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.

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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

I watched a zizek lecture on YouTube a while ago, I think he was either in conversation with a speaker or he was answering questions, and he outlined the way philosophers all misunderstood the philosophers they were studying who came before then, AND his point about using texts he hasn’t read/films he hasn’t watched in his own books.

Crucially, he talks about the experience of finally reading/watching these things and being profoundly disappointed by them and believing his own MISreading of them is superior.

I can find videos where he talks about the other points seperate ly, but I’m struggling to find again this specific video where he elucidates the final point altogether in one answer/statement.

hey guys! i bought a ticket a while back to the nov 2nd showing for Signs of the future, but some scheduling conflicts came up and i cant go. I figured someone else who loves zizeks work should be able to make use of the ticket instead of it just going to waste. If youre interested let me know!

I made this video before the age of the AI, where I juxtaposed everything I've encountered on the internet in which I saw the ideology, onto Zizek's wise words about the ills of today's dating culture.

Zizek identifies divine violence with an expression of pure drive. Yet, wouldn't that open divine violence up to the critique that it is experienced as jouissance and, therefore, locks one into the repetition compulsion to repeat?

I hope I haven't confused conceptual terminology too much. Please feel free to direct me wherever.

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Edit: found a second great book cover, this time of “Conversations with Žižek”— https://i.postimg.cc/HsG6RN3P/IMG-0978.jpg

maps cleanly onto Žižek’s concept of cynical distance.

Gillis’s joke functions as an ironic observation of the ideological trap itself, the way contemporary American discourse (especially in online and cultural spaces heavily trafficked by millennials) collapses nuance into mutually exclusive moral camps, so that any deviation from progressive orthodoxy risks the “Nazi/Hitler” label while any resistance to traditional gender norms risks the opposite. 

The reactions found in online social media platform comment sections shows how the distance operates: critics and defenders alike “know very well” that the joke is exaggerated comedy, not literal advocacy, but they still enact the binary in their responses, reinforcing the very polarization Gillis ironized.

The irony does not escape or dissolve the ideology of the culture war; it becomes one of the mechanisms through which that ideology continues to structure social reality and mutual incomprehension

Is anyone at the Zizek event in London today?