a saint telling a perverse truth: dementia, masochism and the idea of God

17Apr10

In Christianity, the tie with the shepherd is an individual one. It is personal submission to him. His will is done, not because it is consistent with the law, and not just as far as it is consistent with it, but, principally, because it is his will.

-Michel Foucault.

This is also the structure of masochism where what the masochist desires is not so much the arbitrary imposition of the law but the imposition of one individual will over it’s own. There may be all manner of high theoretical indications to the otherwise, buried inside arguments pushed to obscene convolution, but it is clear that what is described above is the case.

In the first instance the masochist never takes themselves away to explicitly authoritarian countries to be put under the crushing thumb of totalitarian law. In the second instance no masochist asks for a reason why they must perform as commanded; every law, no matter how arbitrary, carries with it its own camouflage of reason, of rationalisation, and adheres to a nomos. Thirdly, it has become a common place truism to speak of the masochist seeking to extinguish its own will in that of another, a truism which is already found in the writing of Masoch, after whom ‘masochism’ is named. In the final instance, which for us as for the masochist can never arrive, no one could explain K. in his quest to find reason among the absently ringing telephone connections of the Castle as masochistic. Here again, in the total submission of will to that of another, we also find a correlate with Buddist practice wherein the initiate, before being able to completely surrender and so enter nirvana, must submit to his master.

It may well be contended that in this case and in the case of sexual masochism that the point is to attain the peak experience, as nirvana and the little nirvana of orgasm respectively. Yet in both these instances one is not operating by way of a law or for the sake of a law, either to transgress or to become identical to, but to suspend it. In a certain sense, under  a certain perspective of debasement, the law is the law of the abandonment of all law, a law which cancels law. If the masochist wants a Hitler to reign over them then they do so in the explicit rejection of the Reich. If they desire a Fuhrer then it is the pure viciousness of personality they desire, the imaginary of the cult without the attachment to any symbolic order.

Yet are we not too quick to identify this metaphor of shepherd to masochism, with all these other grim appellations mediating our understanding in between. After all, the shepherd tends to his flock. He leads them to water, provides them with food, guards them safe from predation even while they sleep; in short, the shepherd cares. Recalling Heidegger’s pronouncement on idle chatter and curiosity as relieving us from the need to ‘take care of things’, then first of all we can say that the shepherd is the one who takes care. That is, in distinction to the Heidegger’s inauthentic (and for now ignoring the ‘inauthenticity’ of the decisional dyad this implies) the shepherd is the one who exercises responsibility.

In this manner we could speak of the politician as the shepherd of the people, as with Plato’s philosopher kings, but these people remained fully entrenched in a symbolic order or, to strip ourselves of Lacanese, they remain within a fully anthropocentric encoding of an intersubjectively experienced reality. The true masochist doesn’t give a give a shit about such patterns of encoding, seeking to occupy that place wherein the codes (which ossify in law) are a persistent naught. The essence here is that of the subsuming of will into that of another. The masochist does not act on their own behalf, does not occupy a space of responsibility but rather redoubles such a space on within another person. You are responsible for the both of us, you are responsible for my pleasure and pain, for my nirvanic exhaustion that leads me beyond the worldly sphere.

An irony here. As the masochist attempts to escape the worldly in this nirvanic embrace they paradoxically cannot help but place themselves at a remove from their own subjectivity. As they move closer to negating the experience of their own subjectivity, in the acephalic abandon of agonised orgasm, the masochist comes ever closer to themselves as an object. It is not that they are reduced to the state of objects, not that they become abject, for this could only be the case from the perspective of a philosophy that counted only humans as capable of being valuable, important or actants. The masochist ironically wills the cessation of will to escape into the peak experience into some quasi-religious sphere and in doing so comes ever closer to their own aspect of being real. As the exorelational dynamic intensifies so too does the masochist’s own endorelational standing to its own being as an object.

If masochism’s ‘final, unexpected message is to forget yourself’ (Philips) then it is precisely a forgetting of one’s actualisations, one’s attachments and place which form the surface of identity. Masochism refuses responsibility to be what one obviously is and in doing so brings one closer to what one is. If object-oriented philosophy, in its varied expressions, teach us that the core of all objects is withdrawn or virtual and that all differences which make a difference are objects then its lessons must be applicable to human beings as well. Masochism is a practice of disidentification, identity being a particular way (among others) that human beings are actualised. Masochism is a discipline of recession to virtuality. Or it would be, were it not for the fact that all this is mediated in submission to the will of another who is, crucially, not just any other but specifically a human other. As all other exorelations disappear one is intensified, brought into the fore and focussed on at the expense of all others. What the masochist requires then is another which is properly other.

One could quite quickly take a turn here towards God. Indeed in many respects I think this is entirely possible and even attractive. Simone Weil often spoke of God’s grace entering the void at the core of us and it would not take much to think of the virtual, in its radical inaccessibility, as being just such a void. Not a devoid void in the sense of vacuum. Surely there is a sense of loss about it in that the virtual can refuse certain propetizations of itself, that is it can fail to enter into certain relationships and therefore fail to blossom or activate certain subterranean potential manifestations of itself, but this loss is also a liberation. The object can become something else. This is a lack of something which is also an abundance insofar as, in entering certain  (multiplicities of) relations it can actualise itself in certain ways by communicating itself as such and such a thing, rather than as something else. Of course this is also a homeostatic operation of a kind in the sense that the object’s virtual being saves itself from communicating itself too much. It would either be the destruction of the object or simply and truly impossible for it to take on every possible quality. In either case the circumstance seem pretty unimaginable.

A masochist is attempting to get at its virtual being. It is prevented from doing so by the presence of other objects. In terms of its subjective experience, which is also impacted upon by other objects, the masochist places itself in a specific relation to another human being demanding that that other take on responsibility for the attainment of an arrival at the masochist’s virtual core. To escape this the masochist can turn to the ultimate shepherd; God. It is in this way that when Simone Weil talks of de-creation, the return to the void within us into which God’s grace can enter, she is really talking about a return to the our own virtuality, the depths of our own objecthood. Here the masochist is a saint who tells a perverse truth: like everything else I am an object.  The masochist actively and with discipline seeks to attain a that state of subjectless subjectivity that I, among others, have called post-traumatic. The void into which God’s grace enters is properly speaking the virtual constitution of objects.

What does all this mean for God? Here I can’t help but fall into personal conviction on the nature of God. The name refers not to some actual deity but does refer to something real. As with object-oriented philosophy and William James’s radical empiricism we must admit that God is a real object (to say the two are related seems unproblematic to me although this relation is, as with all realisms and empiricisms, strained and a little distant). If an object is any difference which creates difference then the idea of God is certainly an object, having created manifold differences wherever it has occurred. God is a rich and nuanced object even if, at the same time, it is oblique and extremely difficult to think. The phenomena of iconoclasm tells us this much about God: it is an object which we have little, if any, access to. God is a deep object so withdrawn into itself that all we can say of it is that, in the mode of negative theology, any direct relationship to it is clouded by its unthinkability. The alterity of God is the alterity of an object that remains almost fully virtual. It appears as another void in our conceptual field, a gap that cannot be bridged.

This all seems to suggest, to me at least, that obedience to God is in fact nothing more than obedience to virtuality. The religious sphere then is that of an attempted disactivation, an unpropertising, a deactualisation. Of course human beings enter into all kinds of other relationships, relationships in which they are often not even the most important. Take (as I write) today’s grounding of all flights in and out of the UK. In Iceland a volcano  has erupted sending out plumes of ash that might cause problems for aircraft, radar and communication systems as well as pilots. The amount of objects acting in concert here far exceeds simply human involvement. Is not the human lesson of so many natural occurrences like this, and even more so with natural disaster, that the human-world relationship is simply one among many others that cannot take precedence over or reduce that multiplicity.

Yet the masochist, like humanity as a whole, is unable to fully leave behind its sense of self-importance. It couldn’t completely abnegate its special status in its own eyes and nor would it want to. In her own attempts to reach the attain the grace of God Weil made an over-identification with the figure of Christ. Zizek has written, in response to Simon Critchley, that there is a monstrous aspect to  Christianity in the demands articulated on the Sermon on the Mount, a traumatic demand that rips one open. Yet in part this is precisely the point. It ended with Weil’s death and there are doubtless descriptions of her as suicidal. Maybe she enacted decreation a little too literally, attempting to remove her body from its exorelations and this was a self-defeating strategy as, as noted above, masochism always remains relational. To die, or to aim to die, in masochism is to undo what it does, to return to law and so forth which is likely why Weil attempted to repeat Christ.

This temporary self-extinction of persons is the attempted, and always frustrated, recession  to virtuality; to withdraw oneself as far as possible without passing over into death. This is always frustration because no object can exist outwith relations, even as that object exceeds those relations.The practice of decreation or, in my own neologism, “necrochism” is analogous to the psychopathological processes at work in the post-traumatic negative space. To speak clinically for a moment, if we focus on Alzheimer’s dementia we can observe that people who are regarded as in a ‘living death’ can suddenly become lucid and communicative (Normann et al). I have read of one case where a woman was placed on an anticholinesterase medication (a drug which slows down neurological impairment in dementia) who suddenly ‘returned to herself’ after a long period of almost-catatonia (Aquilina and Hughes). The effect was not permanent but in the time that the woman seemed to emerge from an utter withdrawal she claimed to be ‘teaching myself to control my own individual life.’

Of course her withdrawal was not quite so utter. Her body still interacted with other objects, other objects still interacted with her and so on. The presence and effect of the anticholinesterase itself speaks of the endorelations going on.

The point here is that this woman returned from the her partial withdrawal into virtuality. I am in no way suggesting that people should seek to become demented, I’m not sure its even possible. Likewise this is no romantic pion to the liberating effects of dementia. Even having only worked a short-time with people with dementia, sometimes quite sever, I would not glorify the effects of that disease. What I would say though is that these people remain such. They remain people. More precisely, the remain persons. I am increasingly being led to think that the proper name for what we call self is person. Even as identity is occluded and selfhood abnegating the person remains. People with dementia or other illnesses we might (far too broadly) categorise as post-traumatic are people who not only survive their own death but do not even die to begin with.

There may be a lesson, an ethic, in all this regarding what we who live in an increasingly post-traumatic condition might be able to do within that situation. There may even be something of a politics to be had here in the practice of a discpline of necrochism. It is as if to confirm the phrase that another blogger has used in a not altogether unrelated context; better living through psychopathology. Or, as Kitwood and Bredin have it, people with dementia (and for our purposes perhaps all those post-traumatic persons)

may become an exemplary model of interpersonal life, an epitome of how to be human

There are, of course, darker messages to be had in regards to post-traumatism and dementia in particular. Yet I would say these darker messages are merely expressions of dark passages through which we pass, the darkness of receeding. Those who speak of ‘the victim’s self unbecoming’ (Fotana and Smith) have glimpsed an insight into the withdrawing but left it at that, neglecting the various new modes of living engendered by what could be practiced in this ‘necrochism’ whilst also missing the point that those with dementia remain persons, even as something as we would call ‘self’ seems to disappear. Could this be what Baudrillard means when he speaks of a need to disappear? A disappearance now understood as a recombinatory experiment.

In keeping with an object-oriented approach this necrochism no longer plays on the ontological categories of presence and absence, being and nothing, for even in the withdrawal there is not experienced a loss of substance but an immersion in substance. Of course this is also partially inspired by what gets dubbed a person-centred approach. I don’t see why this should be too problematic if we recognise that the human person, the individual mind or whatever, is itself an object. As such this is merely a narrowing of the object-oriented mode for a practical application. If Kitwood speaks of a ‘malignant social psychology’ then we could speak of an ‘object-oriented psychopathology’ that renders a politics of persons. As ever, I may be spouting utter nonsense, smashing together poorly understood ideas into an ill-fitting matrix. There again, I might not. There is clearly some overlap here with a schizoanalytic practice, indeed for all I can grasp and recall this may simply be a restatement of some of the basic premises of that practice.

If necrochism means anything it may simply be this: the rejection of all transcendence and the recognition of the banality of immanence. It is first and foremost a discipline of subjective defection which ‘modifies the context within which a problem has arisen…’ (Virno). Necrochism in its embrace of the recession to the virtual wants to drill holes in things, in our reality and in ourselves. To pass through and to re-emerge.  To take leave in order to found. To accelerate the process of disassembly whilst acknowledging the impossibility of exhaustion, for this can only come from excessive identification and other actualistions. To render ourselves and our world oblique. To become incommunicative so we might become communicable. Knowing that all actants act and that we are simply one more among them. We must take account of how they shape one another as well as ourselves. We must recall that as long as virtual being remains intact no object s truly annihilated.

There is another way to understand this necrochism, one which I hope to develop in the future and this by going back to explore another dimension of masochism. We can agree that today’s situation is one with increasing amounts of disaffection and anhedonia, where everywhere an intangible loss is felt, an anxiety so complete that it is its own perfectly autonomous object. As we speak of ‘the thought occurred to me’ so to we can speak of ‘the anxiety occurred to me.’ Anxiety, like thought, is an actant in its own right, it is something that comes into relation with us rather than being a mere product of our own generational powers. Once thought or anxiety arise they have their own capacity to effect. We live in a world where anxiety acts hyperbolically to render itself the central affect, producing in its wake a general flattening of affectivity, and with that a further blunting.

In Christian terms we live in an age of soul-sickness, of distance from God, in the limbo of spiritual paralysis. As many have observed (Gurdjieff, Derrida, umpteen psychologists) this takes effect in a day to day life of the ritualisation of automatism which is itself undercut by a generalised precarity of economy and existence (Bifo, Virno and so on). Necrotism might also be one approach to what Dominic Fox sums up as the cold world. Here we do not jump into pleasure, into a rehabilitation of our dyphoric condition but intensify. We might speak here, completely aware of the dual meaning, of necrotism being an agitation of our dysphoria. To quote Philips again:

Masochism in this context is not so much about bringing pleasure to an existing suffering but about brining sensation to a state of unfeeling.

As ever, apologies to all those who may have had their ideas entirely misrepresented or bludgeoned.  I’m happy to be corrected where I’ve misused ideas. Where there are flaws in what passes here for  kind of argument they are my own.

The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation

-Simone Weil

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References:

Acquila and Hughes. ‘The Return of the living dead: agency lost and found?’ In: Dementia: mind, meaning and the person

Fontana, A. and Smith, A. ‘Alzheimer’s disease victims: the “unbecoming” of self and the normalisation of competence.‘ Sociological perspectives 32:35-46.

Foucault, M. ‘Omni et singulatim’

Heidegger, M. Being and time.

Kitwood, T. and Brendin, K. ‘Towards a theory of dementia care: personhood and well-being’ Ageing and society 12:29-87.

Kitwood, T. The dialectics of dementia: with particular reference to Alzheimer’s disease.’ Ageing and society, 9:177-96.

Normann, H.K., Asplund, K. and Norberg, A. ‘Episodes of lucidity in people with severe dementia as narrated by formal carers’.  Journal of advanced nursing, 28:1295-300.

Philips, A. A defence of masochism.

Virno, P. A grammar of the multitude.

Weil, S. Gravity and grace.

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Tags: christianity, dementia, God, masochism, object oriented philosophy, post-traumatic, pyschopathology, Simone Weil, Tom Kitwood, virtuality