K-punk

Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.

If you’ve got everything, why are you so sad?

What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream.

Though never explicitly discussed, labour is something like an ambient theme, omnipresent but unarticulated.

Why put obstacles in the way of understanding?

This is one sense of the famous Lacanian formula that “desire is the desire of the other”. The perfect erotic situation would involve neither a dominance of, nor a fusion with, the other; it would consist rather in being objectified by someone you also want to objectify.

Kant reasoned that, from the point of view of his ethics, sex was inherently problematic, because to engage in sexual congress entails treating the other as an object to be used.

Hardcore pornography haunts late capitalism, functioning as the cipher of a supposedly demystified, disillusioned “reality”. “A pornographic culture par excellence: one that pursues the workings of the real at all times and all places.”

As Renata Salecl argues in (Per)Versions of Love and Hate,2 it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed by the news that, when an orangutan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating.

The middle-class defection from reproductive futurism into scarification and tribalisation did nothing more than state the obvious — middle-class careers and the privileges they bring are empty, tedious and ennervating — but, now more than ever, it is this obviousness that cannot be stated.

The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know that they are the enemy.15