The Indomitable Gaze of the Other

The Near-Far 

Sometimes when Deep calls to Deep, Ishmael heard it. At first it was an accident, but after that, his desire to hear it again was insatiable. There were more and more opportunities to hear it as the neighborhood emptied out because there were more and more dark places where there had once been light. But Ishmael soon realized that it wasn’t only the dark places that were dark. The darkness’s self-obfuscating intensities were an enjoyable dissatisfaction with him that wanted to speak without the burden of meaning and to be seen without becoming visible. His inner dialog became like the impenetrable rants of a psychotic’s certainty, interrupted less and less by his familiar, neurotic doubt. He was beginning to doubt his doubt, which was a source of great consternation to him because it was his doubt that had kept him safe thus far from some of the beliefs the others, beliefs that had become internal to himself like parasitic worms, so that now he couldn’t tell which had come from him and which he had been infected with by his proximity to them. 

But there was a dark voice in him that he associated most with himself, and which seemed to resist outside infection. It was the tongue that had infected him the longest, so that it seemed to be in him more than himself. It spoke profoundly but in the superficial, manic banter of advertisements and influencers. It was deep but not very because it was just below the depth of his knowable intentions as their concealed adversary. He wondered if it was his “true self” forced to speak in the tones of the outside world because of its embedding in this time and place. There was a sort of strange, possibly sick, enjoyment to being undermined in this way. It felt like being opened to the sublime transcendence of indeterminacy itself, but it was an immanent transcendence of local vastness that he had heard called the “near-far” by the mystics, and that he and his fellow travelers into the near-far felt as the proximal hiddenness of queer affects. 

There were others who had been left behind, and who had also heard the Deep speak in the dark places. Most other folks had left because the bugs had become too much, but most of the small minority who remained had continued to dream the dreams of those who had left. This remainder kept those other dreams for fear of being without concepts before the drives now loosed within them. They didn’t know what the ambiguous yearnings were for, but they sensed them despite being fed, clothed, and sheltered. Whatever this lack was about, it wasn’t about anything directly necessary, but more about the furtive necessity of gratuity. The intention for what was counter to their given biological and social-biological intentions was somehow being replace; instead, there was a crazed drive for what was unintentional, or for what wasn’t for anything, which wasn't for nothing exactly, but for what couldn’t be said, which wasn’t for silence exactly, but for what was invisible even when it appeared, like the visible darkness of John Milton’s Satan. Meister Ekhart, whose sermons they had read aloud in a circle on the moldy library floor, had called this desiring without intention, “Living without a why.”   

At first, their little community kept falling for what they imagined their desires were for instead of for desire itself. There seemed to be no way to directly desire without an object, so they tried to work out if desire could be for a non-object. New techniques had to be developed to trick the intentions of their desires away from their satisfaction and towards the ambiguous excess of the unintentional. But how could they intend what was unintentional, or be unintentional about their intentions? It would have to be something like care without concern, or like the Daoist’s “Wu Wei,” usually translated as “purposeless action” or the “non-way.” But care has always exceeded its pregiven intentions. It has never been enough just to be, but to know what being is, “in-itself,” without our intentions for it, whatever that could possibly mean. Care is excessive when it is no longer about what the world is for me, but what the world is for itself because this sort of gratuitous care is useless. It is the disease of philosophers and of mystics and is the self-undermining and useless fount of their babbling nonsense. This sickness was now within the small cartel that formed in the zone to worship whatever it was that was counter to their intentions. Each of them was “alone with the alone,” as the mystics said of the darkness within that connected them to each other through their mutual love of uselessness and its coincident excesses. 

The cartel had discovered that religious practices could be for what was in them more than themselves, which to them meant for what couldn’t be named or determined about being. They were looking for clues as to how to resist the overbearing determinations of those that had left the zone, determinations that had remained even after their exodus. They were listening to the ambiguous speech of the unintentional, so that they might get out of the traps that had been laid for them by “The They,” as Martin Heidegger had called the other voices who spoke for our society in our heads. The cartel had tried religious practices that were “for” something but always found that whatever they were “for” corrupted the cartel’s practice with “The They’s” outside intention, but whenever their religious practices were without an intention, they devolved into sex magic of some kind, which was neither sexy nor magical, but just the regular intention for sex dressed up in religious signification. There must be some way to sneak up on desire, so that it might be kept unaware and unintentional without the typical twenty-something drive for copulation. The zone had been vacated, except for them and the other weirdos who hadn’t been able or willing to leave, but the desires of those who had left continued to play on repeat in the heads and bodies of the cartel 

Although their initial practices had been developed to spice up their sexual congress, they hadn’t realized that at the time. The most powerful intentions within them seemed to be truly beyond them because their libidos were always the “real reason” why they did whatever they did. At that age all intentions were for sex, but sex proved to be much more elusive than its mere biological operations. Freud had taught that all desire was structured like sex, or possibly that all desire, however dressed up in sublimation, was for biological copulation. But the cartel wanted to hide that from themselves because access to sex without an obstacle reduces its alure, even for twenty-somethings, which seemed to suggest that they weren’t merely their biological intentions. 

The public library had been left as it was the day that it had been abandoned. At first, it was guarded by some unhappy security guards who were quite discontented by the swarms of insects busying themselves with their short but predictable lives of fornication and murder. It was a mess, and it was easy to see why those who left had left. The endless repetitions of various suppression efforts against the insect invasion had ended in the bugs’ ultimate victory against the techne that had been arrayed against them. After the library was closed, there was some initial thought from someone somewhere to protect it from looters, or from squatters, and so the security guards were sent to watch over what had already been lost to the enigmatic curse of the zone. However, within a few months, any oversight of the neighborhood ended, and the locks were broken, and the wires were pulled out of the half-hearted alarms without a fuss. And the bugs didn't care one way or the other about any of that.  

Those who didn’t have other places to stay moved into the library, and the others who were staying in their increasingly unfamiliar homes, like Ismeal, had to visit the library each day because their utilities had been cut. However, the library’s water continued to flow for some unknown reason. The fresh water became an essential community good, so that the pipes did not freeze even in the dead of winter because the zone’s leftovers filled their buckets day and night with their daily needs.  

The library’s books entered active circulation again soon after the guards left, especially among the cartel of horny, twenty-something seekers of the near-far. They had stayed behind for the free sex but needed to find some intellectual diversions to get back the mojo that had been lost when whatever boundaries to fucking had been lost. Any clues that might be found in the wisdom of the ages about how to live now that the future had been cancelled were enthusiastically sought. However, the erudition of their knowing was always reduced to the Biblical “knowing” of biological intercourse. Some of the members became experts on biological anthropology’s reduction of all things to survival and reproduction. They began to speak of the ratio of “low value” to “high value” members, ridding themselves of the burden of having to translate these economic principles into religious discourse.  

These “Alphas” become less a part of the cartel’s pretentions as they were consumed by their own. There was no longer much of a signal for social media in the zone, but the Alphas who remained had copious discussion about “high value” females, and how to properly distribute them amongst themselves. However, the high value women weren’t having it, and, although, that normally would have only increased the enjoyment of the Alphas for “acquiring” what they wanted against the females’ wills, a sort of miracle happened: the Alphas found something of higher value. They fell into fighting with each other over “access rights” that they didn’t have, and somehow amid all the wrestling around, they found that they not only enjoyed the close, bodily wrestling, but also, the sexual congress to which their tussles inevitably lead. Unbeknownst to them but well-understood by something that was nonetheless in them more than themselves, they had longed to wrestle for their “intimacy.” They had wanted resistance to their advances more than they had wished for “high value females.” The value that they had pinned on certain females was due to the obstacle to them that gave them an aura of desirability, which was the desire that they imagined that others had for these select few. 

Now that they didn’t have to perform their masculinity on social media anymore, they could perform it with each other in acts that they used to consider abominations. They soon forgot about “high value” females altogether, and started wrestling for “high value” males, who were those that could resist their advances the best or with the most panache, which led to better sexual congress amongst themselves, which was what they had wanted in the first place, but didn’t know it because the Alpha Male Influencers on social media hadn’t been telling them about all of their options, perhaps, because the influencers wanted to keep all the “high value” males to themselves. We all fall for what resists our intentions, but it is a tricky game. Courtly love was the love of the obstacles of consummation rather than of the beloved. And these Alphas of the zone had a sort of contempt for those who could not withstand their intention because no booty easily obtained was worth much to them. 

They took their boons if they could get them, but in their release from desire, they did not find satisfaction as much as a “little death,” which is the enjoyment beyond satisfaction that the French call “jouissance.” They would rise again from this dying, which is the boredom that the French call “ennui,” but it was harder and harder to forget how they were let down by their desires in the aftermaths of their satisfaction, which is the pretermission that the French call “secondaire naivete.”  With these three concepts the French reduce all of being’s multitudinous strivings to their pointless ground in nothing, which the Greeks call “khaos,” and is the dark ground from which the mystics watch all of being continually emerge from the “incontinence of the void,” as Samuel Beckett so aptly put it.  

Famously, Beckett wrote in his second language, which was French, and then translated his French writing back into English to simplify his prose, which is how he rendered the common French phrase “l’appel du vide,” normally translated as the “call of the void,” into the somewhat elaborated notion of the void’s evacuation of itself from itself, which is the incontinent void that Slavoj Zizek thought of as “less than nothing.” The void’s call is to void itself of itself as the excrement of creation. Ishmael thought of the biblical phrase “Deep calls to Deep” in this manner as the self-emptying of nothing from nothing because what he thought he heard was the Deep urging itself out of the depths of its nothingness into being, which is how Hegel thought of being’s relation to nonbeing as an internal relation to itself. Its call, or its voice, seemed to arrive from elsewhere. The voice was disembodied, but resonant in particular, material conditions. This herald augured a great fall, as the Frenchmen Paul Vallery conveyed when he wrote that “being is a blemish on the perfection of nonbeing,” but this accidental becoming was a fall for the sake of knowing as the writers of Gensis understood.  

The Biblical authors knew that the desire that drove becoming was for knowing what shouldn’t be known because a tree of knowledge set in a perfect Garden couldn’t be left alone. Knowing had to be a transgression for the being for whom being is a question because being’s care for itself had to be motivated by the coincidence of lack and desire. Being’s care desires to know what withdraws from the light of its understanding, which is both the ground and the limit of its being and its care.  

The Christian follower of the Neoplatonic teachings of Plotinus, unkindly referred to as the “Pseudo-Dionysus” called the incontinent void a “super-saturated darkness,” as if it were a bowel readying to evacuate its pressurized contents. Because this darkness was and still is a twice negated absence, it is always pregnant with what it cannot contain, which is an absence whose escape from itself radiates like light. This aboriginal darkness is darker than the absence of light, so that its darkness glows as the presence of becoming, which is the becoming-present of absence, or the becoming-active of nonbeing.   

Those seven remaining within the cartel preferred to disguise the antagonisms, as well as the agonies, of their sex acts with the blessed praxis of esoteric techne. Before they performed their sacralized fucking, they discussed its religious significances. Post colitis, they no longer cared about theory or meaning. They had quickly worn out the library’s books of their sexual content, but they grew dissatisfied with their post coital satisfaction, or “ennui” as they referred to it in their erudition. They began to experiment with new forms of transcendence, but whatever creative sublimation of the sex drive they came up with, they usually collapsed back into the determinations sex’s mechanical, biological processes. Was there a way to enter the near-far without so much lingering ennui? Could you stay in the “before” of libidinal ecstasy without facing what came after? Was there such a thing as satisfying dissatisfaction? Could you live in between completion and anticipation? The mystics talked of becoming’s “already, but not yet” nature, and the cartel began to wonder if that liminal space was locatable.  

Ishmael’s somewhat independent studies had brought him to the discovery that the vagina was the origin of ancient mystery cults. Who knows if that was really true, but it was an enjoyable sort of speculation. Mystery cults recreated the descent into vaginal darkness, but to enter the inner chamber resulted in the dissatisfaction of satisfaction, which was the little death of the orgasm covered above. The Jouissance of transgression illuminated what should be left dark but was the irresistible ground of knowing. The mystics spoke of the invisible remaining hidden even when it was revealed. Was it possible to penetrate the inner sanctum without revealing its secrets? Meister Ekhart had said that when “God revealed itself, it hid more deeply within its Godhead.” There had to be a way to enter the dark chamber without obtaining satisfaction as to remain in the moment before, rather than the moment after knowing.  

Ishmael revealed his findings about the vagina-centered phallus to the cartel, which framed the problem of dissatisfaction to his satisfaction, but not to theirs. Their rejection of and abhorrence at the male orientation of his fantasy was swift and complete. They enthusiastically pointed out that penetration wasn’t necessary for feminine enjoyment. But nobody was really ready to expand on that. Gabriel, in particular, was troubled by Ishmael’s “findings” because her total rejection of them revealed her general lack of theorizing about her own refusal of the masculine position that had been assigned to her at birth. She wasn’t what they told her that she was, and that had been that, but now she wondered why. Did there need to be one? Ekhart’s “living without a why” came into her mind often. Ekhart had thought that “why’s” negation was a positive negation, or an affirmation of being via its liberation from purpose. However, Gabriel wondered about the Hegelian “determinate negation,” in which a thing’s identity is given by what it isn’t.  

She pondered her own experience of her identity, which wasn’t a positivized negativity so much as a substantial “in-itself.” There was something in her that withdrew from representation because it was beyond signification. It was what refused binary categories altogether, so there was something in her that made the symbolization of gender fail. But was it a substantial “in-itself” beyond gender categories or was it merely a structural failure internal to symbolization? Was she beyond representation in the positive sense that she was more than could be represented by symbolic categories or did this failure of representation reflect the negativity of incompletion, which could be considered positively as openness. Incomplete being is the lack of being inherent to it that Hegel called “nonbeing,” and it was the dialectical relation between determinate being and indeterminate nonbeing that allowed being to escape the static unity of “being-all-in-one-place" to become the moving, open flow of becoming multiple or of becoming different. To Gabriel the failure of identity was too much to identify, so that what was in her more that her was the substantial void that was the before of symbolization that Kant had called the noumenal realm of “things-in-themself.” Was the feminine phallus a substantial nothing like the super-saturated darkness that they had read about in Pseudo-Dionysus? 

Gabriel knew that neither the Symbolic nor biology can tell you what you are, but some of the cartel without vaginas were not ready to give up penetration yet, and even though they were without a theory of the feminine phallus, they still desired putting their penises into dark places. And some of those members with vaginas also desired penetration. The pro-penetration camp’s general lack of theory didn’t inhibit this desire as Gaberiel thought it should. 

Intercourse, or Biblical “Knowing,” is motivated by an obstacle. That much the cartel had worked out from their Lacanian studies. If the obstacle was lost, or mystery of the Other was penetrated too deeply, they would have to find some other barrier to seduce their transgression. If they had learned one thing about mysteries and their revelation, it was this. However, to some of them, the unknowing that surrounded the vagina seemed like the mystification of femininity that Lacan himself might be accused of when the cartel was in certain moods. Why should feminine jouissance be the enjoyment of seduction rather than of completion? When the phallus was located on the penis, it was about having. When the phallus was located in the vagina, it was about “releasement,” as the mystics said. The feminine phallus reveled without exposing, and that was difficult to work out the meaning of, and Gabriel hadn’t worked it out, but she held the other’s liable for their willingness to proceed with intercourse without having moved the phallus to the vagina or even knowing how. Whatever the cartel’s favorite mystic Meister Ekhart had meant by reveling while simultaneously hiding came to mind whenever feminine jouissance was debated, but Ekhart’s paradox resolved nothing, which perhaps was the point. 

On December 27, 167 BC, when Antiochus Epiphanes entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, he was shocked to find that there was nothing in there. And so, he placed a statue of the Ancient Greek god of the Phallus, “Zeus,” in there, and then he cooked some pork and ate it to make his sacrilege compete. But after all that satisfying desecration, he was dissatisfied. The temple priests called the event, “the Abomination of Desolation,” and the Greek general would have killed for something as glorious as all that. Antiochus Epiphanes had come into the temple looking for the satisfaction that the Jews were keeping to themselves but found only the presence of a profoundly dissatisfying absence. The ancient Israelite priests had had it right and Antiochus had had it wrong. Penetration is an empty desperation, and feminine jouissance is an impenetrable mystery of endlessly deferred incompletion. 

The cartel agreed that the feminine phallus was where it was at, but they couldn't figure out if penetration without satisfaction or satisfaction without penetration was the way to go, or if there was some other yet unseen formulation. Gabriel often pointed out, they all had anuses, so why couldn’t they sanctify these dark places instead. Making the rectum the Holy of Holies allowed for a certain equality within the cartel since they all had them. Many of them had penetrated this inner sanctum of course, but there was some difference that they couldn’t figure out yet. Anuses could be vaginas in as much as they were structured similarly, and so they could be like the secret, dark rooms of the ancient mystery cults. Why should it matter if they weren’t openings to biological wombs?  

However, there was something that resisted the move of the phallus to the anus. Sure, it had been done many times throughout history. And within the cartel it had been done to avoid impregnating the persons with wombs. But, If the members with penises entered the lacuna that led to this possibility space, they practiced the desecration that the Church had called “Onanism,” which was named after the Biblical figure “Onan” who peeved the Lord by pulling out instead of impregnating his dead brother’s wife. Onan “spilled his seed in the dirt,” and in so doing, disobeyed God. It was the imagined spite associated with the spilling of one’s seed in direct contradiction to the intention of the Big Other that gave it its satisfaction, but that enjoyment was wearing thin as the fantasy of the Big Other’s disapproval faded.