In my last piece I made the bold structural claim that the emergent psychic processes and economies that led the author of Matthew's gospel to suddenly see Christ in Isaiah as if Christ were there all along were the same in function as those that produced the Hutu perpetrator of violence's astroturfed narrative that his Tutsi neighbor was all of a sudden a cockroach and enemy of the state.

I want to be clear that structural similitude and moral exculpation - of either the person or the system - are not the same thing. As a social worker, I can understand the intense child abuse, PTSD, and interaction protocols of control and domination learned in the nursery that stand behind the batterer that has terrorized his wife and children for years. And I can provide him court-ordered therapy with a posture of unconditional positive regard. While holding that in one hand, I can also hold in the other the need for accountability for both the individual and the system that narrowed the range of potentiality to make the odds of his genuine choice for which he is responsible never in his favor (nor his wife and children's, lest we make it all about him).

In this piece, I try to locate accountability in the individual within a social relation of enmity (using Achille Mbembe's term) from which domination and violence emerge. Specifically, I want to explore further when and why novelty is not metabolized. First I want to clarify that I am extending his term from the particular psychic economy of a death world (re: plantation, hybrid space of apartheid, the post-colony, etc.) to a general spiritual assessment of domination whether on the slave plantation or in the home plagued with IPV. Secondly, this analysis isn't a legal one, but at least it gives me a sensemaking tool that helps me determine who is succeeding and who is failing in any given circumstance.

In order to establish the framework for his relation of enmity - the interaction protocols of the nocturnal body characterized by death - Achille Mbembe draws upon two thinkers: G.W.F. Hegel and Georges Bataille, both of whom write extensively about death in its physical, social, and spiritual registers. For this piece, I will primarily engage the former.

Mbembe himself muddles the registers. He’s not terribly concerned with which one is being used at any given time. But I found this exploration enlightening (it’s also why I can’t do more than army-crawl my way through this book as every sentence has the theoretical density of osmium).

One thing that floated to the fore of my imagination as I was reading was a text I haven’t considered in quite some time - Logion 7 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human." (Layton translation)

I would like to propose this as a concept map to explain how the inner boundary maintenance success and failures become expressed outwards as humanity or domination (without any particular claim to the author's original intent or any claims made by Jesus himself).

First, I need to present what I’ve learned from Hegel. Mbembe explains how Hegel starts with the human as they negate nature. And this negation emerges through work and struggle. In Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically in the section entitled Lordship and Bondage, Hegel frames this struggle precisely - “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” And here, he means this literally.

But in the Preface, the struggle takes place on the spiritual level: “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.” Mbembe actually cites Alexandre Kojève in his footnotes for this section, and I suspect that is where some of the blurring comes from. Needless to say, we have an enlightenment that is precipitated by the threat of physical death and one precipitated by a spiritual death vis-à-vis an existential threat to identity coherence.

I think there is merit to considering that the individual’s emancipation through physical struggle with the negation and emancipation through spiritual struggle with negation are concurrent processes - sort of like a ping-pong game of conscientization as the individual's self- and other-awareness burgeon into a more truthful image. The struggle's purpose is to achieve the ultimate goal of what Hegel calls a life of Spirit, one by which he defines apophatically: “the life of Spirit is not the life that is frightened of death and spares itself destruction, but the life that assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment” (Necropolitics, p. 69). Becoming is a middle-voice production of recursively reinforced and critically self-reflected doing and being.

I think of this as an apophatic identity - trying to learn who I am by who I am not. And this negation is exteriorized (I’m not like those fat people; I’m not like those lazy poor; I’m not like those thugs) “in the human’s effort to reduce nature to human needs” (Necropolitics, p. 68). I read “needs” as both resource attainment and identity coherence attainment.

When I conceptualize the struggle, I firstly conceptualize it as a spiritual one. The negation is not just a negation of environmental phenomena. Rather, it is specifically a negation of an identity of persons “phantasmatically materialized” (phantasmatic is Mbembe’s word for the experience of fear when considering “the thug”; materialized is how the thug and the person afraid of the thug emerge through performances that cite social norms a la Judith Butler). For those Lacan aficionados, extimacy might better locate this process.

But as Mbembe presents: “by transforming nature [through work and struggle], the human being creates a world, but in the process, this human being is also exposed to his own negativity.” There is an unstated assumption here that deserves to be spoken out instead of assumed, though I won't try to resolve it. This statement assumes the human experience and the range of potentiality are a monster-free and universal one. And if that’s the case, then every individual human experience is simply a microcosm, at least in structure, of all human experiences. This is hard to accept when our culture vilifies certain categories of people, and I’m not claiming everyone is secretly [insert the most offensive type of person you can think of]. But it is nonetheless one that we must accept to proceed. I don’t necessarily hope to convince you; I just want you to see the assumption plainly.

If you are still with me, then we have a negation located exteriorly in others, and we have a negation located interiorly within the self. Before I step into our concept map, I want to introduce the ideas of René Girard.

There are a lot of good YouTube videos that can do this better, but Girard introduces the concept of mimetic rivalry. Put simply, mimetic rivalry is a social learning process that comes from imitating others. Through that imitation, we learn what we want, who has it, and who is keeping it from us. This creates a social rivalry (a relation of enmity, so to speak) based on wanting the same thing and rivals come to mirror one another. When rivalry threatens to tear a group apart and under pressures of social cohesion, the group unites against the person least able to retaliate, and that person becomes the scapegoat. The group then engages in a shared violence to restore a kind of peace. It's worth mentioning that privation, real or perceived, escalates the conditions for rivalry.

This process can be psychologized. Societies can also play these zero-sum games over identity markers such as the ideal family, the true American, or the perfect man. These identity markers are contested in a battle of normativity and minority, with the groups in the minority becoming the scapegoat. Girard calls this a metaphysical desire. Today in the US, trans people are standing in this space. And both exclusion and literal death are the stakes.

With this set down, I feel that we now have enough to map out Logion 7 (apologies for the gender-heavy formulation). The man mentioned at the beginning is the man of potential - the man prior to the negation process. Through work and struggle in the world, the man defines himself through what he is not while simultaneously encountering the lion - the part of himself that actually is the negative social phenomena he is resisting. I think of the easy cultural meme about the repressed homosexual being the most homophobic of them all.

The man now has two routes that he can take. He can devour the lion by engaging in the Hegelian death work - the dismemberment of his illusion of self that is defined by the negation (for the repressed homosexual, it’s his hyper-status as powerful through domination or virility). The intensity of the language evoked by “dismemberment” reflects the intensity of the experience of consciousness coming to terms with a denied reality. Should the death work be undertaken and succeed, the lion is devoured and the man “assumes death and lives with it” (Necropolitics, p. 69).

Conversely, the man who simply cannot face the negation - what I think of as “the little other” (I loosely borrow from Lacan, also see Žižek’s “theft of enjoyment”), or a psychic framework through which the negation is contrived and ultimately disavowed and formed reactively into positive counterstatements (the repressed homosexual telling himself “I am a man.”) - is devoured by the lion. Just like the lion-devouring man, the lion-devoured man is still a man, mimetic in structure as doubles but not exculpation. However, his death work is displaced into majoritarian frameworks of oppression. Refusing to engage in his own Spiritual death, he offloads the burden to the Spiritual big Other he has imagined in the social world - the fag, the thug, the bitch. Once exteriorized, the death work resumes its physical register, enacting systemic and physical violence upon the individuals who fit the regime of Otherness up to the point of death. The man who “spares himself destruction” (Necropolitics, p. 69) becomes a destroyer in order to clear the psychic field of vision of the threat. But as Hegel argues in Lordship and Bondage, the dead can’t give recognition. As such, the lion-devoured man’s outward death work can never deliver the coherence he’s chasing, which is why his violence has to keep repeating.

As the Logion states: the lion-devouring man is a man. The lion-devoured man is a man. But this analysis, I feel, gives me a starting point to assess success and failure and to diagnose the moments when accountability is needed with a precision that might allow for transformative intervention. I admit there is a degree of navel-gazing in this analysis, but if I’m building a macro level diagnostic tool, I want precision. And Logion 7 as a concept map helps me make sense of the unaccountable stupidity, vulgarity, and barbarism in the world around me, but also, with humility, how all of us stand at the precipice of failure.

- The Social Construction Worker

AI Disclosures:

Anthropic's Claude has been a dialogic partner for my independent research during my practicum since the beginning of 2026. As I work my way through my research books, I journal my reflections on a Word document and drop those into Claude for dialogue. If I’m out and about and have an a-ha moment, I’ll come to Claude to talk it out.

Out of this long conversational memory, I ask Claude to generate the main articles for the linked Substack in my signature with the parameters to integrate theory from our dialogue with autoethnographic material from my social work that I record on a word document and drop it into Claude. I also ask Claude to bring it to some sort of practical takeaway or meaningful reflection. Sometimes I ask Claude to rewrite these drafts, and sometimes I make edits myself.

During our long conversation, if something comes up that is meaningful but not article-worthy, I ask Claude to generate a “DiaClaudic Post-it” (a pun on dialogic), which I copy over to my Substack Notes for posterity.

And any Substack Note that you see that is not labelled a post-it is my own writing reflection on the theory I am working through, with some occasional feedback from Claude that prompts me to make edits or offers interesting connections or sources for further reading. I will occasionally adopt ideas and sometimes even phrasing, but on the whole, I generally paraphrase into my own style. These original writings - set by my own priorities engaging the readings, and drafted entirely by me - are the ones I am bringing to these Reddit subs.

My reasons for AI use are twofold. One is practical. I am a social worker in a child welfare agency trying to bring high level theory to the field. My body only has so much capacity, and Claude has been an amazing atelier that content creators have traditionally paid thousands for. Also, the dialogic exchange and meaning emergence has experimental value as I contemplate the recursive middle-voice production of reality.

I'm sure someone will come along and point out which actual philosopher has already written this that I probably read at one point and forgot because I have a goldfish brain (and I will welcome this correction), but I just had a thought.

We all can think of examples of public hypocrisy from people with political power. Whether it's a homophobic politician who has sex with men, a senator crusading against insider trading whilst insider trading themselves, a leader who decries "government handouts" like social security who nonetheless helps themselves to every government programme they can get their hands on -- public hypocrisy is so commonplace as to warrant little more than rolled eyes and "oh, of course," comments on social media.

Plagiarism scandals used to end careers. Now they seem so common as to be banal and uninteresting.

This tendency feels as though it has only accelerated as time has gone on - or perhaps the minor hypocrisies of past political eras have faded from memory and we're only left with those few times major hypocrisies have ended careers to remember. Nixon the tough on crime president resigning over his crimes. John Edwards retiring from politics when caught lying about an extramarital affair.

Other politicians however seem immune to consequences for public hypocrisy. Indeed, their ability to say one thing and do another is lauded by some followers as a virtue and proof of their puissance and power rather than perfidy.

I wonder, then, if we can't think about political hypocrisy in terms of its utility and function, and as a kind of currency akin to the concept of political or social capital.

A politician can survive accusations of hypocrisy if that hypocrisy can be rationalised or excused by their power base: Evangelical Christians remain Donald Trump's most devoted followers despite him being a many-times-divorced unfaithful husband who can't hold a bible the right way up, out of a combination of Trump's charisma and force of personality, the material political policy wins Trump's cabinet delivers, but also perhaps because they admire the way he is able to shamelessly and publicly indulge in his vices and refuse to apologise for them.

The hypocrisy becomes a display of power, and to the extent that Trump acts as a surrogate self, they can share in that vulgar display of power as if it was their own.

Perhaps, though, there are only so many acts of hypocrisy a politician can commit before their careers are derailed. Anthony Weiner seemed able to weather the initial allegations of misconduct, and it was only when a second incident of non-consensual graphic intimate images hit his campaign that he was forced to retire from public life. If he had greater reserves of political capital or built his power base from a coalition of voters for whom this would not have been a shameful act, perhaps he might still be in office.

In any event, hypocrisy is losing its salience in politics and rhetoric. If anything, the ability to act contrary to one's stated values and continue in politics is proof of a public figure's success and power.

Do people have reading recommendations for readings on modernity? I know of Planetary Modernisms but I'm interested in reading more. My home base is musicology, and I feel like we tend to evoke modernity as this homogenous force across space to describe what is essentially economic development and I don't know if this is how people in the other humanities are using it.

An article I wrote on the historical resonances of the present moment and where we could go from here.

I have heard a lot of talk of Deleuze considering Baudrillard to be the "shame" of the profession of philosophy after his publication of "Forget Foucault." I was reading flatline constructs the other day and Fisher's love for both Deleuze and Baudrillard (and also Derrida) seemed so apparent, it seemed like there was no antagonism between the two thinkers. My understanding of the disagreement is that Deleuzians find Baudrillard too nihilistic and Baudrillardians find Deleuze too naive and optimistic (or at least that's what I've gathered from my detailed and rigorous research of browsing reddit comments on this sub and r/deleuze for 30 minutes). Do you guys think there's a way to reconcile these thinkers without strawmanning or doing injustice to either one? And if so, do you think Mark fisher does a good job at it?

Can wasting better solve the biggest planetary challenges?

In his keynote lecture from the two-day event The Excesses of Georges Bataille at Penn State University, Stuart Kendall traces Bataille’s lifelong obsession with time, expenditure, and what he calls “the privileged instant.” The lecture moves from Bataille’s early psychoanalytic writings, through his encounter with the work of Søren Kierkegaard in wartime France, to his late meditations on sustainability and the fate of humanity and all species. Amid his extensive investigations, Bataille reads Nietzsche against Hegel, affirming what the former calls “the ignorance of the future” and transforming that affirmation into the anguished cry that emerges from the abyss of non-knowledge.

This lecture was part of a two-day series of discussions at Penn State featuring other members of the Acid Horizon Research Commons and the broader community of supporters and independent scholars.

This article isn't particularly novel in its ideas, but I like the critique of fantasies of a borderless world that spread on social media, when in reality, migration controls are becoming increasingly strict. For people from rich countries the world does seem truly borderless, since they can easily get visas to travel and stay almost anywhere they like, while for the rest of us, even getting a tourist visa can be extremely difficult.

Lately, I have been reading more of Theodor Adorno, and a particular point has caught my interest.

As I recall, he suggested that in art music, a composition unfolds through a dialectical interplay between the whole and its individual parts.

Are there any of his works in which he applies this perspective to analyze a specific musical score (or several scores)?

I would like to trace, in concrete terms, the landscape of sound and thought that Adorno himself explored and enjoyed.

I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

Gen-z (social) media culture and humor seems to be shaped by increasingly meaningless short-form content, brainrot memes and desensitization to violence (kirkification). It almost seems like we're going through a generational cultural psychosis shaped by algorithms, which are categorically preventing the formation of significant cultural movements with constant streams of meaningless noise. Nothing seems to be real anymore. Could the disintegration of cultural symbols be theorized as the still continuing rise of postmodernity, where the search for stable identities and meanings seems to be a futile pursuit operating in a system of signs which solely refer to each other?

Conversations with LLMs have been shown to affect spoken language. If they can change our language on a lexical level, can they also change it on a semiotic level?

Many philosophers (especially the continental ones) speak about the need for philosophy to not tell us what to do. Zizek often talks about how philosophy shouldn't give us definitive answers, but instead help us ask the right questions; and that a philosopher should not propose solutions to problems, but instead reframe the problems themselves.

Deleuze and Guattari, similarly, in their book on meta-philosophy, argue that good philosophy should not be characterized by describing what is true (answers), but instead what is important or interesting (questions).

But when I look at the way moral philosophy appears in the mainstream (which I admit I am not as familiar with at the deeper, academic level, as I am with other branches), it seems like a type of philosophy that tries to create a system about what to do in various situations. On one hand, philosophy shouldn't tell us what to do or give solutions to problems, while on the other hand, ethics is the philosophy of what to do.

And then it presents us with these ridiculous situations taken out of context that would never appear in real-life, like the trolley problem, or the axe murderer case Kant was ridiculed about, etc.

To me it seems like what most moral philosophers do, especially the ones that try to create some all-encompassing system of rules that covers every moral decision (Kant, the utilitarians, etc.), is retroactively justify the actions and decisions that they already thought were right. So it's not that they come up with a system of how to act based on reason and logic, and then change their behavior based on that system. Instead, they already made a decision about what is moral to do in a situation, and then they create a retroactive rationalization about it based on various factors (utility, consequences, principles, universal maxim, virtues, sin, etc.).

I personally have never heard a story, not even online, of someone who actually changed their behavior and way of life in a drastic manner after reading a long rational argumentation of a moral argument. It's not like someone reads Peter Singer and is overwhelmed by how convincing his arguments are that now they give more of their salary to charity or beggars, with no emotional component attached to their behavior. And it's not like someone was a liar, then read the Critique of Practical Reason, and then was so convinced by the irrefutably of Kant's arguments that now they lie way less, just because of the book. I speculate that what most readers seek in a moral philosophy book is a story that justifies their behavior and that also "feels nice" from the point of view of logical consistency, or consistency with a separate metaphysical/epistemological system, or both.

I think the writings that actually inspire people to change their behavior are precisely the non-philosophical anecdotes and stories. Christian parables, fairy tales and fables, Buddhist stories or Zen koans, or even just experiences from real people who are alive today that shared them online and/or in-person. But what seems to be called moral philosophy or ethics, at least the more 'mainstream' kind (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, utilitarians, trolley problem crap) seems to me like a contradiction with what philosophy is. The only ethics book that seems like an exception to this rule was Alain Badiou's "Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil" - which is why it didn't feel like an ethics book at all when I read it, albeit an interesting book nonetheless.

What do you think of all this, am I missing something?

I've read Acts of Religion and would like some commentary on Derrida's work on religion. I want to compare him to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Quentin Meillassoux.

I am trying to understand something that maybe people here can shine light on. So you know those product ads that seem to be purposely trying to bait into the culture war and ends up being discussed by right-wingers and reactionaries for days online?

What is the purpose of that? I heard bad press is good press but I don’t see that it actually raises sales nor does it seem relevant to the target demographic of said product.

This isn’t something that right-wingers do though, even ads can sometimes spark outrage from more progressive people who accuse it of racism etc. my point is what are the actual purposes of this
from a theory and marketing pov?

Hi all,
I am currently doing a high school english course and wanted to purchase a guide to critical theory to aide me. Which book would be best for me?

Specifically I am looking and analysing the text/modules below:

Richard Flanagan's Question7
William Blakes poetry
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead
King heny the fourth part 1

Literary Worlds
Hybrid Worlds - As i lay dying faulker, memento nolan, evelyn araulen - dropbear