Fraying the String

Jung’s concept of individuation engenders its own forms of welcome. In the Jungian idiom, it begins with a crisis, a big dream, or some other encounter with shadow. And on one reading of Jung, it has a terminus, the Self, which means the process of analysis admits of something like stages. A process with such a telos may not necessarily entail a notion of spiritual seniority, but it certainly prepares the ground for one, and with it a fissure opens between the uninitiated and the graduated.

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In my early to mid-twenties, I was living and working in Japan. Long before the days of Western streamers busking for train fare in Osaka or dudes doing backflips on Shibuya’s crosswalks for likes, some of us aimed at becoming “lifers,” or at least at indulging a years-long dose of enculturation that would change us for good.

The consequences of these experiments were manifold. I wore a few different hats during my time as an assistant language teacher under Japan’s Ministry of Education, one of which was acting as a sort of mentor and counselor to newcomers adjusting to life there. The role entailed long phone calls marked by acute culture shock and the occasional visit to the mental hospital, where local expats had been institutionalized for nervous breakdowns or psychotic episodes. One notable case involved a young guy who’d committed to a rigorous week-long meditation retreat he wasn’t permitted to leave. He eventually broke free from the compound, but not before trying to stop an inbound train at a busy JR station with his palms outstretched. I often think of the bruises the police planted on him once they’d pulled him up onto the platform.1

The irony was that I too was slowly building up to a break. Japan has lately been called, in a pejorative sense, “Wakanda for white people,” but its combination of world-class hospitality and impeccable aesthetics obscure the difficulties foreigners from all over the globe face in finding their place in social life beyond that of a tourist.2 Even as a competent speaker of Japanese — or perhaps partly because of that fact — I recognized my own tenuous foothold amid my then burgeoning form of Japanese identity. I was a confident kid in America, but that youthful buoyancy diminished day by day while living in Kobe. Then came the night terrors.

Over a period of days and weeks, I was troubled by unsettling dreams and intense nightmares. I was forced to acknowledge at a certain point that these nightly episodes were not abating and that I should do something about it. As a young child I had an extremely active dream life, and it seemed I was again being drawn deep into a once-familiar imaginal well.

A connection I had made was that the intensity of the dreams seemed to pair with the feeling of being infantilized at work and in other social contexts. Anyone who has lived in Japan for an extended period may have come to feel as if every day were their first day there — at least from the perspective of those native to Japan. I remember one morning, on the cusp of permanently returning to the States, an older, unfamiliar neighbor cut a sharp angle in my direction on my walk to the local JR station and greeted me, unprompted, with “welcome to Japan.” To be fair, his gesture confirmed the familiar image of Japanese politeness. And it should be said that the informal protocols that exist in Japan for helping foreigners through everyday difficulties are by almost any standard enviable. The downside, from the perspective of the one receiving the hospitality, is the almost unbridgeable social distance it seems to force. This is especially true if you don’t speak the language well enough to stave off the suspicion that you are not competent to do the thing you’re trying to do. If you are a young American who prides himself on his personal autonomy, the dynamic can feel especially frustrating. My Japanese was at least good enough most of the time—but in the early years it wasn’t great, and this probably signaled that I was a floppier fish than I believed myself to be. In any case, when I did find myself truly unable to do something on my own, or when I was, for example, preemptively excluded from a work meeting on the grounds that I wouldn’t understand it or that it didn’t concern me, it dredged up feelings I hadn’t experienced since I was a small child.

My initial strategy was to find some sort of therapist — and given that I was formally educated in an intellectual milieu where the influence of Freud loomed large, I operated under the faulty assumption that just about any therapist would be ready to work with my dream content. Compounding this misconception, I didn’t know Freud’s work well enough at the time to conceive of what outcomes anything like Freudian therapy might actually produce. Living abroad complicated things further, since I was now working with an extremely limited contingent of counselors with native English ability. To my surprise, there turned out to be a whole community of expat psychologists and therapists established in Japan primed to see guys just like me. Regrettably, my approach was scattershot, and despite the range of options, I simply opted for someone close by.

The counselor I emailed was an American woman in her sixties. I cannot recall the contents of my initial message, but I don’t think it recorded the dire sense that infused my subsequent messages to other therapists. She operated out of an old clinic on the outskirts of the city, enshrouded in a Shōwa-era patina. The details of our conversation are a blur to me today, except for one crucial one — or two, rather. As we walked into her office, I casually mentioned that I had thoughts of ending my life, despite never having said that out loud or even thought it privately. “Okay, yeah, we need to get you in here,” she said, quite reasonably. Strangely, though, my suicide mention scarcely came up again in our session. But the notion was now in the air, and this deathly desire had become an operator in my general psychic makeup — a detail that would later manifest less as real death than, more productively, as a necessary imaginal death.

The second echo, still audible more than twenty years later, was her suggestion that I watch Harold and Maude. It’s the story of Harold, a death-obsessed twenty-something from a bourgeois family who stages spurious suicides as spectacles to garner attention, and who eventually falls in love with his polar opposite: Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old woman with a penchant for living life to the fullest. (If you haven’t seen it, you can imagine the ending; it’s a solid entry in the history of dramatic cinema in any case.) The counselor checked in a couple of times to see whether I had taken her recommendation. I had. Though I was not as financially well-endowed as Harold, the age gap between us, the subject matter she had chosen for me, and the tenor of the follow-up left me uneasy. I still don’t know what was intended; I stopped writing back. As my dreams continued, so did the search for a therapist.

Things were getting worse, so I groped for new strategies. It was around this time that I considered looking into the work of Carl Jung, who, in the hallowed halls of academia, is typically written off for his associations with mysticism, idealism, and his passing affinities with the European nationalisms of his era. A lot of that was opaque to me then, and despite an education deeply under the influence of post-Marxist thought, I was still fairly wild-eyed in that world. Netscape searches for Jung-related books and essays also turned up the work of James Hillman, who in the late nineties and early 2000s was enjoying a bit of a heyday. Compared to Jung, Hillman’s sensibilities accorded more closely with my undergraduate exploration of Derrida and the like — though I came to discover later that Hillman knew Derrida personally and absolutely hated him. Incidentally, I haven’t seen this recorded anywhere; it survives only through the verbal transmission of one of my late mentors, which, given Derrida, is both fitting and funny. Take it as hearsay or apocrypha.

The incipient journey with Jung and Hillman offered some relief and provided scaffolding by which to make sense of the ongoing night terrors. And despite this tryst being a sort of betrayal of the intellectual mediators I had encountered in college, Jung and Hillman really arrived on the scene, where Nietzsche, Derrida, and the others did not. The almost oppressive sense that these psychical pressures were on the inside, rather than emergent in the outer world, gave Jung’s influence some additional purchase. That said, Hillman’s idea of the anima mundi — that what I was experiencing was in fact in the world — was also resonant, since the general affective thrum coursing under my dream life seemed continuous with the challenges I faced in waking life. Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld was a real gift; it had me going to Muji, Japan’s famous big-box retailer of minimal home goods, to grab pens and stationery for scrawling out all sorts of drawings and whipping up daily entries in my dream diary.

Around this time, one of my earlier messages in a bottle turned up on the shore of Toshio Kawai, a Jungian analyst and professor at Kyoto University, who for whatever reason graciously offered to take me on as an analysand. It was absolutely what I needed—though for various reasons I felt as if I had thoughtlessly imposed on Kawai-sensei, who at the time seemed to be giving up valuable office hours for my bullshit. In one of our initial sessions, I began to cry effusively while recounting the details of one of my dreams, the tears flowing almost on their own, the emotional dam holding them back effectively burst. To this day that remains perhaps the most deeply satisfying relinquishment of pain and suffering I have ever experienced. Unlike our friend on the train tracks and other expats who suffered similar fates, the intervention I helped to cultivate saved me from getting my ass booted out of the country — or worse.

My relationship with archetypal psychology subsequently blossomed into a years-long project marked by periods of sustained analysis and a personal regimen of active imagination. A later return to post-Marxist and post- and anti-psychoanalytic literature reopened questions and lines of thought that would ultimately come to challenge certain beliefs and values cultivated in the general milieu of archetypal thinking.

The recent Acid Horizon Research Commons public panel Does Psyche Matter? Jung and the Unconscious in 2026 takes up a number of questions and concerns, some of them long settled in my mind and others still open, that continue to trouble — in the most positive and productive sense — my early encounters with Jung and Hillman. In the wake of that discussion I have gathered a few of the threads unspooled in the panel and the Q&A that followed, which I plan to address in an upcoming piece on individuation: its relationship to the master signifier, and the way the concept itself functions as a master signifier of sorts. Look forward to it.

In the meantime, have a look at the panel discussion, and note that Bob’s class on Jung and Spinoza begins next month on October 4th.

A quick note before this piece: enough people have asked about paid access that I've decided to enable contributor subscriptions here on Substack directly. But if you're looking for where your financial support really bolsters our projects, take a class at Acid Horizon Research Commons, which also helps fund the administrative work behind building out our course series, than toward me personally. If you already support Acid Horizon or LEPHT HAND on Patreon, this essay is also posted there as subscriber-exclusive content, so there's no need to pay for it twice. That said, this piece goes public alongside an upcoming Acid Horizon episode in September, and it will be made publicly on this blog around that time. Thanks for the generous support!

The Case Against Deleuze and Guattari

One of the objections that some Marxists raise concerning the work of Deleuze and Guattari is their theoretical dissolution of the proletariat as a determinate revolutionary subject. Their concern is worth taking seriously, especially as the contradictions of advanced capitalism continue to exacerbate without producing the revolution meant to resolve them, to say nothing of our trudging deeper into the mire of the new right’s growing hegemony. With the end of history sprawling now into an interminable epilogue, the demand for an effective quantity and quality of revolutionary power forces an urgent re-examination of proletarian struggle vis-à-vis a bounded conception of the proletariat as it pertains to class composition.

Moreover, within a smaller milieu of detractors, Deleuze and Guattari are said to have put class under erasure, or pushed it to the side. The Deleuzians, they say, are in favor of a notion of revolution already co-opted by the now dying neoliberal establishment, one that elevates outgrowths of class and its socially evolving contingencies (race, sex, gender, etc.) while deprioritizing or outright dismissing the plight of workers. This charge has produced a spongy taxonomy of who among workers retains real revolutionary potential and who instead services the ruling class as a bulwark against the cultivation of class consciousness. Categories such as the “professional-managerial class,” including institutionally firm-footed academics, have become prominent targets here, alongside the murkier “labor aristocracy”: a stratum of well-paid laborers with sought-after professional skills, Cadillac health plans, protected pensions, and a host of other affordances. However, as with any socioeconomic category, edge cases trouble—particularly under the mercurial conditions of today's capitalism. Even on Marx’s own terms, the desire to furnish a settled proletarian category rests on shakier ground than these folks would like to admit. As Étienne Balibar observes, “the very word ‘proletariat’ almost never appears in Capital (Vol. 1)”, a paucity of appearance suggestive of the fact that Marxism depends less on firming up the category than on extending the analysis of capital into its attendant revolutionary practices—which was Marx’s actual project.1

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Witness

In June, I was overcome by an unexpected flood of negative emotion related to a variety of internal and external pressures. It aroused in me a familiar game of extraordinary self-regulation and intrapsychic diplomacy: balancing honest expression against the impulse towards self-management, all while keeping watch over the whole process. Before the charade collapsed into my usual tendency towards a paradoxical mix of sloppy private effusion and masculine suppression of underlying issues, I cleared my schedule to enjoy a morning bike ride. We live at the very top of our mountain, which affords a luxurious downhill slope where, if you ball yourself up tight enough, you can hit anywhere from 30 to 40 miles per hour, risking the bliss of an unbroken ten-minute meditation beneath an emerald gauntlet of elder oaks. I started the ride and began sloughing the negative vibes as I let the aperture of my soul open wide.

Then came the shock: passing the old lime plant, an oncoming Ram 2500 pickup, with all its chrome and heft, struck a yearling doe as she darted out from under an adjacent guardrail. The impact spiraled the animal, legs splayed akimbo, and deposited her on the opposite side of the road. My cry was audible, visceral, and immediate. I rolled closer to bear witness, my bike’s freewheel ticking beneath me as I approached the scene. The truck u-turned and pulled onto a patch of gravel, its front end mangled. A grizzled but friendly local stepped down from the cab: stained cap, cargo shorts, a decades-old American flag shirt from Old Navy.

“Well, that’s a way to start the day. I love killing these guys in the fall, ya know — when you’re allowed to. But I hate seeing them go like this...”

There was something to appreciate about the man’s blunt, if not thoughtless, candor. It flows from a style and character attributable to many American men I have known, for whom pulling a trigger is almost better than having an orgasm. Consider that the first thing this guy told me was how much he loves killing animals, as one he’d just accidentally run over still writhed on the road’s shoulder. To be fair, the many American hunters I have known do seem to truly appreciate Nature and its “gifts”, though they’ll also admit those gifts aren’t innocently obtained. They see the woods as providing not only sustenance, but a mythic arena where the impulse toward predation can be satisfied by socially sanctioned means.

Legal hunting in the US is an institution that channels a broader “restricted economy” of cruelty: our allegedly innate drive to kill gets funneled away from homicide and linked instead to a prestige hierarchy of freezer-fillers, trophy-gatherers, and men chasing bragging rights. But when a wild animal’s death results from accident rather than the hunt, even a neighbor with a bit of bloodlust becomes exposed to a host of feelings his hunting rituals are built to hold at bay.

The deer was not dead — not yet anyway. The doe’s black eye hovered motionless above the faltering thrash of its shattered limbs. Despite snapped legs and caved-in ribs, she evinced a stoic grace, her gaze fixed on the crest of the weedy embankment which she clambered to ascend. Her jaw drooped as her ambition began to fade. My horror fully crystallized at the sight of her curved eyelashes, a detail that concretized her personhood amid her stammered breathing.

Desperate, I asked the man if he was carrying. He was — everyone has guns on them out here — but he was reluctant to dispatch the animal with the lime plant and a few older Victorian homes just forty or fifty yards away. Given a bullet through the lungs was not an option, the man slunk back towards his battered pickup, muttering that he’d call the game commission to come grab the doe. I had nothing to offer. My restorative ride was effectively over as I snuck glimpses of the deer’s last convulsions. I began to coast down the hill again, now towards an indeterminate destination.

Though crude, the mercy killing of an animal is standard practice in these parts if you have the means and the guts. In fact, my younger brother once stopped to slit the throat of a maimed buck wriggling roadside on Route 611 in Swiftwater before bagging it up for processing. When he tells the story, he never fails to mention that a random rubbernecker, aghast at the ordeal, vomited out the driver-side window of their Honda Civic as blood spurted from the neck wound across the glass and gravel. My brother, a wildlife researcher (not to mention a hunter and quintessential nature lover), now had a full freezer to brag about.

The culture of hunting and outdoor sports encircled me throughout my youth, but, unlike my brother, something in me ultimately recoiled against it. Even though I grew up in a working-class family of self-described “rednecks” — a term that, in my experience, has come to mean something like downwardly mobile workers, slowly inured to the Walmartification of America and swept up in a mass culture that glamorizes a rural-coded, low-prole aesthetic — I was never really inscribed into their milieu, aesthetically speaking. The financial reality, however, did not discriminate.

Long before I became an “elitist” vegetarian, I developed an outsider’s perspective on outdoor sports, the killing of deer, and the like. I kept a secret solidarity with dad’s kills, even if I later partook of them in the form of ring bologna or ground venison patties. I vaguely recall how the gamey twinge of deer meat would cling to my palate. It was almost aromatic — a peculiar taste lingered that intimated a sense of “animal presence” no other meat could evoke.

That presence became refulgent one November, after my dad bagged a buck and we drove it down to the processor in our 1978 two-tone brown and yellow Chevy Scottsdale pickup, the animal bunched up in the truck’s short bed. We were instantly transported to a scene à la Hellraiser as the metal door swung open to let us in. There were more deer dangling from the ceiling than I’d imagined. Men in bloodied coveralls stripped buck hides with alarming speed and ease, pulling away the chestnut veneers to reveal the luminescent fascia beneath. The cutting room’s unforgiving fluorescence danced upon the ghostly sheath of membranous tissue enveloping each of the bucks’ bodies, a final barrier between remaining beast and becoming meat.

The Logic Forgets the Dogs

The English word “deer” comes from the Old English word “dēor,” which in its time referred to a “wild animal,” a “beast,” or any wild quadruped; hence, “dēor” did not simply refer to the antlered animal to which “deer” refers today. Tracing the etymology further back, we find the Proto-Germanic *deuzą, derived from the Proto-Indo-European *dʰewsóm (”living thing”) and, further still, *dʰéws (”breath”). In its most reducible terms, what we call “deer” in modern English gestures linguistically toward what is most basic and visceral in animals and ourselves: breathing. Here there are resonances with the Latin word anima, which carries connotations of “breath” and “soul.” In modern analytical and archetypal psychology, anima denotes an archetypal image of alterity, typically construed as the feminine figure within the masculinized unconscious, essential to the process of individuation.

The triangulation of masculine psyche, feminine divinity, and brute animality finds a particularly apt expression through the Greek myth of Actaeon. Navigating from an etymological register to an archetypal one, we might produce an interesting interpretation of the myth. However, no interpretation approaches this triangulation without complication. An adequate interpretation demands minimal fidelity to the images that inhabit it while pushing beyond itself in a manner suggested by the image itself. In the case of Actaeon in particular, this may involve shattering some of the metaphysical presuppositions which underpin the method by which one approaches it.

As the story goes, Actaeon is a hunter who, having called off the day’s hunt, decides instead to indulge a midday stroll into the woods with his pack of hunting dogs in tow. On his jaunt, he stumbles upon the goddess Artemis bathing nude in a grotto alongside her forest nymphs. Artemis’s beauty stuns the accidental voyeur, whose gasp, we might imagine, alerts the goddess and her entourage to his trespass. As punishment, Artemis transforms Actaeon into a stag, and he bounds off in fear. His own hounds, no longer recognizing their master, run him down and tear him to shreds. The hunter is, in the end, slaughtered by the very instruments of his own predation.

Jungian psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich, known for his infusion of Hegelian metaphysics into Jung’s psychology, reads Actaeon’s transformation as a metaphor for the dialectical life of the soul. On this account, Actaeon’s drift from the ego-driven act of hunting (a symbol of the ego) opens onto an encounter with the Other (the feminine Divine embodied by Artemis) in its absolute alterity. The dissolution of the ego thereby gives way to a merger of Self and Other, revealing the archetypal truth of the soul and its atemporal logic.

But what Giegerich’s notion of truth demands, expressed in its Hegelian idiom, is the dismissal of a crucial remainder the myth’s logic forgets in the moment of its own revelation. While Actaeon perishes, his hounds thrive. Relieved of their imposed hunting duties, the pack is left to enjoy the play of its instincts through the flight of its master-turned-prey. Actaeon’s glimpse of Artemis breaks apart the Actaeon-pack-assemblage of the hunt, delivering the hunter to what Georges Bataille terms an “immanent flow” — an utter animality, the devourings of an amoral cruelty, a state foreclosed to the human realm given its predilection for a discontinuity produced by the instrumentalization of life. A brush with immanence, for Bataille, means probing the limits of this lost continuity and valorizing what he terms an “unemployed negativity.”

That said, one challenge for Bataille’s view is that it leans toward recommitting to the dialectical schema through its own inversion. In other words, by plumbing the horrors of what the early work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze terms a philosophy of the “depths,” Bataille risks falling into a trap similar to the one Deleuze associates with the “heights” — in this case, the Absolute, approached in its inverted form through the figure of pure excess.

It’s worth noting that readings of Bataille split on this point: one Bataille pursues maximal transgression and expenditure in perpetuity; a more “managerial” Bataille insists on the dual necessity of both regulatory social and economic operations and pronounced moments of non-productive expenditure. The textual evidence leans toward the latter, but what persists across both readings is the lingering shadow of Hegel within Bataille’s very attempt to escape him. In any case, when considering the image of desire in the Actaeon myth, the dangers of the depths (annihilation through ecstatic embodiment) and those of the heights (annihilation through rarefaction into the ideal) often obscure a different cruelty, one that is convertible, deathless, and ravages without commitment to ascent or dissolution.

The imagistic excess that Giegerich’s reading cannot incorporate is the pack of hounds itself: nomadic, multiplicitous, feral, and finally faithless to any given master. What lives beyond our glimpse of Artemis is the ambiguity of beauty and horror to which the myth itself attests. As for Giegerich’s notion of soul: the myth of Actaeon yields the truth of Self and Other only by abandoning the polymorphous perversity of desire in favor of its own absolutized logic. Simply put, the logic forgets the dogs. The pack embodies the continuity crushed not only by the instrumentalization of life but the drive towards fully rendering it within a systematized logic. The dogs are what remains animal in the myth from start to finish.

Beauty, Horror, and a Return to Breath

Like Actaeon, bearing witness to the commingled beauty and horror of the dying doe entailed a transformation that nearly undid me. In the days and weeks that followed, I developed a sustained nervous malady that underwent a series of changes. Upon returning home that morning, I told my wife that I had witnessed the accident and that it had seriously impacted me—though it was clear I failed at communicating the existential depths this event had touched. Not long after our conversation, I felt a welling up in my chest, and a panic attack came on. Prior to that day, I had experienced overwhelming anxiety only once before in my life. Subsequently, the afterimage of the doe’s placid countenance set above her broken body continued to haunt me as I began to suffer frequent heart palpitations. In addition, I became intermittently short of breath. An invisible chaos was now at work inside my chest cavity.

The impetus to write this piece came from the weeks of quiet suffering that followed. Despite my attempts to explain to those around me what was happening, something utterly opaque — an incommunicable excess — always escaped articulation. In the final weeks of the episode, the chaos detached from my heart and lungs and began roving my body like a vagrant shadow. At night, I trembled, the shudder amplified by the thought that it might never end.

The ceaseless irregularities brought on by the event forced me to return to deliberate breathing, sitting meditation, and regular yoga practice. This broad intervention seemed to work, as the symptoms began to diminish day by day. Regardless of whether my renewed practice was truly the cause or not, I became more in touch with my body, which resulted in a generally slower, more deliberate pace and a greater attentiveness to the world around me. This is an ethos I’ve attempted to foster through developing projects such as Vintagia; the urgency of my personal situation, however, gave a much stronger impetus than any I had tried to previously manufacture. In this sense, the tragic death of the doe that morning was not in vain. Her serene eye became a lodestar which helped lead me back to my own breath.

To undergo a becoming-deer is to undergo an intensive reduction to the act of breathing — to be made aware of breath in its full constitutive force, and to know that without it we perish or become lost. It means the collapse of the conceit of being human, and the awakening of the viscerality we share with animals: the discovery of breathing itself as both fragile event and immanent force in the unfolding of bodily truth. This awakening occurs through a visceralization of beauty and horror, often rendered so close together as to be indistinguishable. A gasp of horror and a moment of breathtaking awe can pass through the body in proximate registers, each mistakable for the other. As in the myth of Actaeon, gasps sparked by this commingling offer a brush with the immanent flow of the animal realm. Though Actaeon begins the tale bounded within the human, he is rendered both into and unto animal: his animality collapses into huff and chase, an egoic singularity ravaged by the jaws of a faithless pack.

I have thought of the doe every day since that June morning. My affinity for deer has grown since moving to the woods more than five years ago. Observing their habits and movements daily, I’ve come to learn a great deal about them. This year, two fawns arrived, and our yard became their playground. Their mother deemed us safe enough to leave them close to the house as she went off to feed. As they grew, the fawns remained properly tentative about drawing too close, yet showed a lingering curiosity about the bearded man who drifted past their hiding spots during their first days of life. I would prefer that they not make the leap into the realm of the human. I would ask that our respective alterity be preserved, a certain distance between us remain, and that what is incommunicable never fully resolve.

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Taking the public collapse of the popular podcast This Jungian Life (a lawsuit between its co-hosts, allegations of pseudonymous anti-trans activism, and the installation of a producer with ties to The Epoch Times) as a case study, Craig and Bob trace how the reification of archetypes, the politics of projection, and the discipline's own economic and institutional pressures leave it vulnerable to exactly the reactionary capture it claims to diagnose.

Bob's website: https://www.roberthlangan.com/
ig: roberthlangan
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Dan's paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jkxy_QPKk_W_yg4uanXx17Qnyka6ry-x/view?usp=sharing

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That's the charge Baudrillard levels at Foucault in 'Forget Foucault', the 1977 book review that got him blacklisted from French theory and earned him the title "shame of the profession" from Deleuze. Cooper Cherry of Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour joins us to work through reversibility, seduction, the potlatch, and what Baudrillard thinks theory should actually be doing. We get into power, seduction, enucleation, courtly love, yearning versus craving, and Baudrillard's theory of fascism.

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twitter: @unconscioushh

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In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights.

Groys reveals a Kojève with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.

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What if fascism isn't a break from capitalism but just capitalism finally being honest about itself? Craig sits down with the podcast's very own Adam C. Jones to unpack his essay "The Promise of Cruelty: Fascism and Social Murder," tracing Engels' concept of social murder through Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and the current far right. We dig into how neoliberalism redistributes cruelty as compensation when it can't redistribute wealth. We also address why today's "simulacral fascism" mobilizes people as consumers and fans rather than as an organized political base. A wide-ranging discussion where Marxist analysis confronts the concepts of Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Bataille.

"The Promise of Cruelty: Fascism and Social Murder": https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/26/the-promise-of-cruelty-fascism-and-social-murder/

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What if modernity's greatest crime isn't economic or political, but spiritual, a severing of humanity from the sacred language written into nature itself? In this episode, Serpetie and Emma dig into Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 1993 collection The Need for a Sacred Science, taking a critical look at his perennialist argument that the harmony, symbols, and laws of the natural world carry an ontological reality that modern scientific reductionism has all but destroyed. The conversation moves through Nasr's critique of technological progress, the idol of innovation, and some surprising common ground with Deleuze, James Hillman, and anti-civilization thought, including what any of this means in the age of AI. Part two goes deeper into Nasr's sacred order and its tensions with strife and Nietzschean cosmology, and that one is for Patreon subscribers only. Link below.

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I put my previous meditations on pause following the release of my review of Inferno for The Quietus, which seemed the right time to catch my breath following the weeks of build up and the cathartic release many of us BoC obsessives felt. Nonetheless, I continued to work quietly on various planned philosophical engagements related to themes illuminated by the album. In the pipeline are some discussions with fellow collaborator Emma Stamm for the LEPHT HAND podcast. One will involve an extended look at the writing of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose 2003 lecture from Harvard Divinity School was sampled on the track ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz.’ There is another episode in the planning and research phase on deep time, especially as the concept is addressed in Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow/Time’s Cycle. Gould has long been a favorite author, and his work has been waiting patiently for the right occasion to feature on one of our shows.

The thoughts in this piece were inspired by exactly three pages in Roger Caillois’ Man and the Sacred. Caillois was not merely a contemporary of Georges Bataille but a one-time collaborator; both were founding members of the Collège de Sociologie in the late 1930s, and Caillois briefly participated in its more secretive counterpart, Acéphale. To venture a comparison, whereas Bataille is a bit of a “brawler” when it came to his work on the sacred and its place in political economy, Caillois was the more technical fighter. This is not to disparage Bataille, whose stronger political commitments and unique theoretical voice make his the more outstanding contribution. The two later fell out over Caillois’ charge that Bataille’s work had succumbed to mysticism and irrationalism, lacking the scholarly rigor to which Caillois held himself. That said, the depth and precision of Caillois’ intervention into a field populated by heavyweights such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto invites unique insights, some of which I examine herein.

I should also note that Man and the Sacred will feature on an upcoming episode of Acid Horizon. Caillois’ work also appears on the reading list for Myth, Tragedy & the Aesthetics of Liberation: Nietzsche, Marx & Bataille on the Political Economy of Play, an upcoming course offered by Devin Gouré at AHRC beginning July 7th, 2026. While I am plainly invested in the overall success of our course series, I cannot recommend Devin’s new work on play and games featured in this course highly enough. It traverses important ground in philosophy and myth studies while bearing directly on urgent concerns in revolutionary thought, examining how our collective libidinal makeup is shaped by our shared orientation towards work, play, and aesthetics.

The Ambiguities of the Sacred

What Caillois calls the sacred dialectic is established in the dual attraction and repulsion of the divine. The sacred maintains both a captivating and terrifying character, or what Rudolf Otto distinguished as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. What struck me in Caillois’ work is his careful account of the emergence of the sacred/profane distinction and the imaginal and libidinal forces that draw us into relationship with the sacred. To put it as a question: how do sacred objects and spaces seduce us into a relationship with the divine?

In Caillois’ account, an encounter with the sacred cleaves our world into dualities not only effectuating a radical shift in collective values but, one might argue, redistricting the psyche entirely.

To be sure, the polarization of sacred and profane is not merely psychological but structural. Nonetheless, the religious imaginary is populated with syzygies and imagistic counterpoints that illuminate the contours of this structure: heaven and hell, Christ and Lucifer, salvation and damnation, to name but a few. Yet naming even a few raises the question of how these dualities, sometimes deemed archetypal positions, would appear in a more secular idiom or in a milieu where the figure of religion itself was inverted or profaned, either as a function of ideological critique or in an act of outright desecration or disavowal.

Before we can ask how the sacred appears in the secular idiom, we must ask what compels us to draw close to sacred places at all. A more fundamental question might be: what is the nature of the nascent impulse that unfolds as a desire for the sacred itself? Caillois points to two salient examples: 1) Augustine’s et inardesco, the ardor kindled within the sense that we are insufficient before the divine yet fundamentally identified with it, and 2) an image from the Bhagavad-gītā of humans hurling themselves en masse into Krishna’s mouth, unable to thwart the seemingly irrational compulsion to dissolve themselves in a spiritual abyss. Sacred sites and consecrated objects function as spaces that tease the prospect of divine dissolution and merger through the construction of taboos and prohibitions, instigating a push and pull in the psyche. Put another way, holy demarcation itself institutes the sacred dialectic, and its function is to amplify a sense of gaping lack within us and the yearning which always falls short of filling it. Following Augustine, the most basic image of the sacred dialectic is the flame of ardor aroused in the double bind of the divine’s simultaneous presence and absence.

One or Several Campfire Headphases

Within the image of fire, philosophical reflection and sacred feeling find a common ground, generative and consuming in equal measure. Gaston Bachelard, in his The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), asserts that philosophical and other creative reflection was born in the campfire or the hearth. In our hypnotic dwelling within the embers (a campfire headphase perhaps), images and intimations circulate to form new thoughts and create novel distinctions. For Caillois, approaching the sacred stokes the flame of awe, enacting a sort of spiritual centrifuge within us which separates opposing qualities: the pure from impure, good from evil, sacred from profane.

In the aftermath of the tremendum et fascinans, the tempering of the inflamed soul produces a concrescence in the form of internalized religious mandates and strict moral boundaries. What is essential to Caillois’ concept of the sacred dialectic is the centrifugal process whose ambivalent animating factors terminate in the creation of opposites. This oppositionalism intends to enshrine dualities in discrete forms, but the interminable problem of religious attitudes evolved from such encounters is that the ambivalences are preserved amid the polarities they produce—the co-determination of heaven and hell being one such example. The work of theology involves the challenge of simultaneously preserving the ambivalences engendered in the experience of the divine while articulating its dual facets of fascination and horror.

The Sacred Aesthetics of Profanation

The aestheticization and ambivalent profanation of religion in the work of Boards of Canada—which was previously incidental but now a dominant if not singular theme in Inferno—partakes in its own sacred dialectic. This is a claim that I essentially advanced in my first fateful piece on the concept of corduroy psychedelia. In that essay, I suggested that a certain modern tendency of nostalgic reminiscence entailed a confrontation with its apocalyptic obverse. In the Sandison brothers’ cosmology, this appears first as the valorization of what Simon Reynolds called ‘the cult of childhood’ before us long-time listeners were slowly pulled into a deeper well of darker forces. Throughout BoC’s evolving discography, we are shuttled back and forth along these poles at varying intensities and intervals before we finally arrive at Inferno, which features these themes in some of their sharpest relief.

What has come to me as new since my first piece is the possibility that the experience of nostalgia in its modern accent may act as surrogate for encounters with the divine. The implication is that modern hauntology comprises a larger secular articulation of the sacred dialectic. This may seem like a big jump to make—but some of the work needed to make the leap has already been undertaken in my piece on corduroy psychedelia, which interrogates our collective nostalgia for late modernity, specifically that of the 1970s and early 80s.

To summarize briefly: the late modern emerged decades in the wake of the death of god; the surrogates that had arrived in the form of totalizing secular frameworks were either verging on collapse or already in ruins. What remained under neoliberalism were ideologically lower-powered but eager substitutes operating under the aegis of American hegemony: nonprofits, new religions, public access initiatives, civic voluntarism, and therapeutic cultures deployed to absorb the antagonisms generated by an ever-evolving set of late capitalist imperatives. For those in the US who rejected the giddiness of mass culture and the metastasizing of popular media, there was the gravitas and antiseptic dignity available in the public broadcast apparatus. From the innocence of Sesame Street to the solemn late-night mediations of Nature and Nova, PBS provided an unhurried, intellectual respite from the blitz and glitz of primetime. Outside of TV and the widening consumer landscape, cults and communes offered a more forceful rejection of the dominant paradigm, creating spaces that promised insulation from the creep of capital and commodity culture into everything.

All of this converges in the nostalgia for the amber of analog media and its tangibility as it is cast against the backdrop of an increasingly evanescent capitalism. There is an intimacy associated with analog culture and the hauntological character of BoC’s earlier work that almost naturally tips into the vertigo we hear on Inferno. On one side of the analog divide, there is a coziness and warmth pinned to a distorted memory of halcyon days; on the other emerge ghostly voices such as those we hear on Inferno: confessions of spiritual abjection in ‘Age of Capricorn,’ echoes from the Hindu hell in ‘Naraka,’ religious devotion sundering familial love in ‘Father and Son,’ and Aleister Crowley’s proclamation of an epoch-ending child-god in ‘All Reason Departs.’

In my corduroy psychedelia piece, written in total ignorance of Inferno‘s imminent release, I claimed that Boards of Canada’s aesthetic encapsulations of childhood innocence presupposed the Satanic vectors of Geogaddi and the apocalyptic temperament of Tomorrow’s Harvest. That BoC titled their latest album Inferno, on which those emergent negativities entwine, vindicates the claims I made at the very start of this informal writing project.

Before the Next Sacrament

There is much more to say on the aestheticization of the sacred dialectic in the manner undertaken by Boards of Canada and what implications it holds for thinking through and beyond their music as simply hauntological. We often speak of analog warmth to describe the character of certain retro visuals and sound, and a resonant if not archetypal correspondence emerges in setting that warmth against the blaze of hellfire or the abyssal cold of hell’s frozen core in Dante’s rendering. The drift from the cozier corduroy feel of BoC’s early work to the ashen pulpit where saints and sinners converge traverses a set of poles akin to Blake’s dialectic of innocence and experience. Caillois too invokes the figure of the innocent child drawn to the flame who, upon being burned, learns the limits of their human curiosity.

And perhaps the paradoxical character of Dante’s ninth circle is worth pausing on: despite what the title Inferno seems to promise, the album feels rather icy at times, particularly at the bends of its own labyrinth. The passage from ‘Age of Capricorn’ to ‘Father and Son’ comes to mind—a brief sonic katábasis and incubation rite intended to deepen and cleanse the listener before the next sacrament.

Coda

If you made it this far—thank you. Receiving responses to my first essay on Boards of Canada was uniquely exciting, and I can hardly imagine replicating those resonances as future writings on Inferno move deeper into the weeds of philosophy. My goal nonetheless is to probe thoughtfully the references the new album so eagerly invites, drawing connections to thoughts and images that extend beyond the record itself.

Followers of the Split Infinities blog (the name itself a quiet tip of the hat to BoC) will already be familiar with the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND projects, which in their distinct ways broach the political and the psychedelic through theoretical intervention. My musical project SEREPTIE emerged within the atmosphere of BoC’s autochthonic energies—imagined as the eventual aftermath of Boards of Canada: a lo-fi ambient world both inebriated and asphyxiated by the detritus of the apocalypse BoC heralds.

In this essay appears an image from Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery—an oracle deck I developed as a tool for navigating creative and spatial experience through the hexagrams of the I Ching. A second limited run of the deck will be printed in July 2026. If you’d like to support my work, please purchase a deck.

An even better way to support the network I am helping to build is to take a course at Acid Horizon Research Commons. We offer rigorous, accessible courses at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and various other forms of theory.

Follow Kwasu on Substack: https://mapscrollanddagger.substack.com/

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https://on.soundcloud.com/gsh6ZRpYOwUizDOV8q

https://on.soundcloud.com/oNgo5GOz2xWetzYJrg

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First of all, why the title ‘Twisted Tree’? Where does this particular image sit in the history of eugenic modes of thinking?

The tree metaphor is an image which is borrowing from two other related images. First, it references the tree of life — the genealogical branching of species popularized by Darwin but predating him — and how it was applied to races as well (most famously by Ernst Haeckel). The tree was used by those who believed in teleological or progressive evolution to represent human racial hierarchies. Furthermore, the intentional confusion and collapse of race and biology has always been central to eugenics, especially as it began as a migration of animal husbandry (controlled breeding) to human beings.

The other tree image referenced is Kant’s comment about crooked timber in terms of the antagonisms and biases of human beings being a problem to the construction of any collective human project. Or, more specifically, it points out the flaws and limitations of humans as rational beings. The whole question is how to respond to this fact and eugenics is very much bound to the fear of ‘correcting’ inherent flaws in humans by means of camouflaging normative or cultural claims as biological ones that can be excised.

How do you think your approach to the history of Eugenic ideology allows us to understand contemporary movements operative today such as ‘MAHA’ (’Make America Healthy Again’) and the rise of new fascisms?

One problem with making historical comparisons to the present is that in public discourse eugenics is either reduced to something that ‘has always existed’ (pointing to the banishment of disabled bodies from the city state in Plato for instance) or to Nazi eugenics whose extreme and baroque form always exceeds the comparison attempted. Historical work by scholars like Marius Turda has shown that modern eugenics has to be thought hand in hand with the transformations of science in the late 1800s along with the construction of modern states and modern citizenry following World War 1. So the interplay between science, pseudo-science and modern racism is more important than any particular ideology. As Turda and others have shown, eugenics has appeared in every political ideology throughout history and on every continent. Of course, within fascism, eugenics is easier because it appeals to the aesthetic/racial dimension of fascism (reactivating traditionalism and ethno-nationalism).

With contemporary US fascism, and specifically in terms of MAHA, it’s difficult to draw easy comparisons because, for one, much of the eugenics is more ‘positive’ eugenics (in the sense of encouraging certain people to reproduce rather than limiting birth rates of others). In addition, much of MAHA is based on emphasizing environment rather than genetics or perceived genetics. I think there are two reasons for this. 1) Many in MAHA do not really believe in evolution and therefore emphasizing genetic factors comes into conflict with strict Christian ideology. 2) By emphasizing environmental factors one can emphasize traditionalism (getting rid of certain preservatives, pushing raw foods etc) as well as deny support or treatment for heritable conditions. This pushes eugenics into line with a ‘it’s the responsibility of the parents’ kind of thing. It’s pseudo-libertarian in how it advocates for small government and personal choice.

This is especially evident in how the Trump administration via RFK Jr has handled ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). They separate certain forms of autism under the name of ‘severe’ in order to allow mainly right-wing mothers to claim victim-hood and weaponize their children to claim political grievances. This in turn, allows environmental claims to be targeted in order to punish political enemies and allow for grifting on the right (alternative medicine, supplements, etc.). MAHA’s eugenics are traditionalist and play off of fake soft-inheritance/environmental inheritance rather than a pseudo-scientific understanding of genetics being falsely correlated with ‘superior’ traits (as in the case of the Nazi party). In terms of historical comparison, the early days of Fascist Italy (prior to the alliance with Hitler) are probably the most similar to contemporary US eugenics.

What can students expect from your upcoming course this June?

Besides discussing the issues mentioned above, students can expect an in-depth analysis of the history of eugenics, an analysis of the abuse of genetics and sociobiology, as well as a discussion of the history of the concept of race. For me it is important that students understand how biological science can be wrestled away from the center and from the right rather than merely abandoning the popular discourse on biology, believing it to be merely a tool of technocratic state power.

When it comes to producing research and teaching, the relationship between the humanities and the traditional structures of the academy is more tenuous than ever. Where do you see the future for new avenues and institutions in research today?

When I first started becoming involved in para-academic studies 12 years ago, it was largely due to the fact that the kinds of things I and others were interested in were not present in the academy. Our courses felt like worn out deserts at the conceptual level. Nowadays, it is more a necessity at the structural level. Generalized austerity present then has only worsened and accelerated due in no small part to more center right thinking and the techno-fix thinking making the humanities seem irrelevant. I think there is an assumption that video essays or learning in different forms must necessarily be of less value than sitting in a traditional classroom but I think the latter has become a privilege that few can afford. My hope is that online learning can become something that is not seen as a lesser or simply faster version but something that is more sustainable especially as it can remove the increasingly bloated management class from higher ed.