the events recorded here took place at the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Assocation) in Montreal March 16th, 2024.

e and I are on Saturday morning sitting in the first room. it is 8:30 AM. he has been here for two days, and I am here for the first time. it is a small room, quaint; overhung with panelling, dividers, which concise a much larger space. we are therefore all in small rooms, but could imagine ourselves to be in a much larger one. the larger one we are in is a field of division, and everything is grey. if we were to imagine ourselves really in it, that would be the

division

we would be in what was the entry of that thought, to think we are in the larger thing even as its appearance is stifled. it cannot rend through: we are in it conceptually.

it is clear that we are here with the same illness as everyone else. it is a kind of stomach bug in the mouth; a mouthbug. the first speaker is from Columbia, and there is a special attention we pay to people from so-called good universities. they fail like the rest of us, but their failure is indexed; incised. there is a surgery whereby the mouth folds outward and we see that it wasn’t a mouth, just lips. no throat, no vocal chords. it is like the larger room we are in: we do not have a throat; it’s a thought. in the end I will ask the question of the missing throat: what about string theory?

to those, like my phantom interlocutors, because the bug keeps my mouth closed in anxiety and anticipation (its pure form), I say that physics is in crisis. it is in a terrible crisis, where having reached the devastated unthinkable of quantum theory, theorists turn either to ramifying the underlying, really superlying, super-convening mathematics or to questioning the entire form of the investigation. the poison is in the water, in the air; it is in the thought we are thinking we are having. roger penrose contra edward witten. the result is that penrose comes out with the suggestion that the universe has endless many big bangs so as to resuscitate really the idea that this is a crisis of thought (by assaulting it with an extreme reality), not merely a question of refining some pre-existing symmetry. more precisely, we ask: how did the wound of that symmetry get there in the first place? what is the cost of all of this abstraction?

recall: formally, witten really believes in the symmetry, whereas penrose’s defter suggestion comes in the form of asking but what does it mean that this is what really exists (symmetry or not).

even still, the same question is worth posing here in our leper colony. but details are forthcoming. we observe first her, and then we observe him, from Harvard, and finally him, also from Harvard. in my head, counting downwards from ten, I ask

how do you deal with the crisis of name-dropping, of wittenising? what happens when the crisis is not just a question of “toggling”, of refinement, but deals with a paralysis of the initial vision itself? what happens when the problem is in theory?

we take these questions out of their environment as if we are making a perfume. it is something we do in order to see what is formally possible. we could say that from this point forward it is a question of one of these things being either the case or not. but, the either/or is a parasite. form itself is a devourment. it is not an interruption of what was there with conceptuality. it is acid, from nowhere. it bleeds itself, absolutely. the perfume then smells of blood or makes us bleed; it infects us with more of ourselves. the symptom of our pathologies is that we are already a formal construct. it is our devastated bodies which breathe backwards. the mouth, more or less again, is an entry, not an exit. how can we really speak but in expectation that that extrusion will show us the divisions of the inside?

this is the critical juncture, our paradox: because Žižek ask us to vomit out the system, because there is no coordinate we can adjoin to what is already an adjoinment, that we must therefore bleed so as to see bleeding, that we must vomit the system out of ourselves so as to turn it inside out, so as to coordinate precisely what we coordinate in the form of coordination (what we infect with theorems), so as to initiate each coordinate with nothing but a viewpoint on the deadlock, on the zugzwang, of our position, how we cannot help but make everything worse, how only that worseness in its negativity suffices. because, equivalently (through what is equivalence), we know that whatever we say to them or us, to ourselves, already fails in having embraced that speech: we cannot really write but write further; that is, only deepen, and show, just how far, how limitlessly, the dysfunction reaches. we cannot save ourselves. anti-messiah; crucifix-mouth.

there is one question we can really ask therefore: what are we really doing? yes, in all its naïveté. from within the standpoint of collapsing metalanguage, which breaks down because it is true, we ask

formally

what we are doing. now it’s just a question of formality. this is the simple opening of Das Kapital: “wealth under capitalism appears as a monstrous assemblage of commodities”. he trusts this formalism, and therefore its acid negativity. his point, which he says elsewhere, in a letter, is that he did not invent class struggle, he merely indexed its formations to underlying changes in the form or mode of production. just because we’ve completely lost the site of a requisite materiality to explain what we might mean by production in the first place, does not mean we should allow ourselves to dissolve this formality: it is basically a conceptual, that is gnawingly metalinguistic, change. what are we really, stupidly producing? can we ask this in the burial-digger, in the excavator of the grey: once we find the formality we choose, we get to see to some extent the terms of our production; the formal terms of that acidification, of that dissolution.

so, what is the political economy of comparative literature? this cesspool, this cross heap. it is a proletariat, exhausted by a totally virtual production and compulsion, exhausted almost literally by nothing: but this is the symptom. its depressing ideology is to think that this exhaustion is some kind of badge of honour because they are so addicted to the idea of having some “real work” with which to minimally compare themselves to the fiction of the working classes they have themselves constructed. we can only really understand ourselves at that point in appearance, and so e and I make a list of formal things which appear:

how people only ever talk about what's for lunch, how everyone talks about the bar they're headed to afterwards;

but this is just the beginning. the question is nonetheless what we are really doing here. how might we appear; how might that appearance concern formal conditions we can only see when we produce a definition of why such a thing as lunch forms a crucial peg in this political economy.

we recall the more abject examples: e has a professor who zooms in from bed, I know someone exiled in the far north of Europe. who, or rather, what has produced this? and what is it precisely that we produce, that we really do? we confront a conclusion which is

liquidate it,

and to do so we must take it very seriously. we must know what we are liquidating, we must know how to take it imaginarily apart piece by piece; we must understand its formal assumptions.

1.

she begins. we listen, inclining our heads. I’m wearing a tie-dye shirt, and I forgot to put on deodorant so I have had to use hand sanitizer (yes, I’m serious). it is warmer than anticipated, both outside, where it is almost spring in Montreal, and inside. she begins with a metaphysical distinction on the subject of the “gift”. no is listening. but, why aren’t they listening? why can they afford not to listen? why is this, in fact, an expectation, so that to listen is, in fact, far more problematic, far more disruptive. it is clear that people accept her assumptions uncritically in order to remain in

the womb,

which is a conceptual structure in which one finds the nauseating insulation within which this “collective thinking” explicates its formal conditions. because if I can stay in this enwombing of headnodding, I secure my own paper; I secure the fact that we do not in fact agree on anything, that no one even remotely holds the same assumptions, the traumatic centre point for which is the mute impossibility of such accordance (anyhow), which of course sustains itself in never being interrogated (because it was only ever the question that was there for you), and so we avoid having to collapse this economy of “nothing”, which sustains us in a motherless womb; we avoid having to subvert our survival which merely calls itself academia, but which is the factory of its own desperation and fear: the name of our impotence, generated in almost pure expectation of it. so begins the toxic self-enforcement, the disciplining: because we cannot be alone, we cannot trust ourselves; and we must therefore self-flagellate in order to ramify that we are afraid beings at all. we must have at least this “fear” to justify the terms of survival, which of course subtracts us: we do not survive; we exist, complicit with our danger. we exist because we choose to remain in survival mode, so that once you take away from us that we must survive in this away we become weightless; we cease to exist.

e will say, at one point, how it is a

an encounter without memory,

because whereas in the old Japanese story the friend reaches his friend’s door having recalled every memory and so turns back, e claims it is only the encounter here that matters: there is no memory. and this is why I want to ask my stupid question: but what do you mean by metaphysics? I am not critical, I am interested. when you are dealing with someone who is traumatised and you observe how they inflict pain upon themselves to sustain the economy of that survival, you have to ask at which point someone will say: ok, yes, we can survive, we can make this deal, and survive. as e says, it works; what we do works. only each new person must fragment their bones and reseal the sack of their flesh without mending the devastated interior: this negativity is an insight; we always heal backwards. we cannot heal them then, we cannot help them survive, because they have over-healed; they medicate illnesses that don’t even exist yet: we, such as “we” exist, can only propose to cut the Gordian knot. we can only propose a

we

to exist for the first time. not, again, because this factory of shame doesn’t work; it does. it is a factory of shame, however. this we, however, exists to the end of asking, not merely, what is it we would really like to do, but what is that forbids already, what is it that forbids question, which inextant trauma forbids us. there is a memory we have of something which has never happened.

she talks about time. I want to ask, but why is time already conceptual? is it so because we say it decays, and must we

say

it decays. do we have to give the decay-word? is this the minimal definition of the quantum? again, you have to confront that it is abstraction itself which is repressed at this conference. we cannot ask the question: but where did this conceptuality come from? again again, we have arrived at this political economy in view of certain formal definitions we would like to pretend we haven’t given. our survival, we say, exists in a forest that already existed? no wonder then we fear the very abstraction which would uplift even a simple forest (of fear) into rational decay, into abstraction. the place we cannot go is in a dream we had.

more practically, how is it possible to give a talk on gifts and not mention the implicit gift-giving of the conference? how can one remain so resolutely anti-formal:

because the question of formality (however pure) leads right into the question of political economy.

in short, we can only afford abstraction at the same time as we literally resolve to accept that Marx’s formality was an intervention into the pure form of analysis itself. there is no analysis without political economy, because the second is a formal definition of the first.

2

he speaks. and I can barely listen because he speaks at once so somberly, parsingly, so meltingly, so aware of his own voice, that there is literally no more room for

the voice.

without realizing it he has deleted it; he has deleted this category in affecting it. no one in the room believes negation exists (because they cannot rationally, that is formally, imagine it), and so we are condemned infernally to ask questions over and again that do not have the metalinguistic frame of being answerable. whereas analytic philosophers have reappropriated metaphysics willingly, comparative literature’s virtual leftists are like those leftist parties across Europe who have become even more ruthlessly austerian than their rightist counterparts. the real repressed term is Hegel (no matter how popular he appears today to be) insofar as only Hegel provides a sufficiently liquidating concept of how metalanguage works, how it works precisely because it categorically overworks: it bathes something in acid so that one literally has “the voice” at the same time as it becomes possible (materially) to lose this. in this view, it is materialism leftists should ruthlessly appropriate against rightist metaphysics: we should insist upon the formal political economic conditions of any materialism.

I think

what if I cannot speak to myself

and I mention l'innommable to myself.

3

he discusses code, someone in the audience asks about Gödel. he doesn’t know who Stephen Wolfram is, so he doesn’t know how the

form of code (or computation)

is not, again, some nice pre-given material construct on the basis of which we reason; it is material insofar as it is formal. meaning: if we say that coding is an illness, because formally it imposes upon us an artificial disjunction in the form of that effect it allows us to imagine it conduces, this means that it is formally ill. the concept can be sick; it is sickness. it is not the formal, that is medical, formulation; it is the sickness of abstraction:

the political economy of abstraction is THIS FACTORY,

which comparative literature guards, so that it really does try to legitimate the perversion, the obscurity, of abstraction. it wants to heal rational incest. but the point it really represses is that conceptuality is itself a radically formal index: the stuckness of some “process” is defined by concepts which (in their insecurity; to an extent in their incompleteness) define what is materially going on. it is not so much that materiality is this incompleteness as it is that a concept is not a perfectoid-rational category which works because, noumenatically,

it works; “it works”,

but because the concept itself can work as a failure, as a split (negative) device. when we view code, then, and we articulate its formal conditions (inexplicably bound up with political economy), we see that it is half-there, that it is the “half-there” indeed of the world it attempts to immanently manifest or weave. this is how we should interpret wolfram’s madness, wherein “everything is code”: even as he proposes this universal, he also instals “rules” to reality, as with a computer. the failure here should be read in purely rational terms: he produces yet another reified dimension of metalanguage in which the concept remains “preserved” (enwombed) while the world (i.e. materiality) suffers what it must. if there is something worth defending it is the idea that we are accountable for the materiality we define, and which extracts itself in arrangements of political economy; that, therefore, we must allow the concept to do its damage (to itself) so as to take seriously the kind of world that ultimately extrudes itself in view of the absolute-acid of materiality’s formality. the moment you preserve the concept, i.e. the conservation of some minimal formal access (which code simply tries to make literally the world qua the topos of computational access), you cannot really define that which is crucially formal in material; it will always conceptually elude you. the result of which is that your metalanguage is incomplete.

4

when the morning is over, e and I walk towards what is meant to be one of few bilingual talks during the weekend. whereas where we had been there were only young people, now we are faced opposite two older men. the first is older; he is an anglophone, though he speaks in French. his accent is kind of elegiac, sort of in-visible.

he discusses the suffering of the heart, sort of. I want to hear this, at least; and it relates to the souffle,

the breath,

of the organ. his real thesis is that poetry deals with, or reaches into that au dela which is, the real. he wants to show that there is some possible material substrate in poetry which provides, again, a certain topos of, if not formal, then “substantial” access. he relies for this upon a poem called the black.

his error, however, and here I must say that methodically, that the arguments that are produced all bear witness to some strange political economy (of abstraction), not that our method is to reject the arguments beforehand in search of the terms of their ‘real production’ (we can only vomit up the system if we really vomit; we must go through these arguments because their fatal mistakes are effectively essential, part of the illness), is to provide mathematics as the

minimal formal definition of the structure of the poem,

though he doesn’t say this. he might as well have. it would’ve meant we could’ve argued more directly. the math of the poem convenes upon its metre, etc. the failure of this is extreme: he misses entirely that many of the exigencies he attributes to poetry one could just as easily apply to math. for example, and let us treat this as a scheme for formality,

nothing, that is the nothing of mathematics, speculates (imaginary numbers, empty sets: “objects” in this case which are already conservations of this categorical capacity to speculate)

(categorical) equivalence, as a kind of radical material language which underwrites nothing; that is upsets any sense that math really “structures” anything. if anything, it is a place we go to produce formal definitions of

“structure”

dimensionality. for this consider the strange reworking of space produced in grothendieck’s work, embodied in his phrase about a lake (or “space”) where

[tous les chevaux du roi y pourraient boire ensemble à l'aise et tout leur saoul, sans les épuiser!

this dimensionality should be compared to the more axiomatic screwup involved in any kind of mathematical modelling, where an ordinary object (or organ) is uncannily modelled and our originary understanding of it subverted by an anxious doubt as to whether we have really captured it. math has no answer to this. it is an entirely formal deadlock.

in short, these exigencies are no different from the radical esquissist interventionism that is the poem. why the disjuncture then? well, recall that we have no formal theory of materiality. if we did, it would be “real” in the worst sense, because we would try to subtract its formality. worse still, we refuse to interrogate mathematics so that it remains the perfect lead base of unquestionability which can underpin our stupid theorising.

the deadlock, at this point in our narrative, should be presented now more extremely: firstly, celan has a word

Himmelssäure

which is sort of the terms of our breakdown. we are dealing with a kind of heavenly breakdown of the real terms of our imagined discourse. the present speaker cannot really produce because he cannot risk changing what he has done (what we all have done). we really are trying to produce something, we should be avowedly materialist: this is the basic LIQUID THEOREM which defines our special political intervention in this text. in producing a formal political economy of the conference we hope to simply assert that we can, and indeed must, change. it is a question of coming up with new formal terms of material change, which rather than externally defining some changeable Thing, works whereby some “thing”, upon its appearance, does not collapse its minimal formality.

we are exhausted by THE COVENANT. this is our political economy as it exists. it has formal conditions: find them. we are exhausted by a labour we do do: it is an exhaustion, in part, for the sake of being exhausted. we want to be oppressed, but not in the sense that we “desire” it. what we desire is that which is behind the contradiction of labour: some kind of minimal inclusion in the world (of who we are trying to save (by saving the metalanguage (even if it implies our own rejection))). we reject turning the formal breakdown of labour upon itself with the topical marxist assertion that one cannot simply labour, so that even his proletariat was exhausted by “nothing”. this is why they are relentlessly symptomatic. the perverse and obscene turn is that engaged in the Žižekian project of

vomiting up the system,

which is taken up and then pushed a brutal step (backward) towards (in the practice of repressed hypercritique; an abstract compulsion)

eating our own vomit;

that is, subsisting grossly in the “trauma that does not exist”, in the memory that never happened.

trauma never happens, that’s the point. the mistake Krasnohorkai makes at the end of Satantangò is to give us a real bell, a real object, whereas he should have seen that the pure formal rainfall (and the non-coming of his narrative) produces a kind of purely virtual object (which is the bell); an object that is non-collapsedly virtual. we persist in eating our own vomit because we think something really exists. we don’t see the formality involved even in “existing”. again, Žižek’s defense of hegel is ultimately very simple:

yes, the Absolute exists; and it is horrifying, devouring, and virtual.

indeed, it is so virtual that “reality” appears as a category merely beside it. a great deal of modern physics confirms this, but they remain “physics” because they unwilling to go to the end and assert this not as a naive, reified statement on some “really existing” physical reality, but as the pure, virtual statement which at last emerges out of the (now virtual category) of the so-called “physical sciences”.

something similar is needed in comparative literature. it is altogether leninist in character, however: when will we see that this liquid is virtual. this is why you cannot eat it even as you can produce a political economy of “eating it”. the repressed abstract character of even political economy is what we are defending, because the use of political economy (of exploration, class, etc.) remains an appeal to some “real” which, at the same time, as it clearly negates categorically, “believes” it is making an assertion to something real. this is an illness, and like all illnesses, it is abstract. there is a much needed defence of radical abstraction as the first step towards understanding very stupidly what we can do materially—not least contained in the very category of the “can” in its own metalinguistic recursion (this is why one should indict analytic metaphysics on similar ground as with the physical or natural sciences: you think you have in metaphysics finally something “real”).

5

we turn towards the second of the hims. I do not ask any questions. his is a kind of functional poetics; a poetics ouvrière. which is apposite in this political economy of THE FACTORY. my question, which remains imaginary, will be very simple:

do you not think knowing what wittgenstein meant by Gebrauch/Verwendung is useful? because you refer to him. you say “lifeworld” as if that clarifies anything.

in the early thirties wittgenstein uses the word multiplicity as a development of his earlier use of the word Bild in the tractatus. while we translate this as a “picture theory of language”, it is really a “model theory of language”. understanding, then, what we mean by the basic equivalence of

model/Object,

as in the objects we are meant to “use” (in either sense of needing or turning, -wending), is actually useful. the point, again, is that in the Tractatus wittgenstein is arguing for how we can more or less form a model of a part of the “world” within the equivalence of a given logical assertion (of what the case is) and the actuality of the world itself as a real product of the interior configuration of his logicist metaphysics. his eventual move, however, is radically necessarily spiritual:

the soul APPEARS after a certain point; he has an ATEMWENDE moment (‘a crystal’ of this object) insofar as the exterior derivation of the object is the standpoint of the human soul.

no, I don’t end up asking any of this. but it’s what I think. and it is all that matters (and, no, not because it is what “I” think). my point is that what wittgenstein is really getting at with any idea of using something hangs upon a deeper concept of some kind of cube-object or metaphysical instinct (whose exterior limit is the human soul; its literal limit). one can establish a link through the middle writings, which is also important. indeed, the explicit limit of the implicit configurations of the language games still defines a

human soul/ATEMKRISTALL,

only it is perhaps more sophisticated insofar as we also have to imagine it as a kind of radical virtual subject: a pure abstract existent.

this is related to this narrative insofar as when we go to ask the naive question of metaphysics, of what objects we have, and we confront more sophisticated attempts to explain the factory conditions of these “objects” we should hold ourselves to a very high standard as to what these are. vague allusions to use(-value) are hardly explicative. and we have to ask how it is possible, again, to be so close to the deadlock of production and yet to refuse how a radical

theory of materiality

is precisely what we need. that we really stupidly do need another opening to Das Kaptial:

‘wealth in comparative literature appears as a monstrous assemblage of conferences’.

and, no, this isn’t meant ironically. the deadlock of what we imagine we produce is not just an intellectual failure; it is a product of a repression of the very question of the “object” itself. we prefer not to think about it because our reified formal definition is not that we produce “objects”, but that we sort of regulate the cost of abstract objects in society. again, our intervention is entirely formal, as in, what can we literally do differently now:

interrupt someone, leave the room, and when you are speaking “negate yourself”;

and all of this so as to expose the basic acidity of formal definability, to show that the structure of the object is irreducibly formal. how else are we supposed to know where we absolutely are unless we confront the form of our own vomit. if we “eat it” on assumption we have produced a real form of subsistence, we starve and exhaust ourselves. we exist in deprivation. our formal shift in perspective is simple: this deprivation should be seen as subtraction; the only real subsistence we produce is an “actual” formal (means) of subsistence. it never becomes real at any point; this is axiomatic.

6

we leave. have lunch at a place. we are unaware of what is about to happen or where we are about to go. this is irreducibly virtual:

we are unaware of what is about to happen or where we are about to go (absolutely).

we will structure it as three negations (which we did not choose):

first, no:

she is defending that there is a way to deduce a poem. she thinks it has something to do with math; but it’s logic: it is in logic that we see the formal structure of deduction (which will invade math in the post-19th century in the form of logicism). the result, nevertheless, is that negate neither mathematics, nor the ideological that is deductivism. if the political economic assumption of comparative literature is that it recovers all the failed philosophers and political theorists (not to mention all the failed writers), then perhaps it is to produce this is kind of x-ray of untaken-up philosophical assumptions: will you not critical your subject? how can you assume “formally” you even have an object? a question?

it is worth mentioning that the throes of logicism produce wittgenstein’s tractatus, which is perhaps on the great analogies to the poetry of Trakl and Rilke. this is not the deduction we are interested in, and the form of deduction as it relates to poetry (which is the pure relation of how philosophical mathematics might literally come out of poetry and vice versa) is also unimportant. so whatever is important is not really told to us: there are no formal assumptions we could interrogate, because every “talk” exists on the basis that we assume assumptions so as to avoid confronting the deadlock of the object-model of

assumption, or assumability, itself:

and the argument of this text is that THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TOWARDS POLITICAL ECONOMY. how strange is it that we repress abstraction so as to more fundamentally repress how real abstraction would lead us towards the deadlock of our production. this is the crucial reversal, after all, stymied by the very absolute symptomhood of our (and every illness): it is not that we prefer abstraction to practical references to our political economic deadlock, but that we choose some mute “practice” ideologically embedded in the assumption of political economy so as to avoid abstraction (itself). the demon-formula we avoid is that political economy is underpinned by a radical form of abstraction. it is at this point that a real fear of starving to death, of not getting paid, of having no status or reputation, symptomatically presents itself is the FEAR THEOREM itself that, in fact, underpins the proletarian (that is, cesspoolic) character of comparative literature itself: the heart of things is abstract.

this is to say this conference is a genuine symptom. it is borderline, if virtually, proletarian. there is a real exhaustion. so why won’t anyone do anything about it?

second, no, no:

someone (he) is talking about computation (again). maybe, it’s me. I search out these ones. e warned us. but “here” we are. Beckett's book Watt seems to be much more about cartesian geometry, however, than it is about computation “rules.” wolfram’s disease reappears. we figure that Beckett must mean something so depressing, so ineffective. the symptom of this, however, is extremely informative:

it is called TURING’S THEOREM, and it is equivalent to penrose’s interpretation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems as implying a higher-order space of understanding/insight (and not simple “computational”, or even formal, deadlock): it is basically the idea that even while

Turing defines computability limits, it is wrong (even ideological) to read this as implying some infernal, holographic existence whereby we exist sort as infernal spectres of a computational error.

if anything, the opposite is true: it is this (virtual, or non-collapsable) perspective defines a radical space of freedom in which we (and beckett’s characters) struggle.

indeed, this general insight says a lot about what we think of our own abstract (heavenly) perspective: we affirm it only insofar as it never becomes actual. e says that, at the same time as we affirm praxis (so as to affirm our obscure working-class solidarity), we refuse to get practical at the level of conference. it works without us. “an encounter without memory”. can we confront however that

heaven is the acid of the actual.

no, no, no (I’m losing my energy):

john locke, she claims, was interested, was doing, formal logic. the fact that this claim is even possible without at the same time producing a general definition of formal logic is bewildering. the fact, more generally, that we don’t produce formal definitions is part of the symptom-illness we are trying to uncover. she proceeds, however, to cherry pick, subvert even the horizon of some abstract standard: all inevitable corruptions of a person who must repress the question that some abstract authority exists which we either confront or find ourselves subsumed under.

so, I think: liquidate it. vomit. because e and I have to face the contradiction that the reason we cannot simply write any critique that is not already anticipated is because of the symptom-structure (system-externalisation): it is part of the illness that it is “ill”, that the words we speak are so interior they cannot possible define any inner existence.

that which is in inedible

breaks the teeth

drink me

die

ok,

you don’t have a heart anymore (you’re sick);

it doesn’t beat anymore

we put acid in the ventricles

if we stay in this x-ray, self-applied because we ARE the problem (us purely), even as we cannot take up the RADIOACTIVE DEFINITIONS of our subjective state: they implicate us (which is the definition of analytic formality). so we say,

ok, symptom,

acknowledging it, because we can see the overlap, the intersection. devastated in this contradiction. we cannot overcome this “limit” without encroaching on the point of objective insight we assume we exist in and from which we have gained this insight. we don’t see that the insight is RADIOACTIVE, which is why and how we can see it at all. everything we say is true. this is where you get this surplus of language. but it is without orientation. we deny, in turn, the absolute nature of our radiation, of these radioactive insights.

we remain, consequently, having repressed the absolute, still doing nothing, owning nothing, saying nothing, even as we can endlessly replicate the product of our x-ray, which, while it serves to ruthlessly position and subjectivise each of us, relinquishes the definition of the absolute as a RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCE itself; a non-collapsible virtual object. we get sick without naming our absolute illness. it is a refusal to see substance as subject.

acidthroat. acidbreath.

it is a parasite, so scared. it is scared of itself. that is how THE SYMPTOM works. self-hating, because it cannot see itself. not directly. it knows it is the problem. but we forego to ask,

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME.

and no one tells us, you are what you eat. bileslug, eating up your own vomit.

how can we write? intervene. it isn’t about enough talk. it’s about seeing what we do and intervening. IT IS A PHOTO OF MYSELF FROM THE INSIDE. it isn’t just another late-capitalist attitude or pitfall. because you are the problem. how. is there any language for that. we just insistently do nothing. faced with the impotence that if we keep speaking we can do something else while we speak. we can’t. we are that speaking. symptom. so we go mad. anxious with ourselves. get sick. there is nothing more to feel. feeling itself collapses. we numb. only with a formal intervention can we do something. stopping it. interrupting it. how do you stop yourself. you are the problem. refusing. taking seriously some horizon of production. seeing that we do do something. this is our hysteria. we are doing something. we aren’t just doing nothing. even as we may ask how can do many people meet in THE FACTORY and be a danger to no one but ourselves. we are dizzy and disoriented. where’s our pride. we must do something. we can. it’s a word. an orientation. an act of self-vomiting. you cannot just eat yourself. even in the inversions of the light (speer). we cannot pretend we don’t and keep talking.

spinedead. acidthroat. heaven is the hole of its entry. you extract yourself, but you remain nothing. I put hand sanitizer in my armpits.