much more allows for the creation of the many reasons why this all may be happening. Joel produced words, actions, and gifts for Clementine that only he could have produced from his relation, and his only, to what he cannot comprehend. Clementine was drawn to Joel, and vice versa, because of something more, something excessive, something inarticulable. In fact, there is no natural chemistry between the two, as they are complete opposites. However, the chemistry is constructed in their moments of love and longing for each other, when they express their passion or show it in action. The movie does not compel the viewer to believe in chemistry, but instead, it gestures toward its creation, given that there is no verifiable reason for the two characters to be together.

There is a kind of tragic optimism in Joel’s return to Clementine, a willingness to re-enter what has already failed, to risk loving again despite knowing where it has led in the past. In this way, Eternal Sunshine does not merely present the persistence of desiring because we do not know, it narrates the impossible project of erasing this phenomenon. But what Eternal Sunshine ultimately stages is not the failure of a technology to fully erase pain, but the inability to access our trauma in order to destroy the most central kernel of its existence. Joel’s return to Clementine for no reason knowable to human consciousness exemplifies that human connection (between people or between myself and my trauma) is not reducible to any scientifically sound finding because it is not reducible at all.

The point of juxtaposing trauma and love is not to diminish trauma, but to illustrate that the absolute intimacy with which we engage with our past traumas is not indifferent from the connection we make when in love. In both scenarios, we seize an external object with the power of the Gods, ensuring that what is external remains more important than anything inherently internal to us; we integrate the outside as part of our insides. Whether we are dealing with not being able to let go of a horrifying event—feeling so distant yet so intimate with what brings us pain—or a love that persists no matter the lack of sense it makes in our lives, we are confronted with something more than life, more than us, more than what makes sense. Perhaps this is what it means to be human: a constant reckoning with what escapes our grasp, no matter the iron-tight claws with which we grasp. Our trauma does not give us a clear pathway for how to deal with it because it is, quite literally, the inability to deal with it. Does it then become our imperative to master the inhuman—closing the very opening that the unexpected erupts from—or instead, embrace the very space from which we not only suffer and repeat, but also love, create, and encounter how to reckon with suffering in new and beautiful ways?

References

1. “Penguin: The Body Keeps The Score,” Penguin Books UK, n.d., https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/259420/the-body-keeps-the-score-by-kolk-bessel-van-der/9780141978611.

2. Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (NY, NY: Penguin Books, 2015), 1.

3. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 3.

4. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 74.

5. Cormac Gallagher, “A Reading of the Psychoanalytic Act (1967-1968),” Lacan In Ireland, n.d., 8. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Spring_2000-A-READING-OF-THE-PSYCHOANALYTIC-ACT-1967-1968-Cormac-Gallagher.pdf.

In the moment of anxiety, there is a certain something that introduces itself into our seemingly homeostatic lives. This particular feeling resists generalization, as each individual will describe it in a way relevant only to themselves (noting the intimate relation we have with our anxiety). However, there is a universal element that can be proposed regarding this intrusion: that it is an intrusion. This contingent moment of anxiety is a moment, even if only for a millisecond, experienced as an experience beyond our explanatory powers. Yet, whether it takes a millisecond, a minute, an hour, or longer, we reckon with it by reintroducing it into a system of meaning, through explanation, that settles it as something comprehendible.

Rather than anxiety being what is attempted to be explained, perhaps anxiety is the very bodily experience of being unable to explain. Anxiety is the very moment we are struck with an untranslated intrusion, which, until it is displaced onto a linguistic object worthy of inclusion into our explanatory world of sense, remains as anxiety’s ineffable essence. Yet, the moment we name it, even as anxiety, we destroy this ineffable essence for inclusion into meaning.

It may seem from this short exposition that naming anxiety, or having a diagnosis, makes for the best treatment. If we lock it down within our explanatory powers, we conquer it, and better yet, murder it. However, what we conquer in any given moment is not the essence of ‘anxiety,’ but only its fleeting manifestation as it appears within the confines of meaning. The murder is less of a final termination and possibly better explained through the German word Aufhebung: a simultaneous murder and bringing to life of a concept; a canceling and preservation. We may end the feeling by explaining it away, but we keep the essence alive for its next intrusion (and next, and next…) as no explanation fully liquidates what has been brought to life as beyond description. The prioritization of conquest over essence through naming practices constitutes a fantasy of mastery. Perhaps in the moment of naming and identifying what was previously unnameable and unidentifiable, we arrive too late and miss out on what we name. To put it differently, in the act of naming and conquering this affect, we simply close up the amorphous experience that is anxiety; we do not kill it. Yet, in the failure to access the essence of anxiety, we allow ourselves the ability to continually name it, continually write on it (myself included), continually medicalize it, continually run experiments to attempt (and fail) to reach its essence, and most importantly, continue to allow its intrusions.

Another way to conceptualize anxiety’s universal presence is in its relation to movement. Anxiety is a constant movement that infects us, but differentiates itself from any other movement in our lives by existing as movement contra locomotion.² Locomotion, a type of movement, glides on the terrain from point A to point B. It knows its origin and, most importantly, its destination. Anxiety is a movement that perpetually maintains us within the orbit of not arriving at the destination. Therefore, even when naming anxiety as anxiety, the movement endures as not reaching its destination, and a psychologist, doctor, healer, coach, philosopher, scientist, guru, layman, or someone else is needed to displace the feeling onto a linguistic object and allow it to reach a destination—an infinitely more desirable conclusion, regardless of destination, than non-locomotory movement.

The very reason we have the term ‘anxiety’ is to curtail the experience of inexperience. By placing the affect within the word ‘anxiety,’ we now allow signifying connections to be made with whatever explanatory mechanism we may have an interest in. Whether placing the inhibiting feeling into the nest box of ‘anxiety’ leads us to medication, therapeutic services, religious intervention, mystical excavation, illicit drug use, psychedelic exploration, or even denial, the concealing of what has been let loose within the single umbrella of ‘anxiety’ is precisely to conceal what we cannot reckon with as surplus affect. What we are calling anxiety is no longer unexplainable, thereby stifling any chance at exploring the unexplored without closing it up.

Language exists for no other reason than for our ability to communicate with others. Whether we are in direct conversation, online conversation, or even talking to ourselves, we speak to communicate something to someone. It may seem odd to include isolated speech, speaking in the presence of no one, as the same communication as directly engaging with another person; however, why else do we articulate something to ourselves if we are attempting to communicate with someone? In other words, communication is structurally impossible without another. To speak is not merely to emit sound or thought, but to organize experience into words whose function presupposes reception. We speak to give someone else what we believe they want. Language is not a private possession but a shared system of communication. For this reason, so-called private speech is not an exception but exemplary of this discussion: even in solitude, speech stages an addressee, internalized or imagined, as the condition of its intelligibility. Communication, therefore, is always already addressed beyond the self at another.

Therefore, in moments when anxiety intrudes and falters the pleasure of speech’s steady flow, we do not simply have an intimate explosion of affectual horror (we of course do, and what is said next does not negate this), but we fail to continue the chain of communication that we neatly nested in just prior to the intrusion. In other words, anxiety is the inability to communicate because the very words to speak with have been stripped and replaced with an experience of isolation from the world. In the moment of this anxious intrusion, the world no longer provides a simple blueprint for what rolls off the tongue, but instead leaves us with the anxiety-inducing question: What do you want from me?

This is not to say that there is a mechanism that bypasses our linguistic explanatory powers in investigating this untranslated intrusion, but that in exploring anxiety, we have no choice but to explore through our limited explanatory mechanisms. We introduce anxiety into our universal communicative structure to comprehend it, and in this move, we simultaneously relinquish our ability to understand it fully. Yet perhaps an alternative that does not rely on fantasies of mastery lies not in closing anxiety up with a name, explanation, drug, or anything else, but in acknowledging its enduring mystery that comes with the very act of naming, explaining, or medicating. We allow our confrontation with anxiety to remain open to what cannot be fully known or communicated to another. Perhaps we open ourselves to the idea that anxiety is not necessarily a villain but a messenger, delivering a letter about what we refuse to communicate in any given moment. The goal is not to fetishize anxiety, or raise it on a pedestal, but instead to honor anxiety’s role as an immortal force that resists our explanatory powers while keeping the possibility of new meaning alive.

References

1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=anxiety&date=now%201-d&geo=US&hl=en

2. Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. Translated by A.R.

   Price. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2014.

This tripartite selection of what makes us, us, always leaves out a fourth option: neither. That is not to say there is an alternate option that determines human behavior, thoughts, relations, etc., but rather, there is the option we conveniently ignore: what if, in identifying determination, we fail, leaving room for a fourth pathway to comprehending what makes me, me.

Whether we view human existence as determined by natural tendencies, by the imposition of nurture, or by a little bit of both, we are ensuring it is determined by something. And not only are we determined by something, but this something will always leave room for an agenda, thereby ensuring we are determined to do something as well. To leave out the fourth option of ‘neither’ is to leave out any consideration that we could be unaware of what determines us to act in this way and not that. Perhaps there is a certain comfort we take in knowing we are determined by something, whether via nature and/or nurture. Whether our biological wiring, theological wiring, or chemical makeup determines us, or our parental upbringing, environmental factors, or systemic inclusion determines us, we are able to comfortably identify an external point to liquidate any uncertainty for why we are oriented the way we are.

However, this externally determined, identifiable factor leaves no room for agency. In other words, nature and nurture, while separate, represent the same side of the coin: agency is disregarded in favor of complete external determination. Sure, I can say I chose my act, but why would that hold any weight when my nature or nurture ensured I acted in this way? What considering ‘neither’ as an option would introduce is not only a revolutionary way to view human determination, but also a way that does not take a side on external determination vs. full, undoubted agency. Instead, it finds the space where both intersect to produce the human being. Therefore, the intersection is not the combination of nature and nurture—two influencing forces we can point to as that which governs us—but the combination of that which governs us and the space in which that which governs us fails to include its own closure, leaving room for ‘me’ to come to life.

We come into a world that wraps us in its nurturing blanket, forcing us to accept human reality as it existed before our arrival. However, our entrance is always an entrance into human reality through human language. It is the words we speak that are the words we understand ourselves and others through. It is the words we use to communicate with others that are the very nurturing world that creates ‘me.’ Language, quite literally a foreign entity, allows us the ability to exist through language. While it is commonly thought we are born of our parents’ bodies, perhaps our essence is instead born of our parents’ desires,¹ which are expressed through the words they speak, the words we are inculcated with at birth, the words that extinguish the cry for an articulated demand for what it is we want.

However, this does not mean nurture is the reigning champion. In a paradoxical turn of events, in being accepted into being human via language, that very nurturing acceptance is precisely what infects the space of what could have been nature and erases it. In other words, by trading away the cry and infantile perversity, we give up what could have been a life unrestrained by our parents’ demands to mature; we give up a life driven by what we assume the non-human animal is driven by: a natural life. By accepting language, we distance ourselves from what life could be like without language. Therefore, nature becomes not what is identifiable nor what is lost, but it is the very unnatural relation we take to ourselves, always at an irreducible distance. But nurture does not extinguish nature without having to endure its stain. The unnaturalness of our relationship to any natural existence lays itself bare as the incompetency of nurture’s existence. Language becomes our vehicle of life, but it is always a skin suit we may feel as just a fraction off. Yet, it is only once we put on the skin suit that we can tell it feels slightly askew. But there is no taking this suit off, because without it, I am not privy to an authentic self, but exposed to quite literally nothing, and if human life is anything, it is a rejection of existence as nothing.

Nature, then, no longer becomes something we identify, but the nothing we cannot help but not identify accurately. What else does the plethora of debates on our natural existence point to than the missing answer about nature, and the failures we continue to fill the empty space with? To put it more precisely, our nature becomes our complete inability to reduce the distance we ever take from knowing our nature, allowing for the generative effect of various claims for what nature is.

Nurture, then, no longer is the writing in of who we are on the blank sheet of paper, but the consequence of language’s cut, separating us from a natural existence. However, nurture must reckon with the hole nature leaves in reality, always beckoning us to desire the closure of the hole central to our existence through the very mechanism with which nurture separates us from natural existence. In other words, language is what separates us from nature, yet language is the only vehicle we have to engage with what exists as an absence. Language steps in to fill the space left by nature’s absence, yet language’s existence as nurturer does not fill the space in full, always leaving room, as a constitutive rule, for what could be.

Instead of an either/or, the nature nurture debate is better off being discussed as a neither/nor; neither nature, which becomes the presence of absence, nor nurture, which becomes reality that presents ruptures as the exception and not the rule, hiding from the truth that the rule’s entire identity relies on its differentiation from the exception. Nor is it an amalgamation of both. Neither/nor is the failure of both to determine us in full. It is this failure where both nature and nurture leave their mark of incompleteness, where agency unveils itself.

In a foundational conundrum, the autonomy we experience in deciding our fate is rejected when we posit a debate between nature and nurture. Neither/nor presents not only a theory for autonomy that nature/nurture tend to ignore, but it also does not ignore the heteronomous existence of this autonomy: the forced agency to decide how we reckon, as a society, without nature or nurture leading the way. Without forced autonomy, we would not be able to debate the very question of nature versus nurture. It is because we are separated from ever finding certainty in what is our natural existence, and included in the very contrivance of language which nurtures us away from ever having a direct relation with a natural existence, that we as human beings emerge in our skin suits, always attempting assurance in why we act, always falling short in this certitude, and always continuing to try, in perpetuity.

References

1. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 109.

In Hamnet, the 2025 period drama directed by Chloé Zhao about a young William and Agnes Shakespeare, we see a budding romance, a marriage, the birth of three children, and what can only be described as unimaginable grief. The first two-thirds of the film quickly but nimbly portray these elements, as if they were happening over the course of a day. Shakespeare and Agnes meet; there is a bit of cat-and-mouse; they fall in love; they must convince their families that this nuptial is a worthy one; they have one child, then twins.

What is buried in the first two-thirds is a magical realism that follows Agnes; she is afflicted with an ancestral feminine legacy. Agnes is born the daughter of a forest witch, and this lore follows her even after her mother passes and another family takes her and her brother in. Agnes carries this legacy, claiming a sixth sense; she can sense what others cannot. However, Shakespeare is not bothered by the disdainful talk that happens concerning Agnes in the village and pursues her purely out of love.

But what the story of Hamnet finds its grounding in is the one son of William and Agnes: Hamnet. A boy very much attached to his father, wanting to be a player in his father’s plays. What seems to signal a once-beautiful love story turned into a frustrating marriage: Agnes convinced Shakespeare to go to London to pursue his passion for writing and theatre, leaving the children behind, including Hamnet.

Yet, during one of Shakespeare’s excursions to London, Hamnet passes away. His twin sister, Judith, comes down with the bubonic plague, but on the order of his father to protect his mother and sisters, Hamnet, perhaps possessing some of his mother’s unexplained transcendence, one night takes on the plague for himself and away from Judith, and is no longer living by the morning.

The remainder of the film explores how the love of a family becomes what it means to live with grief. Shakespeare, at the ire of his wife, returns to London to run away from loss. Agnes, on the other hand, remains with her family but is in disarray, not knowing how to deal with loss and often succumbs to anger. Perhaps, for one of the few times in her life, she could not have seen this coming; she could not save her son. In fact, at the birth of the twins, Judith almost did not survive, and Agnes was able to revive her, ensuring her twins were never apart, until Hamnet’s death.

While in London and avoiding his family, Shakespeare creates The Tragedy of Hamlet, a creation that sparks outrage in Agnes for how her husband, who has not been home in months, could use their son’s name (Hamnet and Hamlet are interchangeable, as told by the film’s opening epigraph) to put on a show. However, at what is possibly the most important line in the film, her brother convinces her to go to London and see the show, telling Agnes, “Keep your heart open.”

Agnes, at first, is filled with anger as the play begins, and she cannot understand what any of this has to do with her son. But with the entire crowd on its feet, and the front row touching the stage, close enough to feel the sweat drop off the actor’s faces, she sees the actor portraying Hamlet walk out from a hole in the stage’s background wall, a hole surrounded by paintings of a forest, a hole that resembles the hole in the forest Agnes came from and what is constantly returned to as a hole representing Agnes’ forest witch mother, and most of all, death.

From that moment forward, Agnes is transfixed with Hamlet. What unfolds at the end of the play is the most beautiful depiction of grieving together after the loss of a loved one. The death of Hamlet, at the end of The Tragedy of Hamlet, touches Agnes in a way that she cannot articulate; it leaves her speechless. In one of the film’s most courageous moments, Agnes extends her hand to the actor onstage portraying Hamlet as he dies, and he, in a moment of confusion, grabs her hand. Everyone in the audience puts their hands out for him to catch as well, and what we have is an ethereal representation of The Creation of Adam. Except, it is an entire audience with their arms raised, and one young actor portraying Hamlet/Hamnet with his arms out in response. All members of the audience come together to grieve the loss of Agnes’ and William’s son. In what is the film’s most poignant moment, Agnes looks back at a crowd of crying faces, all grieving a loss they may know nothing about beneath its theatrical representation. In that moment, the entire building comes together, not just to grieve, but to celebrate love and loss.

When Shakespeare was working on the set for this production, it was a whole wall of forest paintings. However, he touched the center, knowing that it was there he must cut through the forest and place a dark opening, signifying even though he had left his wife and family, they had never left him. In seeing the opening, Agnes knew precisely what it represented. And in seeing her son walk through the opening, she knew this play was made for Hamnet. While the parents may have grieved separately, Shakespeare creates something for the world to grieve his son. However, what the film shows us is that this creation is incomplete, and always was incomplete, without Agnes’ love, and her opening that invites in another to share in the grief.

This is not in support of empathy. Empathy is the narcissistic embodiment of imagining we can know what another is experiencing, even if we have experienced the same loss. What is shared here is the inability to understand how to confront, reject, embrace, and respond to loss. What Hamnet gives us is that it is in the face of the unknown that we can come together to grieve and love in that very dark opening we are not able to comprehend, no matter the sixth sense or intelligence we possess.

When Agnes convinces Shakespeare to go to London to work, she says, “You should go to London, that place in your head is now more real to you than anywhere else.” She felt the loss of his presence at home before he even left, and knew he was already gone. She sent him away, almost as if she knew the family needed his labor of love, that is, The Tragedy of Hamlet, in the face of loss to heal.

If there is one thing to take from Hamnet, it is that love and loss cannot be separated. If you are not ready to love, you are not prepared to lose. And if you are not ready to experience loss, you are not prepared to experience love.

References

1. Royal Shakespeare Company. “Hamnet | Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet and Shakespeare.” YouTube, May 26, 2023.

Marx took this inversion as an essential step, but did not think Feuerbach went far enough. Marx viewed Feuerbach’s analysis of the human being and their relationship to God as too abstract and idealistic. Feuerbach and his troop of old materialists were unable to disengage from the realm of mere contemplation and truly enter into what Marx thought was the inevitable logic of the materialist turn: practice. Only practical engagement with the world can result in understanding and change.

Where Feuerbach saw God as a psychological or anthropological projective mechanism, Marx saw it as a social and historical one. For Feuerbach, man can never escape his nature, and therefore this limitation is projected, through imagination, onto entities of a higher kind.² Yet, for Marx, this turn to earth as the starting point is valuable, but it gives way to solutions for earth’s tribulations that are contemplative rather than truly practical. It is not human perfection projected onto the divine but the contradiction on earth, presumably between economic classes, that stretches back throughout history. For Feuerbach, human self-consciousness led the way,³ but for Marx, the division of society itself was the engine driving the species forward.

In other words, Feuerbach saw man not as made in the image of God, but God as made in the image of man. Marx, reversing this while maintaining the rejection of the heavens as determinative, held that it was not human subjectivity that creates objectivity but the very opposite: material conditions give rise to human subjectivity; to free our subjectivity and achieve Feuerbach’s point in a sense, we must put into practice our ideas to change the world. This is why Marx concludes his Theses on Feuerbach with the famous Eleventh Thesis stating, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”⁴

Through his extensive body of work, Marx’s project integrated moral criticism, economic analysis, revolutionary activism, social science, and the longing for community, all while analyzing the acceptance of economic rationality and capitalist progress.⁵ However, the Eleventh Thesis privileges revolutionary activism over the rest, leaving the enduring question: how do we interpret and respond to these insights? How do we act in the face of historic income inequality, resurgent bigotry, perpetual war, ecological devastation, and the ceaseless more? For centuries, thinkers and activists alike have grappled with the meaning of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis, in which he passes the baton from philosopher to revolutionary, insisting on action over interpretation.

Before answering the above questions, it is essential to understand what exactly it means to designate a society as ‘ill.’ At its core, a Marxist diagnosis points to structural conditions designed to appease capital that systematically produce suffering, inequality, and disconnection. The empirical evidence supports this⁶—the widening gap between the rich and the working class, the fact that the bottom 50% of global wealth holders contribute 12% of carbon emissions while the top 10% account for nearly 50%, or that despite holding more wealth than any other nation, the U.S. harbors communities with persistent poverty rates above 20%, disproportionately affecting people of color. Not to mention the significant universal crises—genocide, homelessness, global pandemics, ecological degradation, fascist uprisings, and the list goes on. Aside from empirical evidence, the political divide never shrinks but widens globally, where feud and violence are not outliers but the very makings of the political world. Perhaps one of the most significant indicators is the disagreement over whether the world is ill or not.

Today, we see two dominant and prevailing practical solutions that actively address an ill society. On the one hand, we have heavily tech-influenced private interests that privilege innovation and technological advancement as the cure for this illness. Opposing them are activists, often self-identified as anti-capitalists, and often more directly responding to Marx’s call to action, who believe the solution to the universal ailment lies in opposition to the powers that be, by putting forth a more collectivist response. The former response ensures that billions of dollars flood various industries every year, allowing them to produce products such as ‘green’ commodities to combat climate change, AI technology to streamline industries where human labor may not be optimal for the bottom line, or marketing campaigns that align major corporations with social justice initiatives. The latter response lacks the funds to match the scale of the former, yet it often has the manpower to enlist folks in large-scale protests, strikes, electoral political participation, and mass education.

Each response draws on a private and a public ideology, respectively, to guide its path, seemingly opposing the two. However, what aligns them is that, through their resistance to society’s ills, they reveal a shared commitment to those ills. Both accept the imperative that the answer to society’s ills comes from the future, as soon as the correct result, product, explanation, or class consciousness has been achieved. With so many specific struggles that overburden the global community, we are no longer simply a dyad of capitalists and proletarians, as Marx envisioned the future would continue. We are burdened with issues of not only exploitation, but complete unemployment, racial, sexist, and queer bigotry, religious oppression, land wars, ecological crisis, and the list does not stop, allowing for practical solutions to endure. Perhaps, then, the real ‘solution’ is not finding solutions to these problems, but finding the universal issue, allowing a unification of struggle itself. In today’s day and age, what Marx did get right is that no issue does not either fully develop itself or, at the very least, feel the slight touch of capital domination. This shift in capitalist relations allows for a shared throughline in these seemingly oppositional responses (private and public): the assumption that the problem lies in a lack of solutions. Both groups are responding to Marx’s thesis (knowingly or unknowingly) as the imperative to act; there is now sufficient interpretation, and it is time to take action. Society’s illness is no longer a diagnosis but a muse that inspires the production of prophetic, concrete, and profitable solutions, allowing us to conclude that the most revealing symptom of our shared malaise is not any particular atrocity nor the empirical evidence of global decline. The most telling sign of our crisis is the relentless imperative to produce solutions. We see a society in disarray, driven by our demand to create practices, innovate, and provide answers; answers that are ultimately ineffective because the opportunity to produce more solutions persists.

Despite their passion, these agents of change find themselves in a civilization that continues to deteriorate because they fail to recognize the theoretical structures that shape their efforts. Believing themselves to be free agents, unmoored from ideological constraints, they proceed as if their efforts arise from an unmediated will or from the standpoint of the end of history, where theory is no longer needed, as we have all the knowledge we will need, and it is now time to act. The activist, calling for revolution, assumes that resistance is inherently oppositional, failing to recognize that their demands are often subsumed by the logic of the system they oppose. Protest becomes a commodified spectacle, radical rhetoric is watered down, and revolutionary movements are co-opted into the machinery of reform.

The innovator, in turn, views progress as a matter of specialized solutions, blind (or joyous) to the fact that their efforts merely strengthen the logic of capital, where every crisis becomes an opportunity for market expansion. In their negligence to acknowledge the underlying theoretical canvas that authorizes the painting of their actions, they unknowingly serve the powers they seek to disrupt. They take Marx’s Eleventh Thesis as a commandment—“the point is to change it”—without recognizing that the impulse to act, fix, and provide solutions is a symptom of the deeper ideological condition. In this way, action becomes the very mechanism through which the status quo sustains itself, ensuring that the imperative for change never disrupts the logic that necessitates it.

While Marx is well known for his calls to action, whether in Thesis XI or his famous proclamation at the end of The Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”,⁷ there is another, subtler register in his work that reorients the very notion of a revolutionary act. In a lesser-known passage from Capital, Volume II, Marx offers a striking formulation: “Capitalism is abolished root and branch by the bare assumption that it is personal consumption and not enrichment that works as the compelling motive.”⁸ While the Theses on Feuerbach encourages the reader to move beyond interpretation into practice, this passage from Capital, Volume II, suggests that interpretation itself holds revolutionary potential. By assuming a new theoretical position (consumption, rather than enrichment, as the issue), we change the very coordinates from which we act. In other words, Marx advocates shifting the locus of revolution from physical action to the realm of thought, suggesting that radical change results not only from what we do but also from the assumptions underlying our actions. This Marx, seemingly opposed to himself, also appears when he says, “We do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but seek to find a new world through criticism of the old.”⁹ There is still a reliance on human action and not divine ordinance here, but the action is no longer in the realm of physical collective measures, but in contemplative criticism of the world that passes by in every moment.

The radical act of stepping back into thought as opposed to stepping forward into action is not a popularly held position, as stepping back in the face of global atrocity is easily mistaken as apathetic. However, contrary to popular belief, this alternative response is not one of apathy nor a fear of action; critiquing the idea of providing a solution itself need not be a disillusioning experience. Just as tech entrepreneurs and social justice activists have taken up the mantle of Thesis XI, certain philosophers and theorists have developed an oeuvre centered on the more idealist Marx. They take the insight of criticism’s power as a subversive instruction in opposition to the direct call to action of Thesis XI.

The idealist Marx aligns much more comfortably with the philosophical predecessor and teacher to himself and Feuerbach (and to whom many consider Marx the critical heir), German Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel. Hegel. In 1808, Hegel issued a contemplative call to action of his own, unthinkable in today’s era of constant solutions. In a letter he wrote to his friend Friedrich Philipp Immanuel Niethammer, Hegel writes that “once the realm of representation [Vorstellung] is revolutionized, actuality [Wirklichkeit] will not hold out.”¹⁰

While Marx seemed to have moved away from his dedication to philosophical thought as an agent of change throughout his career, there remain remnants of this subtly disruptive idea in his early writings, both professionally and personally. In a letter Marx wrote to his father in 1837, he professes his reading of Hegel to be an unpalatable experience, yet it nevertheless left him with a new recognition of the importance of our intellectual nature.¹¹

It is only through a radical and rigorous dedication to thought, and not instinctual action acting as the imperative, that we are able to reorient the very ground we stand on. We are not in need of more participation in practice, but of a step back to think and ask: do we understand the problem(s) we are facing? Our crisis is not the absence of solutions but our unquestioned devotion to producing them. If we are ever to act differently, we must first think differently. By revolutionizing the realm of thought rather than multiplying solutions, we may discover that practice cannot help but follow. To slightly rephrase Hegel’s call for theory as the revolutionary action, he tells us: if we change the world in theory, practice cannot hold out much longer.¹²

References

1. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London, U.K.: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1881), 1-32.

2. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 11

3. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 12

4. Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Middlesex: Viking Penguin Inc., 1983), 158

5. Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, xii.

6. Inequality.org, n.d., https://inequality.org/.

7. Marx, The Portable Marx, 241.

8. Karl Marx, Capital Volume Two, Marxists Internet Archive, n.d., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm, Part One, Chapter 4.

9. Marx, The Portable Marx, 93.

10. G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Niethammer October 28, 1808,” Marxists Internet Archive, 2012, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/letters/1808-10-28.htm.

11. Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, 15.

12. Todd McGowan, “We Should Be Willing to Go to the End - Symposium on Slavoj Žižek (Day Two),” YouTube, August 31, 2022.

The issue with a word like aura is that it does not represent something as much as it is the representing signifier for nothing. Merriam-Webster describes the presence of aura as “seems to surround.” This word choice points to the ambiguity even the dictionary takes when describing the phenomenon, not to mention the multiple definitions. From official definitions to casual guides to thinking through this fluid term,³ we are able to surmise that aura is a specific energy that is given off. Energy is a certain je ne sais quoi that drives us in a direction, pulls us towards someone or something, or orients our attention towards someone or something. So, when we describe aura as an energy, there is a certain something, or better yet, nothing, that drives us, pulls us, and/or reorients us towards an object. Although what often gets left out in conversations of aura is the source of this energy, most likely because how do we assign a source to something we constantly fail to capture in our descriptions of it, something so amorphous?

At the moment, the source of a specific aura energy is associated with the object. “He/she has aura,” “that room is full of aura.” The feeling of energy that we feel as present is always associated with the external. However, by doing this, we reduce, and at times completely liquidate, our own agency in being drawn to ‘this’ and not ‘that.’ In other words, it is perhaps not that ‘his’ or ‘her’ aura is drawing me to them, but I am drawn to something I identify in them that is more than them, surplus to them; I am drawn to something indescribable in them, but is surely being associated with them by me.

But when we remove our own subjectivity from an identification of aura, we not only elevate others for reasons unexplained (a possibly dangerous move allowing those with ‘aura’ to flow into positions of power because of their indescribable presence), but we also allow for the commodification of this energy through businesses that offer ‘aura readings.’ Not extricable from the former point, the latter allows for folks who completely sideline their subjectivity and become objective viewers of another’s aura. Aura no longer becomes the unexplained presence or mysterious affect painting our vista of an object, but the acceptance that even if it can be ‘felt’ by everyone, it can only be ‘seen’ by some people.⁴

This ability to ‘see’ aura elevates certain people to the readers of what appears to be nothing. This is not inherently an awful claim on their part, but we must be careful in how we view these visionaries of truth. While some may be making a quick dollar, there are undoubtedly aura readers who believe in their ability to read the unreadable. Yet, to believe anyone can produce objective truth in the absence of subjective interpretation is to accept a kind of unearned authority, one that can all too easily be exploited. Even more than that, it begins to substitute myth for method. In fact, the attempt to ‘aura farm’ (the activities one can engage in to increase one’s aura) will always fail because something is considered to have aura only after it casts its spell on our attention, not before. Aura is determined retroactively in the moment after we align our attention with something that draws us in. Aura is our way of describing that thing we are suddenly drawn to out of the blue.

The energy of someone or something is nothing to scoff at; we all feel it as we are all drawn to this person, this look, or even this experience as opposed to that one. While we may be able to pinpoint why we were drawn to what we were drawn to, we describe it to avoid leaving a reason empty. In other words, a description of what is happening fits snugly in the space of ‘why is this happening?’ Yet, with aura, the description never fits snugly, allowing for many descriptions. As far back as the late 19th and early 20th century, aura was used to describe “The premonitory sensations preceding an epileptic or hysterical attack.”⁵ These sensations could be “pressure in the epigastrium, constriction in the throat, throbbing in the temples, ringing in the ears, or components of this complex of feelings.”⁶ The point being, even in a medical context, aura stands in not for something that can be identified for the right amount of money, or photographed with an advanced and spiritually attuned camera, but has always been the representative for an energy that refuses to define itself clearly. And perhaps, it is best left that way.

Whether an affect, a symptom, an imagined Halo around a cool guy or girl, the identification of aura will always say more about ourselves and what we imagine, than what we imagine it says about the object we are drawn to. What seems familiar yet utterly impossible to understand, aura lives in this unstructured, unsaid, unseen gap between the two.

References

1. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura

2. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura

3. www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a65048778/aura-color-meaning/

4. www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a65048778/aura-color-meaning/

5. Sigmund Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Mark Solms, trans. James Strachey, Vol. 2 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 2024), 111. (All further citations will be referred to as RSE).

6. Freud, RSE, Vol. 1, 44.

This hyper-intelligent civilization, which is not unlike a way we might describe our own, builds a creation in the hopes that it will feed back into the society what is missing. For the community in Jennings’ film, that is the meaning of life. For us, there exists a plethora of reasons for building our own supercomputer, or as it’s better known, artificial intelligence: automating repetitive tasks, helping with homework, providing hyper-efficiency for businesses, reducing human error, and many other reasons that boil down to removing human thought from the equation. In one particular study evaluating the top queries on ChatGPT, the number one result was “What is the meaning of life?”¹ For both top uses of AI and top queries inputted into ChatGPT, the studies that produced these findings used AI to evaluate themselves, a perverse self-evaluation in which we must trust the Other to let us know of its own results. But, if we are to be fair and work on the grounds that AI eliminates human error, then we must trust it not just as a creator of information, but also as an evaluator.

The uses of AI to eliminate human error are not distinct from asking the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life? Both loop back to a single universal inquiry that mimics the community in the film: what are we to do with this affliction that is being human? Furthermore, some of the other results of the latter study included how to learn another language, which books to read, what world history is, and the significance of art. Asking these questions points to a secondary, but not unrelated, universal inquiry: how do I relate to my fellow man? Why else is acquiring a second language so high on the list if not the hope that if I communicate with another in their language, they’ll finally understand me—a demand that has no satisfaction. And, in outsourcing even our attempts to understand one another, we betray how unsure we are of how to relate without a system to tell us who we are and what we should mean.

The question, then, that we must reckon with is whether we are pathologically immersed in a life of not-knowing or are we able to build a machine that fills this gap with a satisfying solution, and not constant frustration leading to the need for another supercomputer (and another, and another…) as depicted in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A question such as “what is the meaning of life” will never stop being asked because we ask it precisely because being human may mean we are constitutively distanced from any satisfactory answer; therefore, we must keep on asking. We seek to reduce the ability to think critically simply because we are well aware of our inability to close the very gap at the center of our existence. So, clinging to the belief we can create something to provide us with the ultimate answer as to why we are here, what any of this means, and maybe the most significant question of them all, how do I relate to my fellow man (as shown by those asking ChatGPT to craft text messages, cover letters, break up speeches, love letters, and more), simply becomes a symptom due to a cause we refuse to reckon with: perhaps being human is being permanently distanced from the ultimate truth. In other words, to become human is to step into the reality that creates something external to it that we are doomed to forever desire.

Is there anything we can say about this gap in knowledge? It is a bit of a paradoxical question because if we do not know of an existence, can we say anything about it? As shown by this very writing on non-knowledge, our (perhaps instinctive) response to not knowing is either to provide knowledge immediately to hide from a certain lack, or to discuss the possibility of living without ultimate knowledge, as I am doing, thereby filling the lack with knowledge about non-knowledge. To put it differently, and very bluntly: lack is generative.

Humanity’s justification for building such powerful tools (automating repetitive tasks, helping with homework, providing hyper-efficiency for businesses, reducing human error, etc.) is the perfect antidote to reconciling with the remaining desire for a God who knows all. The AI industry does not display a move away from theological traditions of old, displaying our separation from God into the epoch of Science, but it instead shows that we do not relate to Science as a human technological advancement, but the new God who will reveal to us, with enough input of capital and labor, the very same answers the human civilization turned to God for. In disappointment with what God had provided, humans go so far as to build technology in his absence. It is not the technology that claims the knowledge; instead, we who claim the technology harbor the ultimate knowledge, assuming that something must contain it. Because without this ultimate being, the self fails to find its own completion.

The ridiculousness of the meaning of life being boiled down to the number 42 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is portrayed as silly in the film, but there is something quite ingenious about this. This number, if it does hold significance for the writers and directors (including the creator of the book series, Douglas Adams), does not imply that there is any inherent universal meaning. Due to this lack of meaning, each person can create their own meaning for 42, or remain puzzled by the mystery that is 42. 42 does not represent the meaning of life; it represents its absence. Then, ironically, 42 does represent the meaning of life as the impossibility of ever existing as knowable. This absurd yet revealing moment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy underscores that our desire is never satisfied by an answer (no matter how many supercomputers are built or how many times we type into ChatGPT), but rather sustained by the very human lack around which the question turns.

No matter how far we advance, the truth of the human condition was plausibly diagnosed as far back as 1930: “Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.”²

References

1. Klart AI. “Exploring the Most Popular Prompts for ChatGPT: What People Are Asking?” Klart AI: AI Assistant & Enterprise Search, n.d. https://www.klartai.com/blog/exploring-the-most-popular-prompts-for-chatgpt-what-people-are-asking.

2. Freud, Sigmund. The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Mark Solms. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 21. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, 84.

This young woman describes her two nephews, the children of her sister, Karl and Otto. Otto, the older nephew, had a very close relationship with the young woman. She had a great deal of love for Karl, but admitted she had a bit more affection for Otto. Otto, unfortunately, passed away, leaving the young woman devastated. One night, she dreams that Karl is lying in a little coffin, just like Otto did, with his arms folded, and no life left in him. The young woman, having heard of Freud’s dream theory, angrily accosts Freud, asking him where the wish could be in this.

Now, if this is all she had said, Freud’s following interpretation may have been more credible. He tells her that because she had taken so much joy in seeing a certain man who showed up after Otto’s death, her wish was to see this man again, and this is why she dreamt of Karl’s death. While still a morbid thought, Freud manages to wipe away much of the morbidity of a possible wish and clean it up, seemingly for the betterment of the young woman’s ego. Freud tried to avoid a radical yet horrific and singular truth by interpreting the woman’s desires as simply for a man. While there may be truth in this interpretation, overlooking the most important aspect of this story would be a great disservice to the woman, the readers, and the discipline of psychoanalysis.

Before Freud’s interpretation, the young woman, after describing her dream, says to Freud, “Now tell me, what can that mean? You know me. Am I such a wicked person that I can wish my sister to lose the one child she still has? Or does the dream mean that I would rather Karl were dead than Otto, whom I was so much fonder of?” Freud responds by “[assuring] her that this last interpretation was out of the question. And after reflecting a little I was able to give her the correct interpretation of the dream, which she afterwards confirmed.”

Yet, it is precisely in this moment when Freud reassures her and swiftly installs his own ‘correct’ interpretation that the fault line in his method becomes visible. What appears as therapeutic confidence begins to read instead as a need to preserve his authority, revealing how easily interpretation can serve the therapist’s narcissism rather than the patient’s reality. The point here is not that either interpretation would be right or wrong — the patient’s hidden wish for a man (assisting in the Victorian era misogyny critiques of Freud) or the more horrendous wish of replacing the departed nephew — but that in claiming certainty from the therapist’s chair, the therapist does not gratify the patient but gratify’s his/her own lacking ego.

To take the job of therapy seriously — and by seriously, I exclusively mean what is to be done to prioritize the needs, demands, desires, and safety of the patient — there needs to be a reckoning with what maneuvers help the patient and which ones are in service of the therapist themselves. For Freud to interpret the young woman’s dream with certainty that her dream was not a dream for some horrible wish but a dream for a romantic desire, he fulfills his own role as ‘he who knows.’ However, this is not to say that interpreting her dream as ‘yes, you wish for Karl’s death instead, and Otto’s revival’ would be a maneuver privileging the patient; this choice would be identical to the interpretation Freud actually gave.

Perhaps, Freud is correct, our dreams are built around unconscious wishes we would rather distance ourselves from. And dreams morph these wishes as the vehicle for which we are able to experience the wish guilt-free, until we wake up, of course. But, the only way this can be explored is not to shut down the very mechanism by which the wish may be deciphered—the re-telling of the dream, whether through avowing the wish or negating it—but by paying close attention to what is presented. The therapist who believes themselves to be truth-sayers, able to see into the patient’s mind and recover an interpretation with certainty denies the uncertainty that flows through the room when patient’s present their disturbing and complicated thoughts. In other words, the therapist who denies disarray does so for their own comfort, not the patient’s.

This is not a guidebook for what is the correct choice in every therapeutic encounter, but simply a thought: to privilege the patient in the therapeutic encounter, the therapist must work with precisely what the patient offers and absolutely nothing more (this may seem extreme, but perhaps it is an ideal to work towards and not a realization that must be perfectly met). The therapist receives a loan of the patient’s words in order to unveil the value in them, not to provide the patient with new words. In other words, the young woman provided Freud with the interpretation of her wish for Karl’s death; although she offered it as a negation, she provided it nonetheless. In negating what the wish could not be, she brought her thoughts on the wish to Freud. To privilege the patient is not to accept or deny these words, but to present them to the patient as ‘your’ words and allow the space to explore why this thought was chosen, whether negated or not, and not to impose other words.

Therapy built in this vein elevates the paradoxical position of the singularity and universality that each patient brings to the clinical office: a singular story of their life that can only be told by them and from their perspective, as well as a universal misunderstanding of what this story might be trying to say. A universal misunderstanding shared by therapist and patient. The relationship built then is not one that provides the therapist a clear pathway into the psyche, but an impasse meant to be worked through by the unique relationship between the two. The patient enters the therapist’s office because they are met with a story that has become untranslatable, and they require a translator. The therapist can step into the role of translator by articulating ‘this means that,’ or they can allow the patient to swim in the untranslatable story, thereby producing new translations, forgotten translations, horrendous translations, and beautiful translations. Therapy should not solely validate the patient’s thoughts and feelings, but it also allows for the opportunity to validate their unique and subjective individuality, which is built upon the shame that comes with a universal not-knowing.

References

1. Sigmund Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Mark Solms, trans. James Strachey, Vol. 4 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 2024), 135.

However, both Barbie and Truman face the same inciting incident: an absolute rupture into their flawless, utterly catered lives. Barbie, while dancing with her Barbie Land friends without a care in the world, is abruptly faced with the horrifying thought of mortality, asking her friends in the midst of upbeat music, “You guys ever think about dying?” This question causes the record to scratch and a silence of 10 seconds, causing Barbie to pretend as if she was not asking the mortality-inducing question and ‘fixes’ her thought by articulating that she meant to say “I’m just dying to dance!”, causing the music to turn back on and the party to resume. Truman, in the midst of his morning routine, waving to his neighbors with the perfect television-ready phrase, “In case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night,” prepares to enter his car and get on his way to his perfectly tame job, notices a stage-light traveling down from the sky and crashes into the street in front of his house; an event that has quite literally no reasonable explanation for a moment. After Truman inspects the light and eventually gets back in his car, frazzled still, the catered radio transmission in his car tells him that an aircraft flying over his town happened to have trouble and shed some parts right into town.

While both Barbie and Truman shake off these events as they would rather not provide support to the ruptures in their lives, but instead buy into the homeostasis that their ‘normal’ lives bring them, these events spur on a series of consequential ruptures, small and large, that all cannot help but refer back to the original trauma. In other words, once the first trauma has been instilled, their lives are never the same, never tranquil, never able to be returned to their perfect existence.

In a sense, Barbie and Truman were not born at what is deemed their biological birth (whatever that may mean for Barbie), but were born the moment these first ruptures violently cut into their lives; nothing was ever the same following those moments. Rather, their lives begin with a cut, leading them to always refer to it and to chase what it introduced: the search for meaning, which presented a giant void. Instead of two movies showing two titular characters attempting to return to their lives before the cut, both Barbie and Truman are driven to investigate what could be made of this intrusion. Barbie ventures into what we know as the human world to navigate the deafening human thoughts on mortality, and Truman investigates more ruptures and begins to rewrite his past, questioning moments that seemed normal but now, in life after the cut, no longer do.

What aligns these movies is not simply their comedic nature or the star power of Margot Robbie and Jim Carrey, but rather their political radicality, which is the most shared throughline. Barbie, catching slack after its release for towing the line between a particular kind of feminist text and capitalist consumer propaganda, and The Truman Show, perhaps never being thought of in any political or emanicpatory nature, both tell the tale of lives being brought to the limit of what they know and never being allowed to ignore what is beyond the limit: fear, the unknown, and the terror of what lies on the other side.

In our day, we are constantly faced with solution after solution for the world’s ills: buy this, donate here, vote here, take action on this, speak in this way and not that way, return to this kind of tradition of the past, identify with this, progress forward, etc., etc. To act in the thick of a world that forces us to do nothing but act is to ignore the very fundamental horror: the most telling sign of our crisis is the relentless imperative to produce solutions. We see a society in disarray, driven by our demand to create practices, innovate, and provide answers; answers that are ultimately ineffective because the opportunity to produce more solutions persists.

Barbie and Truman quickly move away from the comfort of attempting to find an easy fix for the ruptures in their lives (even though the forced solution — to impose more solutions — is thrust upon them by the ‘men in charge’ governing their lives) and instead dive into the rupture and dance with the impossible instead of trying to reinstate the possible.

These two films would not solidify the surprising radicality of their stories without sharing a certain missive as they provide their conclusions. Barbie, with every opportunity to return to Barbie Land and a life of stability, serenity, and superiority, denies this false option; for her, life after the cut provides an inscription she cannot ignore: life is never able to return to what it is perceived as once being. And Truman, even with the creator of the television world that is his life shouting at him from the heavens, quite literally, that he must return to his perfectly manicured life and all will go back to normal, denies this forced choice in a moment of heroism. Barbie and Truman accept their castrations, no longer flawless beings inhabiting flawless worlds, but beings cut into by rupture and step into the very rupture that cut them. In this sense, ‘castration’ is nothing more than the loss that makes their new lives possible. Truman quite literally steps into an opening in the wall, which to him is the end of his universe, entering the human world, whose very mistake drops the stage light into his world, stepping not into a known solution but into what has not yet been written. Barbie refuses her life in Barbie Land and proclaims that she wants to be “part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made.” Accordingly, the film ends with a literal acceptance of castration, in which Barbie’s first mission in the human world is to see the Gynecologist.

There is a lie in Stewart’s response. That is not to say Stewart is being dishonest; there is no doubt he believes he is not a believer. But his words produce a lie, or better yet, a contradiction in his logic. He has no faith in a beyond, yet he ‘wishes’ that he did. This is not an uncommon position; many people every day deny religious affiliation yet proclaim they would love it if they could believe in something greater than this world. If there is genuinely no belief, then who are the words “I wish” directed towards? Sure, we can assign those words to a colloquial idiom, meaning nothing more than a throw-away phrase. But what if we are to take that wish seriously? Its very presence reveals a longing that logic alone cannot account for, and it is precisely in that tension between denial and desire that the real contradiction begins to emerge.

Stewart mentions his friend and collaborator, fellow comedian Stephen Colbert, is a faithful Catholic, and represents the opposite of him. I agree they are opposed in their relation to the divine, but not in the way Stewart believes. In Colbert’s certainty in faith, he denies God. God exists in our reality as that which does not exist. In other words, God exists in our world not as that which exists in the material, but that which exists in our material speech as the immaterial that speech cannot bring about in reality as an object. Which means, to articulate certainty in God’s existence is to deny God’s existence as surplus to ours, which would deny God altogether. But in Stewart’s wish for God, as something he does not have but wishes he could, he brings God to life (retroactively) in the very space his words create as surplus to them.

God, not as that which we can know, but as the contradiction in what we know, as that we cannot know, is nicely exemplified by the following paradox: “Christopher bore Christ; Christ bore the whole world; where then did Christopher stand?”¹ If Christopher exists to authorize all knowledge, does not our understanding of Christopher negate his existence as an authority outside of all knowledge? However, if there is no Christopher, then Christ himself has not been deemed the site of all knowledge and is lacking, allowing for the very unnameable space in knowledge where we wish for more, yet fail to know this space in full.

If we look at Jesus’ final moment on the cross, he yells into the sky, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” In that moment, Jesus embraces uncertainty, and for a moment, he is not a believer in his Father, but questions how a Father could do such a thing. How could God allow this to happen? Jesus, just for a moment, becomes an atheist. It is in that moment that those who preach the human condition is ‘made in Jesus’ image’ may be entirely accurate. The image that is mirrored is the Jesus who does not know his father’s love, but desires it. It is in that desire, and not in the extinguishing of desire through certainty, that God comes to life. Not as a knowable deity, but an unknown feeling, always in surplus, always excessive to our knowledge, and never without the articulation of the wish for that which is not present.

References

1. Sigmund Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Mark Solms, trans. James Strachey, Vol. 1 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 2024), 109.

Metamorphoses is not the only ancient text to present a tale of love’s origins. The famous story, as told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium,² depicts humans as desperately seeking their missing halves to become whole, as they once were. This is often regarded as a mythical love story that sparks passion in readers, inspiring them to seek a lover who is their perfect match or validating that their existing lover is the other half they have always been seeking.

Seemingly, Cupid’s myth and Aristophanes’ ramblings are fundamentally telling different stories. The former tells a story of Cupid illuminating the desire to love or to flee from love, while the latter inspires hope in an other who exists solely to complete us, make us whole, or make us one with the other. However, beneath the contrast, these stories reaffirm the same deterministic structure: love is not chosen; it emerges as that which has been predetermined from the outset. The beloved is not the other of our choice, but the choice of an other. In Aristophanes’ model, love becomes a search for completion, and what’s more, love is a narcissistic endeavor, privileging the lover’s quest for completion over the beloved. Like Aristophanes’ myth, Cupid’s golden arrow reassures us that love is destined, familiar, safe, and a desire for what we were predetermined to desire. Both stories even explain why, sometimes, love does not work. Cupid must have shot his blunt arrow this time, or the other half was simply not found just yet. In these deterministic frameworks, one does not fall in love so much as one is pushed into it, or potentially, away from it. Love is treated as a preordained outcome, packaged as signifiers such as compatibility, chemistry, destiny, or fate.

Finding love through a matrix that has already predetermined the lover and the beloved’s fate has not been lost in the modern era, which often claims to have left divinity behind in favor of scientific or self-permitted love choices. The divine, to all appearances, is not present in dating apps, which allow for freedom of choice, scientific explanations that frequently reduce love’s true nature to a chemical connection or a specific pheromone attraction between Two people, or love languages that give us the language through which we can find alignment with our authentic language of love.

However, dating apps present the illusion of choice while operating through deeply deterministic logics. By using algorithms, filters, and curated profiles, they reduce love to a matter of compatibility, optimization, and instant attraction, echoing Cupid’s golden arrow by pre-selecting desire rather than allowing it to emerge. In doing so, they frame love as a predictable outcome within a closed system. Most importantly, when the dating app does not deliver success, it is the app’s fault for not bringing fate to the user’s fingertips.

Scientific explanations, while valuable and not to be ignored entirely, misrecognize the logic of their own discovery and findings. As Cormac Gallagher notes in his reading of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XV: “Science, which is in principle atheistic, is in fact firmly theist. It depends on the notion of a subject—God, Nature, Spirit—that has laid out the plan of the Cosmos and possesses a pre-existent knowledge which it is the task of the scientist to reveal.”³ This theological residue within science reflects the broader fantasy that knowledge is out there, complete, and only needs to be uncovered. This fantasy sustains the illusion that some-One or some-Thing—whether God, Nature, Science, Cupid, or the destiny of another half awaiting us—already desires so that we do not have to. Science, here, operates as a mode of producing objective truth while disavowing its own subjective foundations: why are we producing these findings?

Love languages retroactively create pre-existing categories of how we experience love with an other and allow us to find the one with whom we relate the most (Quality time, Acts of service, Words of affirmation, Receiving gifts, Physical touch). The popular model of ‘love languages’ reduces love to a behavioral code to be deciphered, suggesting that with the right inputs, the correct emotional responses will follow. Like dating apps, scientific theology, the missing other half awaiting our finding, and Cupid’s arrows, the framework of love languages assumes that love is a predictable system of needs and translations, denying the strangeness, asymmetry, and unknowability at the heart of desire.

If love were as simple as discovering what existed for us, there would be no collective struggle across the globe in matters of love. Divorce rates would not be as high as they are, domestic violence would not be a highly prevalent and politicized issue, and the search for oneness would not exist, as many happy couples would no longer yearn for anything more than they have. Yet these are all realities we coexist with. Why does something determined afar cause us so much strife?

What I am putting forth is not that love is without heteronomy. Yet, instead of love’s heteronomy as determined by an external force awaiting our discovery, the heteronomous element is our perpetual lack of understanding why we fall in love and also why we must fall in love. In other words, there is no reason for love to exist other than the reason’s non-existence, forcing us to create reasons for its existence continuously. This chance occurrence retroactively being (re)written as necessity is well exemplified by the opening to Cole Porter’s 1928 song Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love). Porter writes about a bluebird who has never said a word, who suddenly starts to sing. He writes of a little bluebell at the bottom of a dell that begins to ring. He writes in this opening of chance events that are perhaps thought of as unthinkable or impossible, that, in fact, do happen. After their occurrence, they become, as Porter writes, “nature, that’s all.” These chance instances rewrite the past, and the instance itself, as a necessity; the past becomes nature only in the future’s retroactive stare. Porter goes on singing that once the bluebird sings and the little bluebell rings, it becomes a delight that we should all fall in love, and in fact, according to him, we all do, from educated fleas to Lithuanians, and even goldfish in the privacy of their bowls.

It is only once we fall in love that we can turn around and determine what pushed us. It is only in a reality after the rupture, after the chance occurrence of the love encounter—an encounter that can never be planned—that Cupid’s arrow and the insistence of the other half, as always had existed, are written into our past. The question then becomes: will this rewriting continue the theological tradition of positing an external influence with no room for the subjectivity that posits, or will our ability to posit be front and center in every reason that we posit? It is only because the love of Two must exist as Two separate beings coming together and deciding what to do with the difference between them that this difference between them can be written as the very reason they found each other. Will the difference that connects lovers be written as something that can be ignored (as is done by stories of external determinism), or will it be celebrated as the very opportunity for Two to come together? The latter allows for all discovery to no longer be a finding, but instead a creation that we are consequently exposed to as external ambiguity, and simultaneously, internal necessity. The very distance we take from the reason we fall in love is a reminder of our ability and choice to fall in love.

Love no longer becomes just the love for an other, but the love for the very difference that allows Two to love each other. The difference is the incompleteness of each lover; yet each lover can only continue to love the other by maintaining their incompleteness, not completing it, as Aristophanes’ tale suggests. Love is not a relation where Two becomes one, but instead the desire for an extinguishing of the space between Two that can only ever exist as a desire, not as a realization. To love the difference, instead of the other, is not an extinguishing of the other, but instead allows the other to exist as that which we can love. To love the other in the hopes that the distance between Two will diminish is not to love the other for their otherness, but is to love the beloved for what they can do for the lover; a love that stands on self-interested shoulders is a love that is invested in ridding the world of love itself.

Love as perpetual desire is a love that does not compel us to adopt an unmitigated and verifiable identity, but rather compels us to continually re-recognize ourselves and, consequently, to continue attempting to identify ourselves as lovers. This love is the antidote to the pursuit of pure self-interest.

This kind of love does not necessarily announce itself through spectacle but unfolds quietly in the shared moments between Two individuals. Love is presented in its most honest depiction, not with large musical scores for an entire theater to hear, grand fireworks for all to see, or animated birds fluttering from lovers to the spectators. Perhaps love is instead offered to the world in its most honest and radical depiction as not nearly as interesting, not nearly as romantic, not nearly as magical, and not nearly as clearly destined as it might seem to the couple themselves in the moment that they are falling in love. Perhaps the magnificence of love (and this is what a film like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise does so well with its long, drawn-out scenes, at times mundane conversation, and very minimal musical background) is what happens between Two and only between Two. It is a certain experience that cannot be directly touched upon but is felt in excess of the mundane conversation, drawn-out meetings, and music-less harmony between Two that only the Two can experience as a certain wonderful (in)experience. The universality of love is not a shared interest in Cupid but a shared interest in the negative space that Cupid fills, and furthermore, erases.

For love to flourish and exist in our world as the very love for difference in which we love what allows us to love as much as we love the other, we must kill Cupid and break his arrows. By doing so, no longer will love attack us from the outside, but love’s attack will always be an external experience that is internally claimed, misrecognized, and borne by the lover. In killing Cupid, we do not kill love; we kill the fantasy that love knows in advance who we are, what we need, or who we must desire. Only after murder can love emerge, not as destiny, but as the risk of encountering an other without guarantee. Love becomes no longer a truth but the everlasting quest for truth. In this light, we might borrow the words of the French philosopher Alain Badiou to lead our love forward:

“What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of Two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed, and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.”⁴

References

1. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Ian Johnston. Arlington, Virginia: Richer Resources Publications, 2012.

2. Plato. The Portable Plato. Edited by Scott Buchanan. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1977.

3. Gallagher, Cormac. “A Reading of the Psychoanalytic Act (1967-1968).” Lacan In Ireland.

4. Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. London, U.K.: Serpent’s Tail, 2012.