the events recorded here took place at the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Assocation) in Montreal March 17th, 2024.

when it is night, and so not quite the next day, somewhere in the middle, I start vlogging; it’s hysterical. I’m trying to find some diagonal way of speaking through the internet. it’s hard to make a video no one will watch, but I do it because it is made to be watched. that’s its form, and, ultimately, it’s there whether I like it or not. in the morning, it is fresher, moister; misty, even. but still cold. when I reach the conference, I observe it: is there anything inside? approaching this body I am happier than I expect; comorbid.

e and I get tea and coffee respectively. I forget, again (really), my deodorant and so I get myself some hand sanitizer. unavoidable, I’m afraid. we sit, having earlier agreed to attend a colleague of e’s talk. it is a round table, like all the others. something to do with equality, I assume. and we observe, tentatively, what and who we are about to see. it is fragile, like a flower. immortal; sunk through with the teeth of experience. bitemarks where the imagined structure of the world released itself. my eyeholes are these bitemarks. and desperate we compare these holes with others, not realising that only an inversion of ourselves can we justly seek: that version to which we had been subject and whose mere impression into us had left us with the form of our continuance. it is like looking for something in the dark. for a handprint. shape of this wound. we need a nightlight; an x-ray.

1

he begins. for so many hes. they form a carcass pile upon the burrow of my lip; an indent into speech. like a sore.

he’s talking about some novel. I don’t know it. ostensibly, he’s comparing it. it’s fairly automorphic, though without realising itself as such. he talks about the

white nights

of his young character and his vision/confrontation with the “red rose”. to me, it is clearly a reference to cum and vaginas. to developmental wet dreams. why is this not immediately obvious to our speaker? or, at least, why does he not say it? he is interested in form, and so he imagines that that which is “imaginary” in the structure of either symbol must mean that we are beyond, so to speak, the crudity of an explicit sexual reference. this is a fatal mistake: the vagina is an imaginary object. cum, or sperm, is a white, perfectoidal, and empty substance; it formalises “empty” virtuality itself. indeed, it minimally defines “substance” in just how virtual it is. don’t assume away the one thing we have to try and think: what is this thing called reality which abstraction is meant to exceed (and define). the incision of sexual development into any young character is not traumatically imaginary, or unencounterable (and so fantasised over): sexuality is “already” fantasmatic to the extent that explicit objects are (in their very explicitness) also already virtual; there is no simple “objectal” release. sexuality is, then, an incision of “explicitness” (as virtual) into a nonetheless virtual, so-far un-incised “field” of so-called experience (of the pre-pubescent child’s). but, why go so far in defining the formal materiality of developmental sexuality? because of the fact that the speaker does not see this as his task: explicating some minimal standard for the material coordinates of that to which he refers. foreclosed as it is by that political economy in which we find ourselves.

at one point, in the q and a, he refers to his interest in “the back door of an aesthetic predicate”. I have no idea what this means. all I can do is resolutely read it as a sexual reference, because what else can it refer to? really: what else could it concretely be referring to? if this “concrete” is virtual on account of how it is material, that is one thing, and an hypothesis of its own worth interrogating, but, recall, we aren’t dealing with people who really believe in either materiality or abstraction. what is avoided, however, is not a formulation of the virtual, which is simple enough once your aim is the formal coordinates of materiality (for which even analytic philosophy needs a “metaphysics”). instead, it is the operative sense that we are investigating

anything

which is missing here. we repress “anything” to the extent that we cannot really handle what it would be to (acid-)formulate the concrete itself. we need hegel; it’s that simple. we repress conceptuality at the same time as we refer, ultimately perilously, to some imagined substance meant to stand behind our references to red roses and white nights. we refer emptily, but not to emptiness itself.

even a white night as it might literally exist is an abstraction. this is not a naive insight. mathematics is certainly not above the invasiveness that is implied in the minimal existence of something like a concept. if someone proposes a

white night

as in some kind of definition, what follows is not the vindication of this with some arbitrating “substance”. again, substance is the most abstract thing in existence; it is not recovered any more by coordinate “points”, or however we might define them, of a so-called (metaphysical) existence. insofar as we remain within a definition and recognise this as the minimal speculative space of mathematical description (which is not what we should call it), we can certainly proceed to complicate analytic metaphysics’ own fixation on metalanguage (where what is imagined is that a definitional object-language is supported by a plane of metaphysical statements internal to the kernellic structure of the o-language nonetheless independent from the “literal” space of these explicitly descriptive o-language statements) by saying that no definition removes the conceptual need in the first place for some definition. the (analytic) equation of philosophy with science is the outcome of thinking that philosophy should consist of hypotheses from within this form. but who will complicate why what we rationally designate appears in definitions at all?

the point, however, is that analytic metaphysics does not save some

substrate

to which we can safely refer (insofar as it is contained with a metalinguistic apparatus). not that this is the strategy taken by the speaker. once again, he doesn’t even try to answer this question. for him, “white nights” are either aggressively literal (and so why analyse them) or non-existent: oh, so you thought I really thought they existed? he would say, but you said yourself existence gets acidified by the concept. no, that is not what I said. I said: the point is that “existence” categorically complicates whatever we say “exists”. we should treat existence as a mathematical definition and ask ourselves which naive (acid-)“object” we produce in the production of such a speculation. the fact that he is making no concrete reference to anything is worrying precisely because it is the “concrete” we are minimally trying to define, and there is no doubt that what allows his line of reasoning is his attachment to the underlying political economy:

we don’t really believe anything exists. our “abstraction” is to present a dysfunctional “labour” as if it were functional by repressing the cost of so much abstraction in the first place.

and the symptom of this obscuration is that “concretely” nothing is really said. yes, you will suffer under the equation of labour and nothing. how else can we explain how it is possible to gather so many supposed radicals so un-dangerously? how else could we have assumed they were safely neutered but for the gravetheorem, lined in their “ventricles”, that there is no equation between

substance and abstraction.

and so the outcome is simply the strange double negation of political economy: we cannot reach the praxis of our political-economic neutering because we cannot reach or grasp the abstract-substrate of what we might have ever meant by any such material production. not least because we repress the oppressiveness of das Ding (for which adornian totalitarian recoveries are utterly insufficient).

as a note: he even misses that his own phrase “inversion of homesickness” is a reference to incest.

2

another him: which we would accord some genderistic account if we thought there was some relationship between the biology of gender and number. numbers are like trees we grow inside our heads.

anyway: I already ask my question in my head, because this one deals with Marx:

why not just accept that Marx’s standpoint is not concerned with some open-ended “relation” (into which we might substitute modes of production, class struggle, historical development)

but that as per the aforementioned letter Marx resolutely believed his contribution was the indexing of each form or version of class-formation with an underlying change in the mode of production? once again, in this extended analysis I make the same point over and over again (obsessively): the speaker doesn’t go there because he cannot formulate what it would have meant for Marx to have even meant something practical or concrete. this option is foreclosed because he cannot imagine what is really abstract. if he were to say it, he would also have recourse to what are any number of the formal interventions we would also like to propose in this text; namely:

interrupt, leave, and self-negate (to which more will be added later on):

all so that we can see what a formal incursion into the concrete itself consists in. we would place these interventions into the acidbath of our theorematic thinking with the expectation that what would appear out of it would be some minimal object of political economy. why? because that is the most radical index we have come up with (second only to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious) for how exactly we conceive of that which we call

“materiality”,

of how we implicitly propose to define what materiality nonetheless (abstractedly) exists as.

more twistedly, let’s interrogate this political economy as it appears a bit more directly in view of the paradigm of the q and a:

if I ask a question, it is either politically correct or an act of sabotage, i.e. it is either formally void or sufficiently interrogative as to be worthy of reproach. this means that even when someone asks a good question, it is read into the careerist paradigm of the academy: why are you putting me on the spot like that? can’t you see we are not really here to discuss? this

“really here”

is the only “concrete” reference of this political economy. it is the minimal term of its uncollapsing (or virtual) appearance: where are we “really”? there is an answer, but it is a question of the formal coordinates of its appearance. this is why form matters. it is also why the response to this fetish of the “really here” (as only ever an obscene reference to the fact that we really are aware we are careerist hacks) is not to, then, try and manifestly intervene at the level of this really existing here and qua an academic form of mutual aid support each other in precariously reaching for academic positions. no: dissolve it; liquidate it. if we intervene truly at the level of political economy, we dissolve the form itself of any given

here (which is also an effective thesis against all non-hegelian phenomenology: it’s not that we have these reified categories of “access”, the inner world or structure or form of which we lack: these “forms” should not be collapsed into the shadow of phenomenology, but should be radically asserted as actual candidates for what we can mean by what is really

there

where what is there is a categorical definition of really existing, uncollpasable virtual substrates).

the conceptual acid after all of hegel’s phenomenology is not simply an epistemic lacking. the point, therefore, is that we have to actually reconstruct the form, respectful of its virtuality. we only esquisse any kind of “political economy” on the basis of, again, taking Marx at his word: he really sees the “mode of production” as the underlying (reconstructive) terms of our formal analysis of anything. we should seek out a deeper definition of mode of production. furthermore, changing it is as simple as changing that mode (which is also irreducibly formal or virtual). this is the diagonality of simply

interrupting, leaving, and negating,

because literally such changes, in their formality, in the fact that they don’t “change anything deeper” (because what is the “deeper” but another abstract, formal category?), really do change whatever we might mean by the mode of academic production. this DIAGONALITY is also the only way of encountering the AUTOMORPHISM OF THE SYMPTOM: the fact that we really are the problem. so do surgery upon yourself. cut across the very formal “are”: what celan will do in Engführung, and which Knausgaard analyses so well: the pronounal disjoint; the lower even than “here” or “there” categories: the radical forms of morphological-categorical subtraction. we cannot see ourselves: even as we are nothing: we cannot see ourselves from this tunnelled inside into which we would enter with memory and “experience” so as to resuscitate the abstract surgery of whatever we were. there really is a kind of resurrective dimension to symptomology.

in any case, to avoid mutual aid (which is a kind of Archimedean conservatism) we have to figure out how to actually change this formal-mode. so, again, cut across, diagonalise: interrupt, leave, negate, refuse: changes entirely at the formal surface of what we are doing. within political economy we simply ensure a definition such as Marx had done with labour-time (as commodity). define yourself accordingly.

recall, our position in comparative literature is one of being already offended. so where is our trauma-Factory: the reconstructive matrix or lifeline of how we keep alive a “memory that never happened”. why are we so traumatized? why do we keep doing this to ourselves? what happens when, symptomatically, we cannot even identify our pain because we don’t exist (and it never happened except as a pure “memory”; a purely embedded symptom in the walls of our auto-exploitation). are we pure pain? or does our pain also not exist. we might make the speculative step of asserting of our pain exists in not existing: how it is virtually this surgery we undergo of the nothing that we are and the nothing that we choose to remain (in choosing the fiction of “something”, of some unequivocal “something” which, on balance, we cannot imagine because the true substance of the world is not only a pure abstraction,

it is horrifying;

and can we remain these horrors; riven-through; ant-tunnels; unable to orient our pain because we are the pain-cause).

what is Marx’s mode here but a means of radical symptomal extraction: release thyself.

change me.

3

The next speaker is pure obscenity. I mean, really. Yes, we are still in the same grey fucking room. He’s talking about black liberation. But he isn’t black. And I don’t care, but he does. He is entirely the kind of person to care. Why else would a white guy be talking about black liberation? He feels he has to. Which is not how morality works. People who use morality to inflict pain on themselves are moral, and that’s why morality is hideous. It doesn’t save you: it makes you more ill. It’d have been better if he was not the kind of person to tell someone they have to be black to talk about black liberation and then talked about black liberation. If you are doing it because you have to, it’s self-punishment; and if you feel the need to punish yourself how can you see that punishment is precisely the fucking problem and that you cannot answer one sick morality with another (and expect the sickness to be gone). No black liberation is not a sickness: morality is. And our deadlock is that we cannot even moralise something as much needed as emancipation.

This isn’t what he is talking about though. Of course not. That’d be expecting too much. Instead he says “ejecta that are not arbitrary”, which I don’t want to repeat here because it was just as silly when he said it. Because why does he not just say symptom; and yes, again again again, it’s all foreclosed: any even remote practicality, any even remote possibility of collaboration, of shared and actionable assumptions. No, of course not, despite quoting Lacan fifty times; he doesn’t just say “the symptom”, because then he’d have seen that the devastating next step to make is that even as the topic of “black liberation” consists in a symptomal struggle the political economy of slavery is no longer with us (as it was), and that this is the real symptomal dysfunction: we don’t even have the matrix of some “exploitation” or political economy and that we are dealing with a kind of meaningless cancellation of the underlying conditions of bondage (which already the 100 years between the 13th amendment and the “success” of the civil rights movement attests to).

To his credit, he does say something to the effect of a ‘universal slavery’. Formalising this takes a bit more precision, however: if we are all slaves, then we are one giant proletarian symptom and, yes, the pain is universal (which does not make it any more insightful).

But, this ends. And we go into the next room.

4

There is technically a beginning here, but we cannot find it. Someone is zooming in to read a paper they haven’t finished writing. And yet the room still nods its head and disbelieves in negativity. I write in my notes

DISSOLVE IT IN ACID
THIS FACTORY BLOCK
PURE FUCKING LEAD
(LEADHEADS)

As I think about “hall chats”, another formal symptom. Is it possible that a political economy is purely formal: where are the definitions produced? And how? What is a definition? A perfectoid space? Again, take yourself seriously and answer this question: what do you think reality really is?

How can you do anything unless you have an answer to this question? There’s a reason the word cognition and visual field appear in every talk: because this is the (un)official language of this conference: scientistic. Sounds like a kind of cyst. It basically is. But before we reach this second room of talks, it is 10:30 AM and I am speaking to the quasi-Marxist from the morning and I begin to ask him the question I had formulated in my head. I begin and I try to frame something here with respect to Marx’s concrete point. But he doesn’t answer my question. He doesn’t answer it. He thinks I want to know about Marx. But I say in my head as we are interrupted and my voice cuts out

I want to know about you.

And I see how even when you invert fascism, you still repeat its logic. And Knausgaard argues how Hitler in Mein Kampf is missing the “you”, that there is only the I and the we and there is no you and I think that the same thing is true of this conference and this entire academy, no matter how much it presumes to be the opposite of whatever or whomever this accusation is meant to designate.

But, I continue in my thoughts: bleachsun. Symptomworm. Because part of this economy is that we must exist during the day, even as we would prefer to be having lunch or negotiating our book deal at the bar somewhere at night. Even while that is our survival, our excess is to have to present ourselves beneath the bleachsun of this conference. Even though we don’t want to be real. And that could be an axiom. But what is this point of excess that touches upon the essence? We may prefer to survive, but we go out into the light and have to exist with this kind of contental overflow. Which we have already repressed (in advance of it even happening), because we imagine we are suitably protected by how we will negotiate our bodies back later on at night. We don’t see how this light is what exposes the symptom of our innards.

Because even if you took out your organs so as to see yourself you won’t. The result of which is we have a kind of AUTOIMMUNE disease: the body attacks itself under this exposure to light. As we are exposed to our ourselves (automorphically). Exhausted, anxious, depressed: yes, the wormform of our daylight production in the factory is strange because it is so inessential. And yet, yet: form is the site of the real production. And even as that includes whatever is excised from the day, our exhaustion is owed to how much we must formally silence ourselves from really speaking and really doing anything so as to sustain the void of the day. Even if this kills us. Especially if it kills us.

And as we wait for the zoom to turn into something tangible, we confront how our devices are rather incestually interlinked, presuming a “body” of connection that doesn’t, and indeed cannot, exist. Not as some “body” for which each tunnel corresponds to some hole. These holes symptomatise the “body”. Have we tried to analyse ourselves? Could we? Why is that foreclosed? Despite this symptom, the automorphism of the light shows us that this question of a higher perspective is a question of

heaven,

And we should not be afraid to confront this category. We have already seen it. There is not just a recursive statement. The acidity of abstraction bespeaks some “perspective” it categorises in the form of that symptom. There is something that we may call this HEAVENLY PERSPECTIVE that is precisely what we have meant by the symptomal work wherein what cannot just be seen (because it doesn’t exist) still exists. How? It is simple:

HEAVEN IS THE STRETCH; WE LOOK BACK AT OURSELVES: WE PRODUCE A MONSTROUS PERSPECTIVE FROM OUR ACID-SYMPTOM, FROM OUR IMPOSSIBILITY: THIS IMPOSSIBILTIY EXISTS IN THE STRETCHED, ACID-DEFORMED HEAVEN-VIEW: HOW CHRIST’S CRUCIFICTION IS THE PURE STRETCHING OF SUBJECTIVITY.

In our symptomal non-existence heaven exists instead. The condition of those innards as they relate without you: the tunnels of that “perspective” that form to no whole; only hole.

We ask,

Where have we gone? We are nowhere. Ill with ourselves, we cannot see the precise “torsion” which defines this auto-immunity.

Because you don’t know how to analyse yourself. And it’s not that you can’t: but how could you? Sick with yourself, how could you analyse? You get the heavenacid of this abstraction precisely because some non-recursive perspective remains: you. But from the inside-outside of having been burned through with acid: you are heaven.

You are what you do. Even from the inside. You either intervene formally or not. But you prefer to survive, lugging what is a hole in the world into which everything enters and nothing leaves but you.

Heaven is that nowhere.

(And what object do we speculate exists now?)

It is categorical precisely because it defines the category of the symptom. It is a structure of what doesn’t simply appear. The non-structure which defines the entire arrangement of this inversion.

5

The next speaker sits far across from us. At this point, I’m not really listening. We wait to hear e’s professor, who is speaking next. The wheels of my mind turn nonetheless, against my permission:

He’s talking about some labour dystopia novel. I think, firstly, why would your formal intervention concern how to better manage labour? That’s like trying to manage cancer. It’s already killing you.

I think how Marx understood “formality” itself is able to go more or less philosophically to the end in asserting that we aren’t alive. That formally we can have been effectively unalived. That no matter “who we think we are” we are effectively what we are; that is, what we do. The question is whether we can understand this relationship between formality and materiality, whether we can see that that is what defines really what we are, that if we are in a labour market, we are reducible to that which we make available as a (labour-)commodity. It sounds numb. Because haven’t we heard this before. And we did. But we didn’t know what to do about it. Except in 1917, and even then.

We’d like to be organic, but in this view it becomes superfluous, invasive, and even abstract. It does not function as a reference. He wants to emphasise it because he imagines that the dystopian hell defined in the novel can be salvaged by an irremediably organic background. There is only a formal diagonal; we aren’t organic. Or otherwise “organic”. He describes some girl who is interrogated and his analysis is paradigmatic: he says that she is interrogated even though they already know everything about her. But isn’t that the excess of it? The acidexcess, which burns with the heavenhole and leaves on the symptompain. He assumes we can just see ourselves. He cannot imagine a certain diagonal formality (GOD’S DIAGONAL; THE CRUCIFICTION). But you don’t exist, only heaven does.

and e says that the ultimate mark of the parasite is that they parasite upon themselves. what else can they do when they are it. no heavenly perspective preserves them even as that

“perspective”

is precisely that which abstraction concerns: a perspective which burns through what it designates. the inner acid is that inability to extract whatever it is we just are. formality builds up an image of an intervention into the symptomal plain. so we prepare surgery on ourselves so as to present an

organ

we can say is what we are. this is fetish. worse, it is not enough because it is an “organ”; a category. it’s image is inverted in heaven. they try to do a real surgery (of the concrete), so as to really see themselves: all they see is their disfiguration. how can you recognise yourself in a mirror, when you must see yourself in the twisting? you are not otherwise; you are not otherwise than that twisting (in pain).

6

there is no orientation. it’s impossible to do anything. a speech. like what? the tunnel of the digital (us; symptom). insides. parasite. he speaks, and I think

but, why is the infrastructure shit? why is it collapsing in on itself? why do you just expect that formally “what you are” is just this collapse? you don’t see yourself in it.

they don’t produce a theorem because they know it would be meaningless. they don’t trust their own language. they don’t even know what language is. tell me, now, what is it? why are you speaking then? there is no theorem to this conference, so that in the end it has utterly subtracted that formal condition, that invasive thing (we really call language; mouthheart). there is no theorem because it wouldn’t he understood, and having repressed the DIAGONAL how could we expect to act upon that (symptom).

there was no me. I was that “predicate”. it was abstraction which burned through “me”. and I became myself somewhere in the hole of and in which things fade way into some formal resolution to cut into it deeper, to cut through it. acidbreath.

HEAVEN (which became hell and was no less true, no less what it was). and I think, again, how is it possible to write so much, so freely, unless it is already meaningless. because we don’t really do anything (real). and would we even know how?

7

e’s professor begins to speak. he starts by telling a story of his visit to the AI department. he tells us that he wants there to be more collaboration between the humanities and the sciences. but the humanities is already the upstart science. what is science when you can

subtract the category; dissolve it:

and so he sounds insecure, because why not assume you can directly intervene into scientific questions? where did the assumption come in that you couldn’t? maybe because we have been taught we can only do so on the basis we extract its modernity from it or complicate its knowledge protocols. and so he also sounds paranoid. he won’t insert himself into existence, and so he must forcibly see himself as the paranoid object of an “advanced weaponry”, as the subject of the threat of AI. but he isn’t. and it isn’t a threat. not for you. what is for you is the acidified organ of your symptomhood.

he presumes too much in what we do here. there is no weapon that could be used against us we haven’t already used. the only real trauma, over which we

vomit, plot, cry, exhaust

is the pure category of how our lives could have been otherwise. what is more painful than that it could have been otherwise? instead I sanitise myself to be with you and your breath smells of acid.

you can see why it is more traumatising to really intervene at the level of production. your fetish dissolves. his is that he believes we shouldn’t sanitise the “factories”, even as, saying this,

he represses we are in factories (and no we can’t just leave).

there is something to sanitising: if it burns through the naive “form” of the factory floor. Marx knew that one was only really in a factory materially insofar as formally there was some condition, such as your labour(-commodity), which installed properly and abstractedly the category of the “factory”. there is therefore a kind of emancipatory sanitary act insofar as one really asks the fundamental question of

the cost of abstraction (as one would ask the question of the cost of a force in physics)

and in so doing intervenes again diagonally; that is, across/surfacially/formally, at the level of our (formal) production.

the absolute is abstract. it is the heavenacid. it weakens what it designates. like how the x-ray gives us cancer. we do not see ourselves, but

it; and, not even, “it”: we see a pure categorical morphology of abstract “production”, of “who” and “what” we “are”.

there is this “higher perspective” into which we intervene, but it burns through what never was. we arrange our production anew when we formally (diagonally) intervene, because we proceed without the assumption of a we, but merely with the category of “we”: some acidspoilt abstraction dedesignated by the fact that we are “it”. the absolute devours everything; that’s why it’s absolute. we change what we are by changing

the formal conditions by which we are symptomatically a structure at all: we are abstract because we are symptomatic; ill with ourselves.

8

lenin is simple: provisional, he reflects upon the antagonistic nature of the state as he confronts his success. don't be misled: the soviets didn’t get rid of the state. so don’t get cynical. do it.

e doubles the negation and everyone scurries like bugs. but if it appears false when you double it, it is likely already rotten from the beginning. there is a pathological fear of the very abstraction we work with. we literally do not know how we do it. we produce virtual memories precisely because we cannot even begin to understand “how else we exist”. and nothing else appears to tell us how we do: we also produce virtual memories insofar as

there is no we which exists. there is only this forward dissolution in an abstract category; devourment.

and all one has to do is to see how this is the “substrate”; this uncollapsable abstraction. imagine that the body has replaced all of its organs with artificial ones, only they are structured in entirely formal categories (of the absolute).

e asks a question and I am barely listening, but I hear his voice. he asks everyone what they think of the conference, and I add this to the list of formal interventions:

because we intervene at the surface where abstraction is uncollapsed, because we are literally virtual.

it could suddenly change everything, what he is saying. but they have a kind of illness one sees in Brueghel: we are just bodies. after this, we are just bodies. but what is a “body”: you think you are not subject to abstraction, to virtuality? the absolute is a symptom. so much of our malaise is owed to the fact that we are still looking for something “real” to appear, some organ-substrate which we might finally suffocate and bring an end ultimately to our own desire. if only you had the confidence to just change things virtually, formally: to see how the organ is already virtual. you “touch” it categorically, abstractedly. wet with acid; with inversion. everything else follows. it is that easy to change things. I put hand sanitizer in my mouth.