(EXCERPT FORM WILD ENTHUSIASM)
1.
The wildly enthused subject experiences several states that are intertwined with each other beyond recognition. These are: hard-heartedness, bias, possessiveness, enjoyment and passion. For the subject to become wildly enthusiastic, that is, to experience the chaotic synthesis of the qualities of wild enthusiasm, there must be an object of interest within him, opposite him or in the form of separate objects of interest, one contained within him and the other outside him, which will have a common share in building the subjective narcissistic system. Most often, the subject orients himself in the world in terms of values in accordance with his internal needs and motives. But whatever the dispositional relationship of the value correlates of his narcissism, he experiences the wild enthusiasm always in the same, in the sense of uniformity, procedural way. Its procedural dynamics are not damaged but have natural shortcomings. Power is a similar value that repairs and compensates for the natural shortcomings of the wild enthusiasm with the help of its own natural advantages. The shortcomings are reflected in the chaotic synthesis and the false organization of its properties. The subject feels the structural relationship of the properties, but cannot distinguish it and clearly experience its affective mechanism. For this reason, it is closely related to intuition and its gestalt nature. It is a form of intuitive activity that, subtly, intimately, or openly, gets out of control at the first encounter with the extremely impressive object of interest. Later, more precisely towards the end of the book, we will see that wild enthusiasm possesses imperceptible manipulative advantages that exploit natural deficiency. Whatever value correlate we take, whatever relationship between value correlates we describe, wild enthusiasm will always proceed in the following, simplified, and in a descriptive sense, doxological, manner.
The subject notices the object of interest and suddenly becomes passionate. This extreme initial state floods him with vague hyperhedonic feelings. He becomes so passionate that he enjoys the thought of acquiring the object, or of defeating his opponents by acquiring the object. He gets drunk as if he has accomplished the task. He lucidly sinks into his self-awareness and suggestively perceives his self-experience. He becomes so intoxicated that he does not know whether to enjoy the thought of its appropriation; or to rejoice because passion throws him into a delusional ecstasy and forces him to believe that he has appropriated and defeated his supposed opponents. This optimistic exaltation is pierced by a morbid foreboding. The subject imagines that the object of interest may somehow manage to evade his invincible strategy (which paradoxically boils down to his overwhelming feelings). Because of this, he becomes hard-hearted, begins to get angry, and is attacked by evil thoughts. But his dopamine feelings and reflexive reaction is so great that the hard-heartedness is transformed into a bias. Instead of making a scandal, instead of awakening the ressentiment instincts and ruining his mood, he integrates these negative affective and sensual elements into the intention to appropriate the object. He strengthens his primordial intention and gives the pleasure a creepy flavor. Negative expectations appear in the form of anticipated mental events. They ambivalentize the bias, but do not transform it into an ambitendentious affect. What does this mean? The subject is extremely pleased with the idea that the object is within his reach. At the same time, he privatizes the fear of failure, turning it into a stimulus that intensifies all aggressive and conquering drives. The pleasure is not only maintained, but also intensified because elements of discontent feed his appetite. In this sense, hard-heartedness is itself the opposite of wild enthusiasm. Wild enthusiasm uses negative energies to establish, initiate and encourage primordial and subtle aggressive states that it accepts with great passion, joy and enjoyment. The hard-hearted subject has a “lower value”. He starts from the position of a loser who becomes aggressive and violent because he cannot withstand the assumed humiliation. Pessimistic affects reinforce the ecstatic moods of the wildly enthused subject. Same affects force the primordial dispositions associated with inferiority to transform into impulses opposite to them. Therefore, the hard-hearted subject in those moments can no longer tolerate what he, at least personally, considers a terminal humiliation and as consequence he explodes in an extremely powerless manner. In contrast, the wildly enthused subject is superior, although his feelings, intentions, and impulses are also inarticulate and wild.
We will try to upgrade the doxological structures of the wild enthusiasm. We have found a way to complicate the description without introducing a spirit of contradiction into the previous phenomenal impressions.
So, in the simplest terms, wild enthusiasm is a hyperhedonic urge. It is an ecstatic intention that is based entirely on the extreme feeling of pleasure. However wild enthusiasm proceeds, pleasure is the initial and ultimate goal. Every intention is transformed into arousal as a consequence of some overpowering affect. Arousal is a highly energized intention. There are several forms of arousal in Latin and English. Closest to wild enthusiasm, as we understand it, is the Latin term coined by Thomas Aquinas, concupiscentia,1 which means evil lust. Lust is sexual arousal. It is obviously based on pleasure. But the lustful one, the one who cherishes and is filled with highly electrified sexual intentions, is at the same time evil, because he does not have access to the object of interest or because he wants to abuse the object in order to take revenge on it. Thus, he predisposes himself to perform a hideous act: to rape others. Concupiscentia is equated with wild enthusiasm under one condition. If pleasure governs the experiences of the lustful one. In other words, if malice is module of pleasure, the maliciously lustful becomes the wildly enthused, or enthusiastic. The unavailability of the object or the vengeful longing to harm the object inevitably give rise to malice. Malice is accompanied by aggressive moods. But wild enthusiasm does not always include aggression in its falsely organized structure.
Next we will look at the relationship between aggression and wild enthusiasm. It is best to start with absolute aggression.
Rabidity is a term that represents wild and reckless aggression. The most common prejudice associated with the insanely aggressive subject is the notion that he must be deadly serious; that he is over-strained, contorted, and overly focused on the potential for violence and and the object that irritates him. At first glance, he cannot be different because aggressive feelings constrict him. Aggressive behavior strains him so much that he is incapable of experiencing affects more flexible than anger, rage, and sadistic exaltation. In other words, rigidity shapes the mindless aggression of the subject. He is ecstatic, he exalts himself, proof of that is active and passive rage. From this perspective he is rabid. At the same time, he is not flexible, he is sharp, petrified, unyielding, acts abruptly and excessively. Consequently, rabidity becomes rigid. Accordingly, the subject cannot feel pleasure and access to the wild enthusiasm is closed to him, just as the evilly lustful, i.e. the victim of concupiscentia, cannot approach the object of interest. The impulses of the rаbidic subject are devoid of any kind of hedonism. They are based on highly automated and neutral hedonic drives. Drive for aggression involves a feeling of pleasure, but this does not mean that while being aggressive the subject suffers positive moods. Besides aggression, he perceives pleasure itself as his own failure. This is, at least, how every overly strict parent feels while beating his child and after he has beaten him. Some subjects are so inclined to aggression that they like it so much that they do not pay attention to the circumstances and its moral perspectives. They feel pleasure while they are aggressive. The affect of anger that gives rise to aggression mixes with the affect of pleasure during the process. Thus wild enthusiasm creeps into aggressive behavior and energizes the impulse which is neutral from a hedonistic point of view. From this we conclude that arousal is a highly electrified intention that is not always based on the affect of pleasure. Some third parties do not like their own aggression, but after they have carried it out, they love it instinctively. If we consider all cases of aggressive behavior, we will notice and conclude that wild enthusiasm, or the spirit of the lure, is present in the aggressive mood whenever the rabid subject feels pleasure, regardless of at what interval of the process the pleasure erupts.
Both rabidity and wild enthusiasm have one thing in common: excess. The rabid subject is excessively aggressive. The wildly enthused subject feels an excessive ecstatic pleasure from the very fixation on the chosen value. In fact, excess shows that subjects are exalted equally strongly, in two different ways. The less aggression is combined with pleasure, the more rabidity moves away from the wild enthusiasm. However, their smallest common denominator remains excess embodied in energetic forms of pleasure and anger. This neutral position of excess, which is a symbol of ecstasy, is represented by the term craze. The wild enthusiasm functions in the form of a craze insofar as the pleasure is ecstatic and exalts the subject. Rabidity also has a craze-form insofar as the subject gets angry and through anger causes the ecstatic state of aggression. But the subject can behave pseudo-aggressively. He simulates aggressive expressions of behavior, but does not feel truly aggressive. Aggression penetrates modestly into his being. Anger conquers him just enough to reveal the comedy and monkey performances of the subject. In the same way, the subject can use and manage the wild enthusiasm. In both cases, the subject controls the psychomental processes. He turns the soul itself into a tool of his psychologistic experiments. Thus controlled behavior and thus controlled feelings form a latent syndrome. The latent syndrome can easily become real and consistent, to be substantialized if the subject invests a little more of his psychic forces in it. The subject maintains this framed pathological structure in a fluid state. He does not allow her to turn into the monster that she herself is potentially in advance. This type of use of ecstatic moods and feelings of pleasure and displeasure is called frenzy. The subject who is in a state of frenzy chooses an affective complex, so he can develop it or maintain it at the level of practiced anticipation. In fact, wild enthusiasm is created with the help of the frenzy technique. The subject is fixating on the value. Most often he connects the internal value with the related external value. He begins to imitate the state of wild enthusing. Ecstatic feeling of pleasure awakens in him. Urge that lures him towards the object of interest intoxicates him. After that, the subject is luring himself towards it independently of the frenzy technique. He seeks all sorts of transcendent reasons to love the object of interest. Thus, the subject learns to transform all perspectives related to his relationship with the object of interest into derivatives of pleasure. As a result of this, he enters a craze state. He is so ecstatic that he confuses the pleasure of desiring the object of interest with the pleasure of possessing the object.
Enthusiasm is wild, inarticulate and excessive like all the states it represents and does not represent. This does not mean that at the same time, it is not subtle. Accordingly, it manifests itself as a noticeable but intimate part of the expressions of being. The solipsistic nature allows the wild enthusiasm to manifest itself excessively, and at the same time to be latently impressive. The soul is full of it, and the subject appears pretty normal. Exclusively because of this, wild enthusiasm is ancient form of power and its most striking subconscious expression. It is a primordial and relatively permanent impulse that represents power as such. At the same time, wild enthusiasm completely hides power behind its own influences, which are strangely restrained influences of power as well.
How power is born out of wild enthusiasm and how it creates affective structures independently of the latter, we have yet to show. It will be a laborious but blessed process. Before diving deeper into the thematic horizon, we will emphasize that the introductory definition of wild enthusiasm is a vivid pattern. It will help us to experience wild enthusiasm correctly while relating it to other semantic structures.
The subject discovered and learned how to shape arbitrary face-like images in the soul. He rounded off the intuitive processes, penetrated the visuogenic sphere, managed to organize the hypnagogic images and projections, perfected instruere, instructio, instruction and the inconstruction, got to know in detail the immanent Gestalt mechanisms of intuition and convenient imagination, studied the pseudo-practical installation of the attempt, and deepened the insight into the structures of auxiliary attention. He embodied the very notion of syntactic structure in a mechanism of immanent functions that develop and repeat themselves in new ways. He carried out a procedure characteristic of contemporary aesthetic processes:
“Instead of communicating the content, an attempt is made to recognize the recurrent structures, to accept them forever and to realize them optically as they are. On the surface of the picture, no visible reality is presented, but self-identical structures are depicted. They are imagined as things that lie at the foundation of an infinite wealth of meanings that can be formed and that have yet to be realized. This happens so that the theme of pictorial reality is not the contents of representation, but the means of representation. That is, the means and forms of the constitution of the content”.2
The architectonics of arbitrary face-like images was entirely in this spirit. It was a super-complex apparatus of relevant structuring. Or, to put it more simply, it was a processor dynamic in itself, a static functional structure on which all dynamic pictorial and sensorimotor manifestations of dominance behavior and action depended. Now, the subject will gradually begin to emerge from the world of immanent mechanisms and attempt to embody the contents that are based on their transcendent activity. Just as he entered this world with the help of intuition, drive, need and memories, now the subject will gradually leave it by extracting from the mechanisms the concrete arbitrary contents of narcissistic domination, that is, power. As a result of this, his ego-volume grew, and with it all forms of primitive pride rose. The latter, most of all, sheds light on Power that still cannot emerge from the subconscious and turn into an etygeme, that is in a transparent concept with diverse constructive potentials. The subject is between the hammer and the anvil. On the one hand, he cannot cope with the feelings of superiority that flow from him uncontrollably. On the other hand, he knows that his creative possibilities are still severely limited, and therefore he must not relax too much. Wild enthusiasm is nothing other than a concrete and detailed form of cooperation between the ecstatic state of mind and the limited progress.
The subject finds himself in a transoccasional atmosphere. It gives him signals to discover what psychological benefits wild enthusiasm can offer and give him. He feels that wild enthusiasm can help him learn many more things inherent in the being of the arbitrary face-like images, which knowledge of intuitive things could not provide him with. Let us not forget: the subject did not create a specific arbitrary image. He came to its threshold. But beyond its threshold he faced a new threshold with potential contents of learning hidden behind it. Ever since he transformed memory into an face-like image and a symbol of the unmovable dispositional attitude and the unchanging initial state, the subject has seriously begun to approach power. Its subconscious mask began to crumble significantly. The experience with memory was enough to make him more aware of matters of dominance than ever before. After learning how to prepare arbitrary images, his sense of narcissistic-dominance experiences have grown a hundredfold. Thus, the main motives of the subject which are preparing to become transparent are supported from a mental and a psychic, a conscious and an emotional perspective. One of the most important things is that the subject already knows how to prepare procedures, because he knows the essence of gradual action. This will significantly increase his skills in getting to know the world of power.
2.
In the paper Power as an Object, we presented the wild enthusiasm as an instrument of power, through which power tries to attract the subject and force him to desire the objects that represent it. Power was archetypal object of interest, and wild enthusiasm – the only possible way of accurate desiring to possess the archetypal object. The subject either has power or does not, he is aware of his object status or not. Moreover, power is an affective object of interest. The subject can never treat wild enthusiasm as an object of interest, despite the fact that it is a strong affect. So strong, in fact, that it turns the subject into an object that submits to it, into an object-for-it, because its nature exists to direct, seduce, and force others to desire dispositional or centripetal objects of interest. Wild enthusiasm is an exclusively centrifugal object of interest. This affective position should give it authority over the operational actions of the subject. Then why does it slow down the process and trap the subject in its fruitless procedural traps?
This is so because the subject has not sufficiently consciously recognized power as the unconditional object of his interest. The consciousness-of-power is not sufficiently expressed for the subject to advance the function of wild enthusiasm. Power awakens, but is not fully awakened. In this phase of the awakening of power, the subject tries to push power out of himself as “something else that is the highest principle to which the subject voluntarily submits”. Wild enthusiasm always works in the background, as a madly faithful follower of power. Power tries to break out through it and organize the actions of the subject. Wild enthusiasm arises as a desire that must be realized in time within the framework of an event that stimulates it with its present duration. The event suggests and involves certain actions that lead to the realization of the desire. Or wild enthusiasm is an immanent desire that extinguishes precisely because the event has begun to unfold and will end before the desire is fulfilled. It does not allow the desire to come true because the subject does not feel strong enough to act courageously.3 By itself, without the encouraging potential of power, wild enthusiasm causes the second state in the soul and distorts the subject’s behavior. It is a mindless determination to act that does not exceed the limits of the ecstasy it provokes.
The striving of power to establish open authority over the being of the subject is not the only thing that distinguishes it from wild enthusiasm. The striving foreshadows how different and greater the influence of the narcissistic procedure of domination will be, with which the procedure of the wild enthusiasm cannot match, despite the fact that it anticipates the spirit and goals of the first and more influential procedure.
Wild enthusiasm organizes around itself and for its purposes: 1) consciousness-of-greatness that is within the subject’s reach and is embodied in the challenge; 2) subjective greatness that is a supplement to the undiscovered power and that the subject assumes to possess in advance; 3) merit that he attributes to himself by simply having found a significant object of interest, and 4) will to dominate which is the “spirit of spirits”, that is, it anticipates all the real mechanisms of domination but does not help the subject to recognize them as such.
This constitution of affects organized in a procedure, their constant cyclical succession and replacement, and their dynamic affective network represents structural narcissism. Every narcissistic character nurtures this structure within himself. He strives to achieve and satisfy his goals, even when he does not do so concretely and does not have enough strength because he does not develop the consciousness-of-power in himself. The subject cultivates a schizophrenic attitude towards the factors in structural narcissism, which manifests itself as an affective procedure of wild enthusiasm. He does not project into himself an autoscopic double (a double whom he introspects clearly as if he were an individuality detached from the soul and having a character opposite to his own). No, the subject transforms into false personalities the factors in the procedure of wild enthusiasm and in structural narcissism which is the same. They function as a single-minded legion acting solely to achieve their goals. Together and alternately they assure the subject not only that it will be his merit to overcome the challenge but that they will fill him with energetic self-confidence. In ideal circumstances, energetic self-confidence could enable him to experience merit sui generis. The subject seems to hear the greatness-within-reach as it whispers to him: look at the mercantile challenge, it is the ego-form that provokes you from the transposition. Overcome it and you will have me, the Ego-form, the overcome challenge that belongs to you and increases your subjective greatness. The subject once again feels that the greatness-within-reach has lent its voice to the subjective greatness. The latter mentioned and confirmed what the former actually said. After this audible transaction has taken place imperceptibly and obscurely, subjective greatness speaks to the subject with a thunderous voice: I am hidden in that challenge, act promptly, deal with its perfidious shifts, deviations, evasions and attacks. Perfect me by objectifying merit. From the merit, the achieved overcoming will shine. Overcoming will reveal to others why our mother – greatness – is a real force, soon after it has transformed the order of the challenge and objectified me in the transformed order. Subjective greatness is joined by the will to dominate, which asthmatically and distortedly simulates the real urges of dominance. The will to dominate reminds the subjective greatness that it is too distant, ignorant and keeps itself at a great distance from the potential challenge to fuel the subject’s desire for supremacy. But the will to dominate does not persuade subjective greatness and does not provoke it to arise in the subject. It addresses an open call to the subject: don’t you see how close one of the objects you have been longing for all your life is to you and you need it to build the only self-ideal? Your diverse preoccupation turns into an “essence above essences” the object that for small minds is nothing more than a grain of shining sand. You are happy that you have found your self-ideal; that your mind is not obsessed and does not struggle with the greatness it imagines, whose identity it cannot find because it does not know which challenge suits it best and what merit it should hunt for. The ego-form is a potential object of interest that allows you to produce many operational instructions. The ego-form is an open challenge, it fits only into your interests of narcissistic dominance. It calls you to accomplish the tasks to satisfy the structure of narcissism, that is, self-love. Further more, it oblige you to fill yourself with the affective forces of wild enthusiasm and to experience its procedure in actio. If wild enthusiasm is just a pure hierarchy of actions that are not coordinated and synchronized with your movements in reality, we give it solid grounds. The structure of narcissism gives direction to the wild enthusiasm and its affects, although it tends to isolate itself and empathize only with itself. We are the reins that bring it back to the right path whenever it gets carried away. The satisfaction of the general narcissistic structure, the filling of the subject with the affective forces of wild enthusiasm and the synchronization of procedure and action are self-identical process. This appearance of things constitutes me – the will to dominate. But you are only anticipating my highest sense, the pieces of transparent content cannot be converted into your personal experience and put together synoptically. The road is long and tiring. Leave immediately.
Wild enthusiasm focuses on the subject’s love for himself. The first strengthens the latter by organizing the pure narcissistic factors, because the subject has not yet conceived the value and function of the consciousness-of-power. More precisely, the wild enthusiasm does not yet have the appropriate equipment, nor the necessary capacity, to produce such a consciousness. Consciousness-of-power is a developed invariant of self-love. On the other hand, consciousness-of-power and feeling of dominance are informally analogous. These are two faces on a single psychomental surface. Тrue feeling of dominance absorbs pure structure of narcissism and overcomes the imperfect procedure of the wild enthusiasm. The consciousness-of-power controls the role of the wild enthusiasm, advances and transforms the structure of its procedure. So far, the analogy between consciousness-of-power and feeling of dominance is formal. What makes the analogy informal is the fact that the consciousness-of-power and the complete feeling of dominance cannot exist without each other. The consciousness-of-power cannot develop and grow without the feeling of dominance. Without the latter the subject cannot desire power. The feeling of dominance does not exist truly and cannot persist as a growing intensity if the subject is not aware of power. Therefore the will to rule is partial, fragmented, torn, penetrating but unconvincing. The feeling of dominance and the consciousness-of-power chase each other in the wild enthusiasm. Or if they are in close proximity they cannot recognize each other. Wild enthusiasm is a half-cursed, half-blessed state.
Wild enthusiasm occurs as a consequence of the necessity for self-love to compensate for the non-present (we do not say absent intentionally) consciousness-of-power. This deficiency and its compensation are an unavoidable constitutive element of the “period” before power awakens. Wild enthusiasm incites the other false personalities in the structure of narcissism by entering into an alliance with reasoning. Not only does it give them shrewd arguments and cunningly inflame their ambitions, but we have seen how it turns them into “speakers” who provoke and incite each other schizogenically. Thus, wild enthusiasm produces both the formal and the dynamic aspects of the imperfect procedure.
It must be emphasized that, although better structured, the general aspirations of narcissism are also not fully regulated. The fact that the subject has not produced a concrete arbitrary face-like image also means that he does not possess an ego-form that he can realize and follow. Without an ego-form, narcissism cannot flourish and develop. Without it, it will remain eternally unregulated (although partially articulated) because the subject does not satisfy his needs, that is, the needs of self-love. The concrete arbitrary image is an ego-form, or has several ego-forms in itself, which constitute the self-ideal in whole or in part. Similarly, wild enthusiasm has two structures: it is composed of the affects mentioned in the introduction, and it is in constant correlation with the structure of general narcissism. It is impregnated by specific affects, and it impregnates general narcissism. But the latter does not mean that it always manages to play with narcissism as it wishes.
So, wild enthusiasm thinks that it strengthens self-love by igniting and inflaming the factors of general narcissism. However, in doing so, it encourages power to awaken from sleep and conquer consciousness. Self-love is nothing but consciousness-of-power that has fallen into a deep sleep. But wild enthusiasm awakens the consciousness-of-power through self-love by forcing the subject to devote himself to the challenge and to cope with the tasks. If the subject is dissatisfied with the way his collision with the challenge is going, the vital forces of narcissism decline. Then, not only does the consciousness-of-power dream, but also self-love closes in on itself, because the subject thinks only of disappointment.
But wild enthusiasm has a “trump card up its sleeve.” It encourages the subject to empathize with the structure of general narcissism. It urges him to practice the imperfect procedure in the form of an organization dynamic in itself that constantly self-reproduces. More so, a priori abolishes the temporal synthesis with reality and irrevocably ceases to coordinate with the actions in the common ἀμφιθέατρον. In other words, wild enthusiasm wants its unbridled affects to be coordinated with the factors of general narcissism; their structure to arrange their chaotic connections as much as possible. Thus, it believes that it will strengthen its general disposition, that it will deepen its solipsistic modus vivendi and will further empower its affects. In some twistedly honest way, the craze wants to abuse the factors to give power to the affects. It believes that if it increases its own affectivity it will also increase the subject’s love for himself. It is perversely honest however, because it will thus encourage the subject to experience and empathize with the affective structure of narcissism more soberly. The self-love increased with it help will encourage the subject to better approach the general narcissistic structure. Thus, the subject will regain and even strengthen his narcissistic-dominant predispositions. Pleasure, passion, hard-heartedness, bias, possessiveness will fill narcissism with force. After that, the subject will see more clearly essences of merit, feeling of greatness, subjective greatness and the will to dominate. Who knows, perhaps self-love will encourage him to fully experience the feeling of dominance and lay the conceptual foundations of his volitional form. For now, superiority is the “neck” of dominance, a passive essence that needs to be activated.
This moment most vividly illustrates the difference between the procedure of power, which we will deal with later partially and exhaustively, and the procedure of wildly enthusing oneself.
Power strives for the subject to practice the procedure solely in order to encourage and at all costs act operatively in reality. It can fail to help the subject to be courageous, and its procedure will reduced to an approach of wildly enthusiastic approaches that are self-sufficiently active. Even then, the primary goal of power and the essence of its procedure will not change. Wild enthusiasm is unproductive in itself whenever it should encourage the subject to act openly, operatively and courageously. It is like seduction, which goes around in circles and enjoys its delusions, even when the subject does not submit to it. Wild enthusiasm does everything exclusively for itself. It is extremely egocentric and loves to bathe in its own water of affections. But it is transitively productive whenever it succeeds in helping the subject to become aware of power, because only through it and in no other way can the subject’s consciousness be substantially united with power. It is obvious that the subject can be aware of power without being infatuated with it, or with other things strongly associated with it. But the trick lies in the fact that the subject becomes substantially aware of power before that. Power deeply shakes him and begins to govern his life, after he falls in love with it directly and wildly enthused, or after he falls in love with it being wildly enthusiastic about other associated things. The subject who knows that consciousness-of-power is reached through wild enthusiasm, forces the wild enthusiasm to harness itself in power with its whole being. At the same time, the intensity of self-love is a measure of how much wild enthusiasm has managed to awaken the power and turn it into a predominant element of consciousness.
Do power and seduction have anything in common apart from the formal connection they establish through their own procedures? The connection is necessary for power to erupt from the subconscious as quickly and effectively as possible. Every element of the connection is substantial and dense. But is there an affective framework within which power and seduction can be identified more tangibly?
All of us, without exception, strive to become masters, to have power, or to achieve greatness. If we are utterly cut off from the dispositional horizon, we try to use the dispositional potential that is given to us in the concrete set of circumstances, or in the panorama of diverse sets. There is no form of action that is not dispositional from a certain perspective or does not give us an advantage. Even actions that are morally and ethically correct contain a spirit of dispositionality through which we satisfy the urge to dominate others. The selfish approach that cannot hide its face is a litmus paper that reflects our true motives no matter how righteous, risky and seemingly self-sacrificing the initiative we take. Whether we want to win others over with a reasonable approach, or we want them to listen to us because we are truly wise, the common and other people’s personal good are not primary goals but the hunger for the form of power that suits our innate predispositions and the experiences that have shaped our character. Nietzsche foresaw how irresistible and insurmountable this urge is. He looked for it in every gesture of human beings, he became excessively skeptical of human nature and saw in every anthropomorphic movement the corrupted reflex of the urge. Every interpretation and description of it full of open contempt, is based on the assumption that people are the absolute subconscious motive that they practice irrevocably and in accordance with the set of life circumstances.. That is why he went mad. His propositional exaggerations were reflected in his radical mental illness. However, these are not pure prejudices, but modified truths that apply to every person, especially to those with a pronounced grandiose narcissism.
The drive for dominance and the longing for power are polymorphic aspirations and urges that penetrate deep into the unconscious and shape its polyvalent nature. If there is something that we possess before we know that it is within us, that it is ours and that predetermines all our self-elevating actions – it is the feeling of power. Schleiermacher sensed that there was something hidden so deeply in our consciousness that even consciousness itself could not reveal it. He completely subordinated to the hidden something the diverse actions that are consequence of polymorphic influence of power, polyvalent nature of the unconscious and polyvergent interest of consciousness. Schleiermacher describes with surprising accuracy how this absolute something exists in our soul that is totalized through our being. The name of the other thing, which is a phenomenon with a universal affective carcass, cannot be recognized even by the top classical dialectician, although he knows its ontological structure down to the last detail:
“Do we not want to become the property of something else by searching for the highest principles within us? All the more so, we presume that something as something we already have and moreover we want to push ourselves to it with consciousness. The other thing permeates all our knowledge, but unconsciously and through the form of action. In fact, it is the real agent that consciousness has not yet appropriated”.4
Power and wild enthusiasm have identical affective influence over the soul and the actions of subjects, in terms of their ability to preoccupy, absorb and appropriate the latter. There is no person who has not at least once been strongly exalted by the thought of having a disposition (by disposition we mean any obvious and exciting advantage of the subject over other living things). Regardless of whether a person has consciously or unintentionally brought himself into a situation of being more powerful in something than the other and has earned the disposition stance, the narcissistic experience of power and dispositional self-awareness born of such a position are inevitable drives, urges, and aspirations that conquer and flood the soul. They spontaneously subjugate the soul to such an extent that the subject forgets about himself in order to experience himself as a technical carrier of their essence. Such self-submission and voluntary falling of the subject into the arms of the objective essence is actually an exterior act of absorption, an appropriation carried out by the objective essence. No matter how much the subject knows the content of the exaltation, no matter how much he feels the hypostasis of the objective essence during spontaneous absorption and appropriation, and regardless of the fact that he perceives the humiliating subtext of the affective process, the subject forgets himself and attributes his hypostasis to the objective essence. He considers his primordial ownness, as primordial otherness. Thus, the subject becomes strange object for both power and wild enthusiasm. But the contradictions do not stop there. In the end, no matter how much he has lost and surrendered his identity to other objectivities, the subject becomes aware of himself and his absurdly irresistible position. As if nothing had happened, he rejoices that he allowed himself to be subjugated by such attractive forces and turned into a conditionally depersonalized object. Wild enthusiasm and power disfigure the subject conditionally, because he is aware that he is the master despite the fact that other things dominates him. Consciousness-that-he-is-master preserves for him part of the identity. This is how the general psychoenergetic procedure takes place, at the same time reflecting the general dispositional ambitions of the subject. The longing for dominance puts him in the position of an influential object and a partially self-identical factor in the process. Even if consciousness were to appropriate power, the subject would remain in the power of both, or one, of two independent forces. Power suddenly takes over the being of the subject because it is already fused with him. The frenzy is just as malevolent and perceptive, but it penetrates the subject gradually, even if it happens too quickly. Therefore, the influences of the two predominant affects are so similar and related.
3.
First and foremost, we will refer again to Power as object, was that wild enthusiasm excited the subject and thus forced him to grasp the ideal recipe for overcoming the challenge, as if such existed in his immediate vicinity as a material object and as a medium of the greatness that could be grasped. At the same time, the subject could not erase from consciousness the fact that he is an actual object (subordinate) of the wild enthusiasm, although the wild enthusiasm was trying with all its strength to plant the opposite delusion in him. The recipe forced him to believe that everything depended on him and that wild enthusiasm was only a psychological tool in his hands that would help him inspire himself for great undertakings. Regardless of the fact that consciousness strongly and constantly resisted him, the subject expanded the false reality of his relationship with the wild enthusiasm and continued to believe that the realization of the protentions depended on him, and not on the affect of wildly enthusing oneself. This is a turning point. Тhe subject will either have to act operationally and face the challenges, or he will flee, withdraw into himself and agonizingly repeat the self-sufficient procedure of wildly enthusing oneself. The potential component of subjective greatness will cease to be within his reach, he will no longer have the means to nourish it. The merit will be deduced in the representation of the actions that would have made victory over the challenge possible. It would not satisfy the simple feeling of dominance because it would not accomplish the most significant procedure – the transformation of someone else’s order into one’s own. The subject will either literally become disgusted with the position of fictitious master, or will learn to shamelessly enjoy the sterile exaltation that will erupt under the influence of the pure procedural cycles of wild enthusiasm.
This must be noted now. In Power as object (which is, by the way, an appendix to this series), wild enthusiasm manifests itself in a subject who is conscious of power and who quite deliberately strives to prevail in reality by using operational instructions and strategies. He mixes invented images with real situations that allow him future dominance. More precisely, he devises images in a limited way, imagining only associations that fit into real circumstances. These are also adaptable images with broader credentials and with more magnificent contexts. Below we will see how the subject will begin to think abstractly about the relationship between action and intentions within the face-like images, prompted by the connections between intuitive mechanisms and instructional schemes. In no description contained in this book is it based on the transparent worldview of narcissistic domination and its situations.
Whatever the outcome of the subject’s inaction, he will, in one way or another, infect himself with wild enthusiasm and self-affect through it; enjoy it bitterly, or suffer it passionately. Fictitious domination will become the indispensable object of eternal, fruitless and illusory self-exaltation. It will become an object of pride based on naked fictions. Pride, on its part, will put on its face the mask of superiority, but while covering the ridiculous character with the mask, it will make it even funnier. Self-love will save the subject and his egocentric impulses from shame, because it will be an unbreakable and impenetrable foundation that strengthens impudence and indifference.
For its sake, the subject will not trample on the self-ideal, just as he will not abandon the idea of creating a potential recipe. More so, he will not give up the possibility and necessity of acting operationally, even if it is in the form of a pure intention. This does not mean that self-love will remain innocent and pure and will not cause him serious inconveniences. If the subject fails to raise the wild enthusiasm to consciousness-of-power, the polluted self-satisfaction will spoil the flavor of all self-experiences. After constituting the consciousness-of-power in his being, the subject must go a long way, to become unwaveringly courageous and to act swiftly and operatively. Later we will see that the development of a protential recipe depends on the subject reaching certain stages in the procedure of power. Before all this happens, exaltations will continue to occur, last, and become more frequent. Before all this happens, exaltations will continue to occur, last, and become more frequent.
Wildly enthusing the position of overarching master without showing real initiative will bring very unpleasant energetic experience to the subject. It will cripple his courageous behavior that the subject will want to break off the “rendezvous” of self-love and the need to rise to the challenge. The subject will want to master all the factors in the fertile situation. This thought will intoxicate him. However, at the same time he will be afraid to fall in love with himself because self-love will immediately prompt him not to think about operational deficiencies and impaired action. He will not be able to bear the disappointment that arises from the discord between his self-manifestations, the self-ideal, and the concrete ego-forms that the subject has not yet appropriated through dealing with them and accumulating their megalomaniac potentials. Self-love is based on the outlined, although at first glance, it seems like a prevailing factor because it plays the role of an unbreakable foundation that disciplines the standard subjective drives. Self-love cannot divert the subject’s interest in the original self-ideal, because the subject stingily preserves the pure immanent representation of the self-ideal for himself, just as resolutely as it loves himself. The self-ideal conceives self-love, thereby placing itself above it and changing its position as a factor, without addressing the fact that self-love is a primordial “toposphere” where only egocentric initiatives succeed. The self-ideal is a pure immanence. It is not a representation that has anchored itself in the psyche through introjection and the consequent structuring of various concrete things and inclinations. The self-ideal presupposes and contains the corresponding challenges. The self-ideal presupposes and contains the corresponding challenges. It also disperses and distributes the challenges in the ego-forms. There is no self-ideal without awareness of challenges, and there are no important challenges if they do not co-constitute the self-ideal. Accomplished challenges are versatile tributaries from which great achievements flow into the center of the human self.
There is another unfortunate development of events connected with the purely psychic unfolding of wild enthusiasm. The subject can prolong the exaltation, turn it into a psychic routine and develop it until it becomes a procedure aimed exclusively at its own internal expediency. Such is the system of personal power called narcissistic procedure of domination, if it is reduced only to 1) psycho-affective systems, and neglects 2) self-expression, 3) expansive-extensive structures and their operational configurations and 4) the face-like images that are patterns of action towards power. In fact, each of the listed aspects can be centralized, absolutized and squeeze the other aspects out of the field of subjective interest. But if the system of power omits at least one of these diverse and consistent perspectives, it will become highly dysfunctional. In that case, neither the fact that it will completely absorb the subject, nor the fact that it will completely orient itself towards itself will help it.
Just as the subject must not fail to teleologize the system of power, so the he must not fall for the wild enthusiasm, no matter how much it seduces him with its fluid and irresponsible self-expression. The thoughtless self-expression can deceive the subject into thinking that it is no big deal if he allows himself to be trapped in its trap because thoughtlessness is a sign of courageous and safe action. If he takes the bait, the subject will very quickly turn from a man into a donkey. Non-symbolically, this means that if he is deceived, the subject will not be able to awaken the power that could truly bring his greatness to life through its procedure. In doing so, the subject will have to jump over a double bottom, because power exposes him to the same temptation. He will neglect the outgoing consciousness-of-power, on which the future of operational action and his courageous behavior depend. In the worst case, he will forget that it exists. He will neglect the initial consciousness-of-power, on which the future of operational action and his courageous behavior depend. In the worst case, he will forget that it exists, while he is drowning in the bliss of the wild enthusiasm before death. Enthusiasm symbolizes the pure or concrete ecstatic orientation towards the goal. On an unfavorable occasion such as this, the subject ecstatically directs himself towards the ecstatic orientation as such. The absurdity breaks through its own bottom. There is no way out of here.
This refers to cases where the subject knows that there is a useful consciousness-of-power, but cannot force himself to focus on it. Even worse than that would be if the subject produced a simulacrum of the consciousness of power and turned it into a more developed and self-sufficient correlate of wild enthusiasm. The consciousness-of-power will be a corrupt affective correlate of wild enthusiasm since it will force the subject to strongly feel the essence of dominance and to feel dominantly, but it will not help the courageous operational action to surface on the ground. The wild enthusiasm and the consciousness-of-power will not be affectively equal. Consciousness-of-power will be affectively stronger than wild enthusiasm, although wild enthusiasm is a dynamic principle whose flows animate the consciousness-of-power. Consciousness-of-power is a static mental value. The subject focuses the wild enthusiasm on consciousness-of-power in order to experience and desire the consciousness-of-power as originally as possible. But then again, the thought that the consciousness-of-power is a key moment of the actual introspection will inspire the subject to be wildly enthusiastic about it. Thus, wild enthusiasm will produce consciousness-of-power, thanks to the subject’s focusing his attention on the creation of the latter as mental value. After that, the consciousness-of-power as an established element of the wild enthusiasm will intensify even more the influence of wild enthusiasm. So, wild enthusiasm and attention produce consciousness-of-power synchronously. Attention transcends the mental value even before it appears as a concrete and final mental product, makes it receptive to consciousness. Wild enthusiasm makes the very presence of the mental value impressive and attractive. This happens immanently. The consciousness-of-power arises and as it is formed it becomes more and more receptive and impressive. But after it is formed as a final mental product, the receptivity and impressionability of consciousness-of-power continue to grow and intensify. The power-flow of the consciousness-of-power is transpositioning. Attention then focuses wild enthusiasm even more deeply on the formed consciousness-of-power, so that consciousness-of-power, can intensify wild enthusiasm. Finally, the lure inflames the subject’s drive, and forces him to acquire power, to establish domineering authority, and to act operatively in necessary direction. Unfortunately, this apparently successful and fruitful undertaking ends in failure. The consciousness-of-power is a mere simulacrum that, with its strong affective influence, overshadows the wild enthusiasm, conceals the affective failure of the wild enthusing, and does not at all advance the will to dominate, which is a pale shadow of the true will.
The self-sufficient correlate of wild enthusiasm – the consciousness-of-power – cannot satisfy the subject indefinitely, not even when he can afford to spend his entire life unemployed. Its derivatives will exhaust their strength. Boredom will give birth to madness. Тhe hollow eudaemonic existence will disintegrate. The subject will not know how to continue to develop the given affect, so he devotes his attention and thoughts to the operational instructions, the schematic projections and inscenations full of concrete ways of behaving. The transoccasional situation leaves him no choice. He must either choose a memory that contains dispositional self-projections, or he must invent an arbitrary image that will contain at least one substantial form of overcoming the challenge. The first is too limited in number, and the second is too limited in idea. He knows that instructional schemes and attempts are based on abstract operations (called approaches and procedures) and that intuitive mechanisms are also operational complexes. Yet he cannot invent an existential action that will materialize through a series of dispersed operations. Therefore, the subject decides on a desperate move. He will not think of them as concrete operations that justify action of dominance, but will encompass, absorb and depersonalize them in a common immanent point. He will also completely abstract the image, place it in a zero position and depersonalize it categorically, so that there is no insurmountable conflict between the arbitrary and the reminiscence form.
The subject believes that pure immanent reflection on the essence and manifestations of operational action will help the wild enthusiasm to develop in him the sense of proper and systematic action. Wild enthusiasm, he believes this too, will reveal the secret paths that will lead him to the world of consciousness-of-power which is rich in psychologistic and operational instructions. The subject does not seek ways to renounce being an object for the wild enthusiasm, but rather seeks self-love to protect him, to comfort him, and to give him guarantees that in due time he will be freed from the constraints of object status. Until he witnesses the contrary, the subject is deeply convinced that if he finds a good mode of operational action he will make the wild enthusiasm useful. It also implies that if the subject thinks correctly about the mode of operational action, he will free himself from the position of object (which is in its nature to be subservient) by developing a strong self-love capable of breaking the chains of wild enthusiasm. But this procedure will exalt the subject so weakly, intermittently, and briefly that the essence of the operational action will be seen by him as a substrate of wild enthusiasm and the consciousness-of-power which will never be transformed into something more than it always is: a means of achieving power and a series of material moments that confirm and justify the influence of wild enthusiasm. Ideally, self-love can break the chains of wild enthusiasm only under one condition: if power and the self unite in such a way that they unconditionally share the common authority over consciousness. Then, the wild enthusing oneself will turn into a supply that flows unstoppably, but is controlled by the established dual authority.
This situation is unfavorable both for the development of power and for the efficiency of the wild enthusiasm. While the subject is exalted by wildly enthusing himself with the status of dominance, exaltation is a periodic, but ineradicable and autistic trait of the subject. While the subject thinks about the essence of operational action, but all he does is merely anticipate its modes without producing them, he cannot be exalted. At that moment, the subject imagines how dynamic projections and representations excite him, but since they manifest themselves in the form of anticipation, the excitement is only an impressive element of a thought. In other words, excitement is a mental affect as much as the appearance of phenomena.
Is there no way out of this web of broken outcomes? As the saying goes – “we are working on the case”.
The subject quickly begins to understand the negative experience that he will gain with this approach to building self-confidence, so he tries to approach the problem from another side. The pure immanent modes of operational action will not succeed in stimulating the ambitions of the subject for dominance. Therefore, without trying to overcome and subdue wild enthusiasm and free himself from the status of an object, for the time being the subject will set out to experience the most narcissistic self-experience possible – self-love. He will do this while still thinking purely about the essence of the operational action, to see if their united forces will help him to break the status quo. The subject needs nothing more than to become active towards dominance and to courageously carry out the operations, even at the cost of remaining an eternal object of the wild enthusiasm and power. Disappointed by the insufficient influence of wild enthusiasm, he forces himself to all sorts of experimental moves. The subject is aware that he cannot give up the wild enthusiasm, because it is the only efficient and fundamentally effective derivative of the consciousness-of-power. Despite the fact that without the other components of the process that make up the convergent procedures of wild enthusiasm and power, we see that wild enthusiasm has no practical psychologistic value. By practical psychological value we mean all the psychic processes that truly help the subject to be encouraged and to act operatively. Well, we disclosed in advance that the two procedures will converge to help the subject produce the necessary affect that will move him to action. According to us, in order to start acting, the subject must correctly combine the factors in the psychic structures (that is, affects). Maybe we’re wrong. We’ll continue in the opposite direction, we’ll try to justify this thesis, and see where the road takes us.
4.
The last configuration of psychic affects is not restructured. It takes place cyclically, just as it is. It differs from narcissistic self-experience, that is, from self-love, from the subject’s infatuation with himself, in the scope of its occurrence and the depth of its intensity. Self-love is the unstructured (and superstructural) core of all psychic processes of self-elevation. The successful influence of the network of psychic affects intensifies wild enthusiasm. Wild enthusiasm, in turn, deepens as a consequence of the fact that it reinforces the factor that helps it to become deeper. Namely, the stronger the wildly enthusing oneself, the more narcissistically the subject experiences himself. Self-love remains subtle. The subject is not endlessly in love with himself (although the intensification of wild enthusiasm enabled this tendency), and not even obviously. But wildly enthusing oneself infatuates the subject. In other words, it instills in him a kind of demonic self-confidence and forces him to want to behave arrogantly even though he would not do so. The subject becomes aware of this purely emotional reversal of his inhibitions. Therefore, his self-love grows aggressively and he feels the parabulic growth of its aggression. In those moments he turns upside down all the affects contained in the wild enthusiasm, replaces them with one another, recombines them, synthesizes them, creates a series of parabulic explosions and interconnections. The subject begins to feel powerful, even superior. This terminal feeling of dominance deepens the wild enthusiasm, which is already a strong affect in itself that acts impulsively on the subject, and as a rapid stimulus just like the feeling of power. Aggressive self-love is a terminal dominance feeling, because it represents the arrogant mood of the subject. The subject’s self-infatuation does not cause the arrogant mood. The bestial effect of the wild enthusiasm stirs up self-love. It seems that the subject will start acting bossy at any moment because of the arrogant mood, but it is a short-lived emotional state that passes faster than it started. The subject does not justify the terminal state. He does not justify the feeling of domination that was too close to becoming, but did not become a material act. The reality of the statement “it almost became” is inadequate. Even though the distance between the material act and the action of dominance is short, the subject does not have the strength to realize it, regardless of how deep arrogance is as his emotional state.
The way of acquiring behavioral courage connected with the essence of operational action, should have functioned either by itself or in synthesis with self-love. This did not happen for obvious reasons. In both cases, the subject has suppressed the fundamental affect that is most influential at this moment – the wild enthusiasm – and doomed his endeavor. It goes without saying that all these attempts are reduced to ineffective self-sufficient cycles and structural dynamics. The subject gets stuck in these various “systemic” cycles that are a kind of unsustainable procedures. He constantly repeats processes that reincarnate the weak will to dominate and weakly warm the feeling of superiority. But the experiences with wildly enthusing oneself, in any case, increasingly reveal the strong face of superiority – dominance. By the way, the experiences of wild enthusiasm, in any case, increasingly reveal the strong face of superiority – domination. a) Superiority reflects the personal dispositional state in contrast to the dispositional states of others. b) Dominance encompasses all cycles of diverse overpowering of antagonists. This dense correlation lacks supremacy. c) Supremacy represents the limits, scopes, and forms of disposition over antagonists at a certain stage of narcissistic-dominance development. The wild enthusiasm allows the subject to experience this difference on a subconscious level. Each of the three forms of possessing-power-greater-than-the-others, intertwine and differ according to the specific ego-forms and their syntheses. Therefore, all is not lost.
There is a procedure which would help the subject to remedy this state of affairs, provided that the subject’s fickle courage to become serious counterbalance to the unstable inferiority. The subject must unite the acts of dominance with self-love. In doing so, he must embark on the adventure without thinking about the degree and influence of self-love. While he is engaged and operating, he will have to watch how the narcissistic self-experience grows. Courage will immediately inform self-awareness about the successes of the subject. The subject will self-reflexively notice and enjoy his active role as a symbolic master before self-confidence receives notification from courage. The active role of master is symbolic, because courageous action in whatever form and circumstance appears is a naturalized and simplified essence of dominance. Тhe subject does not combine operational acts of dominance with narcissistic self-perception and domination self-awareness while performing the acts.
In fact, there is a general discrepancy. The psycho-affective procedure we have covered so far represents self-manifestation in its entirety. The second is composed exclusively of the first. The procedure cuts off self-manifestation from the structures of expansive and extensive operations, just as it isolates it from the vivid content of the face-like images. The operational acts of the subject till now were specific psycho-affective acts that cooperated together. He operationalized only the affective stances of the soul and chaotically identified them with material acts. Or rather, the latter have been brutally erased and replaced. In this type of immanent representation existential actions are mixed up together with psycho-affective actions. The subject neglects material operational acts, concrete self-projections and fictitious self-manifestations because he cannot cross the border of inferior behavior. Merging of different types of actions and acts in one immanent spot called representation is one of the causes for behavioral inferiority. The psycho-affective aspect of the procedure in the system of personal power, factually absorbs all other aspects. This, we said, is dangerous for spontaneous development of narcissistic dominance. Under normal conditions, material operational acts encourage the subject to act dominantly. They themselves erupt under the influence of the appropriate mental configurations.
The natural shortcomings of previous attempts inspire the subject to seek new ways out of the situation. At least from this perspective the subject is heroically brave. The subject does not hope that courage will magically come to him and supersede his behavior. No, magic does not inspire him. We will have the opportunity to convince us later on, through the procedure of power, that the precise and correct structuring of mental factors in an attempt to acquire courage is not enough to encourage the subject to act operatively. He will not even meet the criteria for courageous action that does not necessarily leave the impression of fearlessness and is unwavering.
The subject cannot endlessly produce approaches with which he will feel how he can be brave. We must acknowledge his merit at least in that he tries to find a productive motive for courageous action by experimenting with actions and because of the knowledge he is gaining about them. For Nietzsche, the fundamental knowledge of the reasons for action is unknown and unattainable.5 For a similar reason, we cannot grasp how power can be the highest principle originally contained in us to which we almost unconditionally surrender, when we do not know it and its identity. However, we maintain that we should give the subject credit for creating a structure of combined motives. This structure does not produce the desired consequence, but it brings him closer and closer to the mental mechanisms that will enable him to be a master. From the very beginning, the subject bases the motive for courageous action on mental events, on their structuring, and on mental structures whose articulation should show how advanced the subject has become in matters of dominance.
The subject is figuratively approaching the end of methodological events. We forgot to say earlier that this end concerns only the basic approaches related to the effective influence of wildly enthusing oneself. The subject will apply another basic approach. If he fails, and we have already announced that he will not succeed, he will focus on more complex approaches. As usual, we will be hasty and announce another secret hidden in the actual contexts and their continuity. The complex approaches will involve the structure of pure (or general) narcissism as such. The subject will try to use the structure to extract from it a motive for action that will help him gain courage. Having failed, he will bring it closer to the procedure of power, without the imperfect structure being transformed into a thoroughly structured procedure. So far, the basic approaches has been based on the role of action, challenge, and wild enthusiasm in finding an effective stoic motive. Therefore, the subject has not had the opportunity to use greatness-at-reach, subjective greatness, merit and the reduced will to dominate. After trying the last basic approach, the subject will turn to the factors in the complex approach. He will use them to try to gain an advantage over the prevailing affects of weakness.
For the last time, the subject approaches courage and operational action in an elementary sense. Not from the perspective of self-love (self-infatuation) but from an intentional perspective. He again produces a challenge in his imagination, projects himself as the master in the inscenation he obviously imagines. He places himself in the position of a superior factor. But he does not address the challenge, his own formations and the antagonistic threat, although he takes them into account. In this way, he again tries to avoid the distinction between reminiscence and arbitrary images. In such a representation, they merge beyond recognition. Treated in this way, the position of a superior factor and the subject’s relationship to the fertile environment can be placed in the class of memories as well as in the class of arbitrary self-projections. The subject avoids with great care and effort every concrete detail that is interwoven into the representation and embodies it. Given this state of affairs, the subject focuses on his masterful self-manifestation. He tries to enjoy the narcissistic self-experience that results from it. What is most expected, he tries to enthuse himself as deeply and as wildly as possible in order to want to act courageously in the world.
Such deliberately induced mental, emotional and affective states belong to planned intentionality and complement each other. But the planned intentional structure of wild enthusiasm, self-love (which does not always reach the state of self-infatuation) and observation of the mental self-manifestations of dominance, this time play a background role. Although it plays obvious secondary role, it is the main corelate of the primary affects that the subject chooses to achieve the psychic approach non the less. Something similar to the relationship between aggressive self-love and bestial enthusiasm that outgrown its wild state, will be repeated. Then, the passionate enthusiasm for the object of interest intensified the self-love to stimulate the sovereign passionate state of the subject even more strongly. In other words, the suppressed value will exploit the highlighted value in the following way.
It is self-evident that the subject will focus most on scenes where he dominates decisively, cruelly, and suggestively. In doing so, his focus remains immanently synoptic throughout. Moreover, the subject has begun to develop one of the three procedures of the personal power system: the psycho-affective procedure. The structure of general narcissism is based on mental categories and complexes, and not on sensory ones, unlike the wild enthusiasm which is entirely affective and psychoenergetic although it sees everything through the monoscope of exalted consciousness. But the subject imagines non-specifically and purely, that is, immanently, the advanced image (which is neither a memory nor a fabrication) and at the same time focuses attention on the operative acts that constitute the action of the subject and the antagonists. With that, he also takes into account expansive-extensive structures and self-manifestation (with its universal forms of self-positioning, self-projection, self-formatting, self-perception, self-affecting, etc.) His mind encompasses these structures synoptically, assumes them as organized entities, even glimpses into their “organism” but does not place them in any form of order, because it is not familiar with their order as such. He does not know whether they are inherited, replaced and supplemented metonymically, or grouped and form configurations depending on convenient combinatorics. Most precisely, the subject tries to organize the psycho-affective states of wild enthusiasm with the operational acts. It did not go well for him at the beginning, although he has progressed significantly. Therefore, we will see what he can do now, after new relatively tangible and relatively touched challenges appear on the horizon.
The subject decides that it is best to devote all attention for the time being to the concrete (as concrete as they can be in this disordered and chimerical situation) acts of overpowering (dominance is still to rough word for him) and demonstration of superiority. Everything except the affect of wild enthusiasm, self-love and general narcissism is pseudo-concrete. Since the subject has insight into the visuogenic sphere and knows how from hypnagogic images conceived images and inscenations are formed, it is not difficult for him to place all categories in the field of false or distorted concreteness and to treat them as shaped particularities. Visuogenic nature is such par excellence.
More so, the subject tries to step out of the hybrid situation. He forces himself to see himself as an entity that dominates any sector of life while empathizing with the spirit of fictitious domination. For an expression of fictitious dominance to exist, the subject has to come up with a concrete face-like image. The subject cannot invent such a thing. Therefore, this step is relative as much as it is essential. It opens significant local doors for him, which we have said that as symbolic objects, are supposed to hide meanings. Such is the following.
His mastery actions in the projection, or in the inscenation, that is, in the imagined drama (which is a whole of exciting events), are elements of the intention that he embodies as a correlate of consciousness. The imagined event is a network of coherent intentions that need to be embodied in complementary actions. Intentions and actions are pure. It does not matter which comes first, unless the preferential placement creates significant semantic and progressive changes. The subject observes with his inner gaze the pure dispositional actions. (Again, to say dominance would be relatively strong and inappropriate for this stage. If we use the expedient expressions, we do so symbolically and with the ultimate and unattained goal in mind). From intentions he automatically shifts to actions. The pure appearance of both allows him to move so flexibly from one to another. He does not look at the actions in order to introject them into himself, but in order to extract the intentions embodied and contained in them. He extracts them from actions as souls from their bodies, and then he disperses their disembodied complex. He creates from them amalgamated presences whose chaotic whole reflects deformedly their previous structure. From them the subject plans to glue an impersonal spirit that will inspire future ventures of dominance. This spirit of dispersed intentions does not become a symbol of the deadly swarm that attacks the opponent and forces him to flee regardless of whether it has an objective form like the challenge or a subjective form like the antagonist. As we indicated in the previous paragraph, the subject accumulates the spirit of dispersed intentions, in order to encourage the triple structure of wild enthusiasm, self-love and abstract dispositional self-manifestation to inspire the subject to act concretely on every appropriate real occasion. They are to play the role of a swarm, but so that they will not attack the opponent themselves, that would be topologically absurd. Instead, they will persuade the subject to do it for them. He treats them just like the wild enthusiasm, turning into their object, into an object-for-them.
This part of the procedure does not have the capacity to bring the subject and the courageous action closer together. Operational action is separated formally from psycho-affective states through intentions. The abstract dominance self-manifestation in a certain life sector combined the extensive-expansive structures and the image, mixed them in itself to the point of unrecognizability. On the other hand, self-manifestation has become the center of pure intentions and pure actions. Even the representation is no longer absolutely immanent. It is now transformed into a monistic entity, into a life sector, that is, into an objective-subjective circumstance filled with alternating challenges, authorizations and downfalls. Even the representation is no longer absolutely immanent. It is now transformed into a monistic entity, into a life sector, that is, into an objective-subjective circumstance filled with alternating challenges, authorizations and downfalls. This additional shift in the series of continuous shifts encourages the subject to continue to experiment methodologically with the structures of the soul; to transform them into motives for courageous behavior and into its psychologistic centers. The subject continues to exploit the possibilities as an infinite number of times before, because he hopes to compose a healing affective prescription.
5.
The subject begins to desire passionately the intentions that are embodied in the anticipated manifestations of dominance and to be biased towards them. He gathers their intentional energies until he absorbs them in a single sublime intention. The subject experiences the sublime intention as a powerful intentional spirit that will give him the impulse to act decisively. But the sublime intention is based on principle of dissolution of individual intentions. We, together with the subject, expect the unifying intention to elevate the remaining intentions, because we imagine the act of elevation as a principle of organization that restores the disintegrated structures and adapts them to current goals. But the dissolved affective coexistence not only contradicts the elevation but also undermines the sublime intention. In doing so, it weakens its affect. The articulated structure of subordinate intentions perfects the sublime intention. Although the sublimе intention rises above the collective intentional structure while representing it personally, the structure provides consistency to the sublimе intention. But it is subordinated to the intentional structure and brings itself into an absolute and unconditional associative relationship with it. The sublime intention absorbs and exalts the other intentions regardless of the degree of their organization. Therefore, the sublime intention conditionally distances itself from them. Тurns into an unattainable ideal which, as such, as something unattainable, predetermines their actual value. Its epiphenomenal empowerment is a characteristic of all daseinsfrei6 entities. They tear themselves away from the beings related to them in order to overpower them subtly. They place them in the lower place that befits them, but at the same time, they thus ensure their most fruitful value destiny. It seems that the more holes there are in the intentional structure and the more flaws appear at the heart of the intentional organization, more free-from-every-other-being or which is the same, more daseinsfrei the sublime intention is.
However, in this case, this is a big lie. Freedom-from-the-being-of-related-beings has value and is affectively strong only if the consistent structure of intentions supplies the sublime intention with sub-contexts. In this way, subordinate intentions will secure the epiphenomenal empowerment of the sublime intention. Then the empowerment will not be based on the seemingly unattainable daseinsfrei position of the sublime intention but will justify and establish its ideality. In other words, for more concrete intentions to elevate the general intention, they need to contain glimpses that the subject will unite into an affective whole. From the whole he will create the sublime intention. Because of the glimpses he will experience it substantially as an integral ideal core of the remaining correlates.
There is another way and perspective that will shed light on the phallic constitution of this approach in more detail. Sublime intention elevates, or exalts subordinate intentions. But they have a primordial defect. They are conceptually disintegrated and as such they destroy the affective power of the spirit thеy produce. In the conceptual chaos of intentions we should look for the key to elucidating the phallic constitution and to answer why exactly they disrupt it.
If the structure of intentions is consistent, it will become a cognitive guide for the subject. Without such a structure, the daseinsfrei position of the sublime intention and the dispersion of the other intentions absolutely associate each other and leave an extremely unpleasant impression. The coherent structure should have fit into the ideal form of the sublime intention, and not given way to the chaotic whole, that is, to the intentional amalgam that distorts the form. The intentional amalgam does not distort the form directly, but rather in such a way that, due to the obvious incongruity, it forces us to reassess its function. The fact that the sublime intention is a daseinsfrei entity, that is, that it is free from the characteristics and predispositions of the related beings it represents, plays a key role in changing our representation of it. It floats in immanent space and does not touch what it signifies, except chaotically and extremely indeterminately. The signified would be part of the experience we have of the daseinsfrei object. The signifier, i.e. the sublime intention itself, would be a general characteristic of the objects we want to describe with the help of experience.7 Indeed, the subject and all of us, whenever we think of acting purposefully towards the greatness that is within our reach, do not first think about the complex of intentions and goals that should excite and encourage us to act. First we strongly experience the potential undertaking itself as something most decisive in our lives. We transform it into an abstract unit. It becomes an intuition that has taken on a hard pure form. In other words, we exalt the undertaking and depersonalize it while raising it to the heights of “being free from concrete affinities”, but we never ever and in no case abolish its ideal connection with the structure of the undertaking. The ideal form and coherent structure of intentions (which should become undertakings) should reach this level of semantic and expressive communication.
Unfortunately, in this and many other cases, the sublime intention (and its ideal form) are utterly alienated from the coherent structure (and the set of subordinate intentions). The sublime intention represents the intentions, but they also enable its ideal function to be expressed. The subject empathizes with the intentions of dominating and thereby absorbs them into their ideal representative. Thus the ideal representative gains power from the subject’s empathy, and the subject’s empathy subordinate the subject to the ideal representative. From here we can draw another analogous conclusion. Sublime intention is something that is given to us and represents the common object. Intentions and the empathizing with intentions are limitations that determine that which is given at our disposal. The given is impersonal, that is, it has a nominal form, and therefore depends on the limitations that determine it. But the limitations are distorted. They lose their structural expression by complicating it by creating its chaotic invariant. The subject is not to blame, he can only draw so much from the visuogenic sphere in which he is stuck. Intentions are both pure and trapped in the visuogenic swamp. Chaos depersonalizes the entities that make visible limitations possible. As a result, they increasingly approach and identify with the nature of daseinsfrei. They are separated from it by one difference: they absolutize the ontological characterization.8 Chaos directly symbolizes the real action of this principle. Daseinsfrei strives to free itself from all characterization, to transform itself into an impersonal and pure sublimation without form. Into an energy that cannot be captured and defined. In this sense, daseinsfrei is anti-chaotic and above chaos, it rises above any expression, even its own, nominal and ideal. Intentions and experiences disfigure in an antinomic, daseinsfrei way. They are not ideal and nominal forms, but forms full of appropriate characteristics gathered without order and order. They strive for absolute energetic freedom from this semantic and positional perspective of chaos. At the same time, because of this, they cannot enrich and arrange the nominal form that is made available to the subject as an ideal entity, nor can they reduce the ideal form to a nominal entity and develop it as such. The experience of the subject has no access to its object. The chaotic co-presence of characteristics blurs the descriptive potentials of the object. All these distortions of expediency are due to inconsistent structure.
The properties of an object exist for experience, they are inputs that give experience access to the appearance of the object. From that aspect, the sublime intention and the dispersed complex of subordinate intentions are properties of dominant self-manifestation and courageous action, which for the subject are objects of greatest interest. The subject has failed to fight them, or rather has failed to fight for them, because he has incorrectly structured their affective construction. He has incorrectly produced their hyper-stimulating unity. However, the subject derives some benefit from this nightmare of unsuccessful approaches. He learns to shape the procedural structures of the soul to his advantage by trying to create increasingly complex methodological constructions. This methodological construction, although phallic and unsuccessful, will help him climb higher on the ladder of attempts to act courageously. By the way, courageous action is a euphemism for action towards dominance. Unlike the latter, which is terrible and dark, it contains more life force and inspires more hope. It is no coincidence that the subject at this stage more decisively calls the planned action courageous. Wild enthusiasm which ignites him, is an elastic, thick and tenacious force, full of strange energy, which creates the conditions for courage to be valued more than dominance. Lets get back. Misguided as they may be, these approaches partially disinhibit the soul and loosen potentials of dominance. Theу are slaves to pathological prejudices and their mechanisms. Most likely this is for the better, because every unsuccessful mental approach is a small step towards victory and self-improvement.
Having considered the pessimistic possibilities, it is time to see what benefit the subject would have had from the last basic approach if he had changed some of the procedures that establish the approach and its structures. This will shed light on some of the misunderstandings regarding what is the reason for the basic failure and the fundamental inadequacy of the approach. The following corrections would have improved the state of affairs in methodological practice and would have helped the subject to use the appropriate psychomental structures more flexibly. The following corrections would have improved the state of affairs in methodological practice and would have helped the subject to use the appropriate mental structures more flexibly. However, this “corrective” perspective will be a pattern-tool with the help of which he will make other corrections, if he finds them in future approaches.
The sublime intention itself is undoubtedly one of the higher affective (energetic) forms of intentionality. In order to feel its teleological effect, which according to Schiller enables true enjoyment,9 the subject must not separate intentions from individual mental action, even if it retains in them its general sense and situational meanings. Only if intentions are embodied in apparent action can they constitute a purposive structure. Moreover, action must be complementary to the event and strung with other actions in which the intentions of dominance are embodying. Intentions justify actions, and the logic of mutual actions unites imagined events, or segments of events. That such imagined drama (inscenations) will turn into a system is shown by Luhmann’s sociological view of psychic systems. According to Luhmann, consciousness uses representations to create new representations. Thus, consciousness self-produces and self-maintains itself through reproduction of representations that are coherent with each other. But the communication of consciousness and its products with the world is necessary to abolish the unnatural division of transcendental and empirical cognitions. Communication reveals the deep and unavoidable connection of empirical facts with transcendental truths.10 The analogy between the unity of intentions, actions and inscenations on one side and the unity of consciousness that produces representations through representations, the representations themselves and communication with the world on the other side, is more than obvious. Intentions are embodied in actions and often correspond directly, as consciousness strings together the corresponding representations. In addition to that, representations are linked together and create a coherent semantic whole. The only difference between intentions embodied in actions and representations that are linked semantically thanks to consciousness is the way in which pairs are connected, not the semantic basis of their development. Actions, like representations, have contexts that are reflected in meanings. Representations may not be connected to any, at least not bodily and existential, actions, but the type of explanation needed to capture their essence is the same as in the case of actions. After that, actions come into contact, communicate with each other on different qualitative levels. They must communicate if they are to establish the overall logic of the development of the event. Intentions are their conceptual justifications, without which it is impossible to conceive of the event. And consciousness must communicate with the world through the synthesis of representations that it strings together semantically in order to abolish the artificial conceptual duality. The communication between the world, consciousness, and representations is diverse because the entities that communicate are diverse. Actions are reduced to a common denominator – material dynamics – regardless of their intentional form, but they establish the same relationship of existence-for-each-other as entities of the psychic system.
The subject separates the intentional structure from its complex body and dismantles its carcass. But reversibility shows that it possesses all the predispositions to restore its systemic function. Only in this way will the subject abolish the unnatural division of a disintegrated complex of intentions on the one hand and of a sublime intention on the other, just as the thinker frees himself from the barriers of atypical expression through communication. Another important moment of this repair appears. The psychic system is restituted through the reincarnation of intentions into purposeful actions by reorganizing the structures of the soul associated only with representation. While experiencing the actions, the subject allocates part of his attention to the pure affect of the intentions that he empathizes and enjoys and to their meaning embodied in the actions and connected with dominance. The subject can embody intentions in actions. Plus, form separate segments of individual actions and separate complexes of interactive actions. This will improve the situation, but will not strengthen the sublime intention. The sublime intention will have a full impact on the subject only if the subject takes into account the entire inscenation and its integral logic of development, regardless of how it will be projected into imagination, and from a bird’s eye view – into the soul. The latter conclusion clearly and unequivocally suggests the following proposition. The reconstruction of the structures of the soul associated with representation is crucial for the complete restoration of the productive relationship between the sublime intention and the subordinate intentions. The reincarnation of intentions in actions makes sense only after the inscenations has been transformed into an affective psychic system thanks to the complementary representations that regain their old status. Such restructurings will abolish the antinomic daseinsfrei modes. Only the first daseinsfrei mode of the sublime intention will survive. It will elevate the sublime intention by incorporating the complex of intentions into itself, because the complex of intentions will have become articulated, will have been properly placed in the staging, will have already been adapted to the ideal conditions contained in the sublime (intentional) form.11
6.
We began the first chapter by comparing the essence of power, wild enthusiasm and the segment devoted to their mutual affective identity. It told us nothing about the fundamental flaw of wild enthusiasm. It even gave us false hope that it was a higher power that would encourage, even force the subject to be brave and to act operatively, powerfully and towards dominance. Its comparison with power and with the subject’s relative experience of the relationship between itself and consciousness-of-power, exaggerated its function, even though its function was technical; it prepared the subject for serious psychomental activity, for real procedural practice, and for fundamental restructurings of the soul. The subject’s various approaches to courage and operational action were synthetic invariants composed of a limited set of values. The approaches helped us to understand, in part and figuratively, why wild enthusiasm is not effective in forcing the subject to operate courageously. It was their core, which we did not see “in action.” But the fact that the approaches were supposed to reinforce the influence of the core and support its function, and did not do so, shows first of all how weak a co-constituent wild enthusiasm is. The limited set of values is not the prime suspect, although its activity comes to the fore.
Now, we will take the opportunity to show why wild enthusiasm is ineffective in itself. We will not expose it in order to break the series of failed psychomental approaches. We need the wild enthusiasm to be exposed for two reasons. First, we will identify and clarify its intrinsic flaw in order to create a structure of evidence that will tell us in advance why complex approaches do not work well, even though complexity itself should be a symbol of structural and affective progress. The basic approaches have shown in practice why wild enthusiasm is ineffective, despite the fact that its relative equality with power has exaggerated and elevated it. It so happens that this revealing mechanism provides us with many useful insights. Therefore, we believe that by exposing the original flaw of the deception, we will also take away the appeal of complex approaches (which enchant us precisely because of their complexity). With this, we overrun the complex approaches and stand before a significant culminating fact. As we indicated before, the procedure of wild enthusiasm will be a means with which the subject will “play” in order to devise complex approaches. But the failure of the procedure of wild enthusiasm as a methodological means will force the subject to connect the its procedure with the system of power (which at this point is one relative procedure mixed with the basic original procedural aspects). The subject will even borrow from complex approaches to achieve the most fruitful inter-procedural (or inter-systemic) connection. He is ready for all sorts of psychic restructurings and combinations just to start acting courageously. After that, he believes that courage will inspire him to develop the operational forms of action.
So, now we will consider wild enthusiasm without connecting it to power. To do this, one circumstance from the last basic approach will help us. That’s the inscenated challenge. The subject imagined a challenge. In the challenge he acts bravely, rules dominantly and shows his superiority on several (or one) occasion connected with the favorable sector of life. The subject has no intention of changing this constellation of the challenge. Perhaps he will instinctively choose another challenge, if he wants to contrast it with the current life situation that is tormenting him and is related to the events and contexts in the challenge. He has no intention of changing this constellation of the challenge. Perhaps he will instinctively choose another challenge, if he wants to contrast it with the current life situation that is tormenting him and is related to the events and contexts in the challenge. But all such premeditations will be half abstract half visuogenic. This constitution of life circumstances is not important to us at the moment. What is important is that the subject becomes passionate by the very fact that he imagines the blurred content of the challenge and connects its events with his being. He sublimates the challenge intentionally: the actions that implement the intention to dominate are absorbed into the intention as such. This moment most strongly urges the subject to become passionate. But a problem immediately arises. The subject does not carry out the intention through actual action, but continues to imagine the challenge passionately. Thus it strengthens the intention that wants to be realized by action. He perceives the intention as a unique chance. But he stagnates as he imagines the content of the challenge he overcomes falsely and cyclically. Passion and intention-as-the-only-chance press upon him. The subject intimately resents at the same time as he feels an immense passion that becomes heavier and heavier because he adds to it the burden of intention. Resentment and excessive passion grow side by side, driven by the stagnation of imagination and intention. Passion and resentment are ambivalent forms of excitement. This affective structure of the soul differs radically from the Freudian pattern of excitement, pleasure, and discontent, only in one aspect of topological dynamics. For Freud, pleasure and discontent are Archimedeanly separated from each other. The decline of excitement helps pleasure to prevail, and its rise strengthens discontent. In the case we are describing, the difference does not consist in the fact that the excitement is divided into intimate resentment and high passion. Resentment is similar to discontent, and pleasure to passion. There is one difference that is insignificant for the perspective we are currently considering. Resentment, unlike discontent, not only symbolizes the emotional state of the subject, but also dynamizes it, turning it into a characteristic feature of behavior. Something similar can be said about passion. The higher the passion, the more obvious it is that pleasure conquers the appearance, even when the subject is at rest and does nothing. If the subject decides to do something, then the intense expressions of pleasure called passion will erupt and drown out his self-manifestations. So far, the couples complement each other. What truly separates the two affective structures of the soul is the topological scheme of intensification. Resentment and passion grow simultaneously, pleasure and dissatisfaction diverge and move away from each other.12
The subject is wildly enthused by experiencing all the aforementioned shifts in the soul in an atmosphere of suffocating passion and stinging resentment. But it is precisely this state and this atmosphere that the subject longs for and reproduces over and over again. In Freud’s subject, pleasure and discontent intersect at certain moments. Their unnatural synthesis can last for a relatively long period. But he strives at all costs to free himself from this psychic state of affairs. Our subject enjoys the atmosphere of stagnation and the air in the paradise of agonizing passion nourishes his self-love. In this sense, mania is closest to wild enthusiasm, although mania does not have the intellectualistic feature of wild enthusiasm in itself and is based on mindless excitement as such. He does not convert the imagined, that is, the cyclical content of the challenge he overcomes, with whom and where he masters, but wild enthusiasm itself. The imagined thing is only an occasion, a convenient body with relative value, which becomes the pure medium of the wild enthusiasm. Dominance as content of the imagined thing, as an eternally recurring challenge with an eternally (un)known course and end, has a certain value in itself. It throws out from itself like a gullet the impulses that exaggerate and increase the subject’s self-infatuation. Dominance makes self-love infinitely dear to the subject. But despite this, once consciousness has anchored itself in the hybrid representation, attention shifts to the wild enthusiasm, empathizing with the contradictory flow of its psychoenergetic structure. Wild enthusiasm turns into a trompe l’oeil (tromplay), not the representation; not the object but the experience. That is why wild enthusiasm “is such a seductive effect, as creepy as the trompe l’oeil: it is a tactile dizziness that bears witness to the subject’s mad vow to embrace its image and disappear”.13 All the characteristics of the trompe l’oeil that Baudrillard weaves into poetic ecstasy can be attributed to wild enthusiasm. This transcription shows with greatest accuracy how attractive a specter wild enthusiasm is. It is attractive mostly because it is a psychoenergetic specter. A specter that represents pure narcissistic energies. It is something that is not an object but acts as an object and conquers the subject as if it had a beautiful body. The subject seems to touch wild enthusiasm with his whole soul, to sacrificially surrender his whole soul to it. Indeed, “we are talking about touch, about a tactile hyperpresence of things, as if they could be touched. But this tactile phantasm has nothing in common with our sense of touch: it is a metaphor for the eeriness that overwhelms us as we abolish the space of representation”.14 We meant the latter when we said that the subject sacrifices the representation to wild enthusiasm. In order to touch wild enthusiasm with its pseudo-touch, the subject must bizarrely abandon the representation. He never gives up on the representation (or performance if we treat it as interactive self-projection). Its sensory influence smolders in the background and intensifies the bizarre rendezvous of the soul and wild enthusiasm, becoming its strange derivative. The wild enthusiasm and the soul are close. They touch each other in the expanse of eternal depths to encourage the subject to drown in the ocean of endless self-love. This is the weak point of wild enthusiasm, which does not give the subject an advantage, because self-love throws him into a solipsistic circle similar to that of wild enthusiasm, and showers him with related damned riches.
Wild enthusiasm is solipsistic. It forces the subject to close in on himself and turn his back on the world. This expression of cursed “genetic” circumstances cannot be changed by anyone, least of all by the approaches, regardless of which “category” they belong to. Then, why do we bother to list and describe the approaches? Because failures co-constitute victory. More precisely, failures shape the lowest layers of its constitution. “To be complete, one must have everything.” Shouldn’t we be concerned about those who, like the subject, lack self-confidence and consequently lack courage? How will we teach them to move on the right path if we don’t show them what mistakes they should avoid? That’s why we took the risk of publishing the failures before we even started reviewing the productive objects of interest.
Passion infects everything: resentment, imagination, and intention itself. Wild enthusiasm does not leave the subject alone to enclose him in its solipsistic circle. Passion calls the subject into its solipsistic circle and does not give him peace to encourage him to overcome his destructive isolation. Without the element of passion, the narcissistic subject who wants to be master would never have sought a way out of the states of stagnation. Passion is based more on the intention to act courageously, which has distracted the subject from the representation, than on the contents of the challenge that initially attracted the subject’s attention. The subject becomes too passionate because he waits for a moment to fulfill the intention. But this moment does not occur at all because of the solipsistic nature and affectivity of wild enthusiasm. For the subject, wild enthusiasm is a latent desire, a predilection, a pre-desire, an unconscious desire that turns his passion into a passive expectation of an intentional outcome.
One of the main problems is created by the cyclical repetition of successful action in the challenge. We take these psychomental processes with a grain of salt. The subject imagines metonymic or independent events, actions and displays of superiority. But they lie tainted at the bottom of abstract visuogenicity, and turn into purely structured pure ideas. Even the predisposed and self-repeating success cannot destroy the bitter and deep feeling of incompleteness. Actions are representations that succeed each other at different time intervals. “The approach of merging representations structured in this way”15 does not satisfy the criteria of expectation. The subject becomes alienated in wild enthusiasm and enjoys its energy flows. But the representational structure of the challenge is an additional obstacle to getting out of the situation. Although the representational structure complements wild enthusiasm, it mostly contributes to the subject’s inability to materialize the intention. The abstract visuogenic structure of the representation solipsizes the subject as much as the affective organization of wild enthusiasm, because both lack a certain degree of order. The expediency of the challenge exhausts all possibilities for a different outcome both in reality and in the mental field. But a greater obstacle to subjective, systemic and procedural progress is that the represented challenge is entirely based on ideational categories that are correlated with the contextualized and visually-organized visuogenic sphere. Both are present in the representation and mixed with each other.
Wild enthusiasm plays a negative role from desiderative perspective: it suppresses conscious desire with its solipsistic nature. Whole wild enthusiasm is woven from desiderative drives. But desire and wishing turn into its own slaves while it hides from the subject’s eyes. It prevents the alternative outcome, the outcome that arises from the desiderative sphere, not from the intentional one. Passion wants to show the intention to consciousness in all its glory. But wild enthusiasm overshadows and travesties the intention, wraps it in the vague urges of desire. It disembodies the intention(s) in the insurmountable territory of the drives related to itself that are as vague as desire contained in itself. Wishing is a drive most accessible to reflection, which reflection tames in advance. Wishing is always a desire of which the subject is aware. It is a desire that lasts consciously. But wild enthusiasm manages to overshadow even this consciousness. It turns desire into a spirit that haunts the subject senselessly whenever he falls into the phantasmagoric realm of its solipsism. Wild enthusiasm unleashes desire on the subject like a hunting dog for fun. More so, wild drives hide the intentional sphere, despite the fact that they are fully marked with the stamp of intentions and represent their needs. In this sense, Wild enthusiasm is modeled on drives. It is a complex drive that suppresses intentions within itself. It disfigures them in its affective fog in order to emphasize the solipsistic supremacy. Wild enthusiasm as a drive with the help of which the subject bizarrely and purely mentally possesses the desired object does not exclude spiritual influences. Desire and wish, however masked and hidden, are value-oriented aspirations and value-oriented influences. The fornicator does not see in the beautiful body an object for sexual exploitation, but an ideal that will enable the highest pleasure. Thus the subject experiences wild enthusiasm, although he is not aware of it, just as he is not aware of how much of an object he has become and how susceptible he is to the influence of its hidden agents. It doesn’t draw its spiritual foundations from drive and desire, from passion and intention, but the solipsistic nature imposes its spiritual foundations on it. The subject is satisfied both with wild enthusiasm and with the representation-object contained in it. The solipsistic exchange of “goods” between wild enthusiasm and the subject is an esoteric ritual that has value and exists only for the participants in the event. The solipsistic nature suffocates the agents of wild enthusiasm in order to subject them to it and depersonalize them. It embeds them imperceptibly into the affective structure of wild enthusiasm in order to absolutely domesticate them, to mystify it more, and to increase its power.
7.
As things stand, the subject cannot find a way out. A ray of hope illuminates his mind. The subject is able to see a possible way out of the situation related to the basic approaches. But he himself is not aware that this basic approach will introduce him to the world of complex approaches. The approach that starts too late to arrive on time will bring the subject to the “big” approaches to merge with them and fertilize, as the subject assesses, the necessary possibility.
Some time ago the subject abandoned the idea of the last basic approach. Some time ago the subject abandoned the idea of the last basic approach. It is good to recall that the basic approach consisted of two procedures. First the subject emphasized the general psycho-affective influence of wild enthusiasm. After that, he tried to separate the operational acts, called actions, from the work of the psycho-affective forms of influence. To this end, he created an immanent representation with limited dispositional proportions.
Instead of sacrificing the challenge to the constructive methodology, namely, to embody the intentions in the actions, and to reconnect the actions in the visually organized plot structure, the subject decided on the opposite. He imagined the content of the challenge in its entirety hybridly, which means chaotically. After that, he transformed the representations into the central moment of a single psychomental disposition. Pure actions and pure intentions have dispersed the representation and distributed it within itself. They have also structured in the simplest possible way the dispositional self-projection. The challenge is not only an indefinite face-like image full of indicative forms, but also represents the indestructible disposition of the subject.
The subject has imagined the challenge in this way consciously, which means that intention in this case played a technical role. But intention becomes a contested factor in the process whenever the subject, at this stage of the development of courageous person, tries to use it as a means of inspiration for action and acquiring courage. This basic diagnostic truth teaches the subject how to recognize what intentional nature he is dealing with and what he can do with the types of intentions at his disposal. Accordingly, the subject no longer seeks to unite the extracted intentions into a single unifying symbolic intention, called sublime intention. This awareness allows him to free himself from ineffective intentional structures, but it does not tell him what he should and can do with potential intentions. But the subject does not appear unprepared. He invokes the integral challenge that he opposes to his own procedural reconstructions. Such moments, from an internal and inspectional point of view, were the embodiment of intentions, embodied intentions and actions whose contexts are sealed codes because the subject avoids the intentions hidden in them, or tendentiously restrains himself from announcing them. Both procedural reconstructions belong to the same representation, to the same challenge constantly realized with one outcome. Therefore, it is easy for the subject to orient himself while discovering and exploiting methodological differences that, in turn, indicate invariant structures of the soul. So, the subject selects only one action from a series of individual and networked actions, empathizes with its form. It attributes to itself the intention that contextualizes the action (along with other life factors) and shapes its form. In other words, the subject unifies the action and the intention in their mutual individual expression, according to the challenge whose causal, coherent, complementary and consistent constituents he impersonalized in order to highlight the challenge itself as an integral operational unit. Maintaining disposition and supremacy was a challenge as great as overcoming antagonists and dangerous circumstances, regardless of whether their motives were openly conquering or undermining. The subject had no clarity about which actions stem from which intentions. Nor was he able to indicate how some intentional actions are solidarized with other intentions and actions.
In addition to the above, we can briefly digress and explain what this means: the subject perceives (or rather introspects) the representation (or the challenge, situation, occasion, event, progressive face-like image) as a total operational unit. The explanation will at the same time justify the subject’s latest initiatives.
The content of the challenge is composed of actions-in-relation. The subject can begin to mentalize and consider them one by one. Dispositional memories are full of superior actions. Each convolutional and lower image that we have considered so far hides a secret that leads the subject to invent new dispositional actions (which include all the categories of masterly self-manifestation: supremacy, superiority, dominance). He unites the reminiscent dispositional actions into a hypnagogic whole, in order to extract from their chaotic co-presence a new dynamic structure of domination. The instructive mechanisms of intuition have trained him well. And yet the right moment had to arise for this. However hopeful it may be, it does not mean that this circumstance will significantly help the subject to cope with the shaping of arbitrary face-like images. We will see.
This is why we are inclined to bring bad news. The subject does not extract several memories, or images containing dispositional actions, in order to compare their differences. He does not arbitrarily combine the operational dynamics inherent in each act or in each separate active complex. The hypnagogic whole should encourage the subject to find in it the smallest common denominator of all actions: the spirit of striving for the goal. Spirit will help the subject to extract a dispositional action. It will be extremely arbitrary and will become the basic tissue of the specific arbitrary image.
The subject sets the action apart. But it remains pure and abstract like all previous actions that do not belong to the concretely expressed reminiscence sphere, despite the fact that it cuts itself off from reminiscent experiences and belongs entirely to arbitrary images. This form of arbitrary action has nothing concrete in itself, except that it presupposes purely its own visual organizations. Therefore, it slows down the progress in shaping, regardless of being the first serious initiative, that localizes the crisis and frames it inductively. The additional basic approach will not fall away as quickly as we think. It brings significant side effects that support the function of the single operational unit. Its potentials will develop on the appropriate occasion.
The above-described way of drawing the individual concrete action from hypnagogic whole will also become a derivative. Whenever the subject remembers how he extracted the action, or extracted several such, related, complementary or coherent (potentially complementary) actions, he will be able to experience them for a longer time, and empathize with them more deeply and intensely. Such psycho-temporal prolongation of psychomental events will help the subject, not to complete the structures of the soul, but to gain greater self-confidence. Accordingly, no matter how many actions the event contains, it is an operational unit that encourages the subject to strive to act courageously. Of course, there are dangers along the way that the subject will anticipate, face, and overplay in due course. The extraction of a single dispositional action that takes place intentionally is an additional basic approach. But the way in which the subject extracts it anticipates the world of complex approaches.
Before we continue to separate, distribute and arrange the announced contexts, we will refer to locomotor attention. Later we will also see why this locomotor property of attention co-constitutes and strengthens the work of complex approaches. This perspective will enter into the logic of descriptive development and illuminate it in its own way.
Now our primary focus remains the challenge as an operational unit. He does not see and experience the challenge, or rather the representation of the challenge, any better than the single, abstract and arbitrary dispositional action. However, the representation offers greater psychologistic possibilities than local action even when it is pure, and that is concrete. A dispositional action has greater power than representation, only when each exciting scene of the representation unfolds to highlight the self-same dispositional action. But even then, action depends on the logistics of representation. Therefore, the subject focuses on the sequence of events as such. He is so absorbed that he does not care whether the representation, that is, the only operational unit, is based on reminiscent experiences or on arbitrary face-like images. Prolonged psychic time solidifies experiences. In contrast, locomotor attention helps the subject discover new models of soul structures. It enables him to bind events, actions, intentions, and motives to the representation. Their association with the sequels and the prequels, in turn, helps the subject to perceive all the successive moments at once. The subject gains insight into all the networks of actions that constitute the plot segments. He does not have to move from the atmosphere of one event to the atmosphere of another. Through the mediation of sequels and prequels, the subject does not dwell on each network individually to unravel its essence and does not consider the actions, intentions and motives individually to extract their contexts. All plot moments become clear in advance in all their causal detail, only if the subject psychomentally ties them to the sequel-prequel line (or whole) as such.
We did not single out and consider this operational mode of the challenge separately, in order to politely remove a class of objective shortcomings from the thematic horizon such as the arbitrary action. The action is trans-hypnagogic. It arises from the visuogenic sphere but does not overcome the state of chaos because it does not organize the visual potentialities. The visuogenic sphere is in principle agent of chaos, because in it the visual and the abstract are completely equalized, despite the fact that the abstract is based on the visual. The subject will apply the same model of introspection, that is the locomotor-attentional introspection, to individual and non-reminiscent dispositional action. He will ascribe abovementioned operational mode to the action that he will single out together with the specific contexts that he has decoded because he investigated the intention. But we have emphasized that such introspection is made difficult, not only because of the excessive localization of activities in action, but also because of its perceptual and participatory form. If the representation is too extensive, it will cause the same problem for the subject, only from the opposite side. This model of introspection based in locomotor attention is an operation that the subject performs on the challenge in genere and its local manifestations such as action, interoperative actions, the manner of cooperation, etc. It is a Procrustean technique, which applies to every internal segment. In contrast to the model, а mode is the experience that the subject acquires for the events contained in the challenge that he examines in an unusual way. It can be said that the model is an external operation, and the mode, an internal one. The first encompasses the general dynamics, the second interprets, regulates and accommodates them. One has a supervisory function, the other a taxonomic one. Attention helps consciousness to gather information from both. This functionality is also reflected in the difference between the technical intention and the essential intentions. Technical intentions designate formal changes, while essential intentions outline crucial solutions. Operations are a consequence of intentions and most often outnumber them. But a convenient intention may arise that will force the subject to operate in accordance with it, in the given circumstances, and even disrupt the planned schedule of actions because of it. For the intention to erupt, to turn into an operation and to materialize in detail, the subject must have a strongly developed self-coordinated reflection, popularly and non-systemically called ingenuity.
The locomotor and attentional insight into representation as a single operational unit, pulled representation out of the sterile state of immanence. It was internally cast aside and could not develop from a vivid perspective. It acquired dynamic characteristics and anticipated its own order because it gathered and incorporated within itself elements that constituted its whole. The elements were nothing more than abstract correlates of existential objects and events. And yet, representation has moved further away from absolute immanence. Previously, it had become relatively independent when it turned into a situation of dominance over the life sector. Now, with this one it has distanced itself even further from the suffocating prison of immanence. Since the representation is identified with face-like images as a whole, its progress also advances the integral position of the face-like images, moving them ever more strongly towards its purposeful form and perfect appearance.
This kind of delving into and introspecting representation can be said to be a half-complex and half-simple approach. We characterize this activity in this way because, on the one hand, the subject treats an integral representation independently of its scope, and, on the other hand, the way in which he observes it, i.e. the locomotor perception through attention, is a relatively simple operation. It does not deal with vivid structures that alternately hide linguistic and visual secrets and show unsolved symbols.
8.
Now we will gradually conquer the expanses of the additional basic approach. What?! First we said that this approach will develop in due time. Then we said that it is always relevant because it strengthens the role of the representation as a single operational unit (as challenge). The hypothetical deepening of the knowledge associated with it does not at all confuse our previous calculations. But happens something unpredictable. Although the last approach opened the subject’s gates to complex forms of access, the subject will be faced with yet another additional fundamental approach. It will occur from the side of wild enthusiasm and its affects, not from the side of the face-like images and theirs procedural and systemic properties (by which we mean material-operational aka extensive-expansional, psycho-affective structures and structures of self-manifestation).
Wild enthusiasm is not as negative as it seems at first glance. Its disposition, which is reflected in the fact that it rules the subject as an object, makes its negative essence repulsively impressive rather than presenting it as a majestic factor and attractive power. Itself, as the core of the affective structure of general narcissism, which is called a procedure only because it is repeated cyclically and its stages are somehow arranged, cannot elevate its structure to a higher level. Nor can the cognitive structure of general narcissism, with its schizogenic whispers and conspiracies, expand and increase the affective power of wild enthusiasm. Wild enthusiasm is a pure affect surrounded and composed of other smaller affects that lies that speaks on behalf of consciousness. General narcissism contains intelligible faces, which direct the subject towards values-in-the-world, in order to inflame his affective states. Viewed integrally, wild enthusiasm doesn’t possess any special predispositions and dispositions, except that it humiliates the subject, because such as it is governs his soul, behavior and actions.
According to the above invariably approximate description, wild enthusiasm is transparent. It is eccentric and at the same time extremely withdrawn. It arises, or rather erupts suddenly, and suddenly constitutes its insane character. After doing so, it forces him to taste all of its states in chaotic order and all of them at the same time. Therefore, it is a original gestalt-affect. This phenomenological manifestation of wild enthusiasm is ideal for establishing an analogy with the way in which consciousness-of-power is born and operates.
We have already mentioned that once it arises, power suddenly takes over the subject. It affects him with a dynamic opposite to the dynamic of wild enthusiasm. But we have not explained how power arises and why its emergence is slow, spontaneous, seductive, and irresistible. This view, or rather, revelation from the future, will not disrupt the narrative order, although it is one of the most important culminations in the acquisition of a narcissistic-dominance habitus. So, the motive of every dispositional action, mood, gesture, thought, intention, action of the subject, etc., before he creates the perfect face-like image, is the subconscious feeling of power. The subject also refers to himself as he experiences this affective phenomenon flowing through him. Self-consciousness, that is, his awareness of his I, penetrates his being along with the sharpest affective barbs to remind him that everything he experiences concerns him exclusively and transforms his being into a presence-of-itself greater and more significant than anything else in the world. The I is a cognitive reference that reinforces and deepens the connection between dispositional affects and self-experience. This is a specific form of self-reflective relationship, where the subject does not compare himself to the surrounding reality and its manifestations, but to the psychomental states that overcome him and to his awareness of the role he plays in meantime. In this pure internal self-reflexive relationship of the subject with himself and his states, I is a subordinate derivative, and power is the unconscious driver of the overall events. The subject is immediately aware of these processes and their meaning. But precisely because of the immediate awareness, he cannot transform power into an entity of prereflection, from where it will more easily emerge as an etygeme. The prereflective state of consciousness is more reliable than the subconscious. When the subject wants to push something out of the subconscious, he can hardly remember what it is. But when he wants to pull the same thing out of prereflection, he lacks a little psychic effort to succeed in doing so. Wild enthusiasm sharpens and distorts this certainty. More precisely, by distorting it, it sharpens it. It sharpens it enough for the subject to become even more aware of it, but at the same time it distorts it just enough so that he cannot remember that power is the center and content of immediate experiences. In this context, the subconsciously present power shapes self-reflection and influences it, but cannot stand out and show its face. I overshadows power, usurps its place, even though it is only its absolute subjective reflection. It is a simple reflection of self-awareness, to which power gives authority and importance, although it manifests and is present subconsciously. Power is hidden, but it affects equally strongly and unassailably. Therefore, the subject not only becomes aware of his I, but he frees his I from the pre-reflexive form in order to present it as the center of all immediate dispositional processes. In light of this, even self-reflection acquires a special value, as it signifies the dispositional process as such.
Self-consciousness is divided into self and I. The self represents the subject’s presence in the world, and I represents the subject’s awareness that he is present in the world as he is. Ontologically, self is the center of self-consciousness. But since it is impersonal in itself and represents the individuality-thrown-into-the-world, in self-consciousness it is seemingly identified with the real world and its dynamic surroundings. I, on the contrary, reflects self, but always refers to itself rather than to the self, despite the fact that I is founded by the self. Accordingly, self-consciousness becomes a self-reflexive category. While the subject is aware of himself, he experiences self as a correlate of the surrounding world, and I as his body that must orient itself in the world and engage with it. Which means that the conscious relationship with oneself hides a self-reflexive thread, which internalizes the relationship between the subject and the world, and turns it into a purely subjective relationship. In this sense, self-consciousness establishes differences within itself, thanks to the self-reflective relationship that the correlates within it foster.
While the subject self-reflexively tastes his dispositional states and acts (if he performs them at all), he is aware that his Self, which centralizes the process within itself, is a false double, of something else hidden in his being, which he cannot reach. All the attempts of the subject, from shaping a face-like images, through the procedural discipline of the soul, to possible systematic operational undertakings, move in the direction of helping self-reflection to extract the true center of influence from its double. Wild enthusiasm is so strong that it constitutes this double by flattering the subject, emphasizing his being, in order to lure him and drown him in its quasi-dispositional, turbulent and stagnant whirlpools. But in all its madness, wild enthusiasm gives unusual signs to the subject. He prophetically sees in its exaggerated manifestations signals that point him to closely guarded secrets. Тhe subject begins to self-reflexively doubt, and wild enthusiasm helps power gain increasingly favorable positions. Thus, power begins to free itself from the subconscious form and to approach consciousness. The subject self-reflexively opens itself to the unknown entity in order to add it to the I, or better yet to merge it with the latter, not knowing that what it merges with the I, will be a more significant other-of-the-same, at least as it transposes. Then they will be absolutely equal. Power must be originally united with I in such a way that the two reflect one-in-the-other in order to recognize themselves as one-for-one.
Self that has come to know itself is called I. Or rather, it is a pronoun for the subject that has come to know himself as a being-with-identity, in opposition to the world and its ambivalent manifestations. It belongs to self-reflection openly. Power is exempt from self-reflection because self-reflection and the subconscious do not coincide specifically but purely associate one another. The moment power becomes part of consciousness, it may or may not establish a relationship with self-reflection. In any case, the subconscious will fall away as the subject becomes aware of the etygematic, or associative presence of power. If power co-constitutes the relationship between the subject’s position in the world and the world that opposes or supports the subject in a certain way, then it turns into a self-reflexive category. But if power is placed in relation to the world purely theoretically, or if its practical forms do not concern the subject and its positioning in the world, then it is a category of consciousness, and does not enter the circle of self-reflection.
However, before this happens, I emerges from the egg of pre-reflection, while at the same time, the subject feels the essential influence of power. With the emergence of I, the self reveals its identity. Then, the subject cannot find any other difference than purely formal between the immediate presence in reality (the self) and the body as a presence-on-oneself with which the subject immediately connects its identity, that is, its center called the I. In this sense, the subject resembles the schizophrenic who does not distinguish his selfhood from external objects, even when he imagines them separately. The latter cannot deal with reality because he treats it as a “paradigm that transcends the selfhood-object relation”.16 However, there is a subtle difference that reflects insurmountable opposites. The subject equates the correlates of self-conscious self-reflection, but does not enter into their relationship with the world, despite the fact that their beings foreshadow, contain, and anticipate the world and their place in it. By being forms of actual presence in the world, they are implicitly self-reflexive. On the one hand, the schizophrenic represents selfhood. Selfhood, synthesizes all the characteristics of identity. They change and change the selfhood with them, but they do not erase the previously acquired properties and the past properties that are no longer there. The self, i.e. the subject actually present in the world, is associated with the identity aspects he possesses up to the current point in life and with those he still processes. However, the actual presence in the world represents the potentials for growth and change of identity. I takes into account current and future characteristics of identity, and connects them directly with the self, i.e. with the immediate presence in the world. The selfhood and its elements have a relationship with the world, are part of it and arise from it. But the subject appropriates them in order to attribute them to himself. He turns them into a symbol of the body that he experiences as one of the most important elements of his presence, called the presence-on-oneself. He also isolates them from the world in order to admire the world, or for the world to admire him; in order to overcome or oppose the world with their help. There is no need to ask: does he renounce the characteristics of identity by equating and mixing them completely with the world? It’s clear that he is not interested in their dispositional ratio. He reconciles them and does not care that it is necessary and useful for him to separate them.
I and power influence each other synthetically. Their “collision” shines through intermedially. The I is transparent to consciousness, and power influences the subject as deeply as I is transparent. Thus, power strives to free itself from the subconscious, and the I subtly prevents it and as a result becomes as transparent as power is persistent. In order for I and Power to unite, they must first enter into such a conflict. This is a necessary initial phase of their mutual transformation. The lower value overcomes the higher value, until the higher value suddenly overpowers the lower value in the end, so that they become blatantly equal as worthy fighters. After all, power must be anchored in the I. In order to be transformed into an original property and guide of consciousness, power must submit itself to this humiliating transformation, to be elevated through the value to which it is submitted. At the beginning, the role of the I is more substantial because it advances power. Power and I are not paradoxically synthesized through mutual distancing from each other. I seeks to suppress power, and power seeks to subjugate I at all costs. This is a kind of mutual distancing. But such distancing is productive in the way that Deleuze describes and supports: “In fact, it is a positive distancing of elements. In it, two opposites are not identified. Their distance is affirmed as something that connects them in harmony with their differences”.17 The I identifies with its bearer. Power identifies with everything that the bearer of I unites to his being, symbolically, metaphysically, materially. The two forms of estrangement—the subordination of one and the desire to subjugate the other—create stagnation. This stagnation is due to the fact that differences must be consolidated and manifested in accordance with similarities; they need time and resources (by resources we mean the characteristics of narcissistic domination which is a system of power). This situation is faced and experienced by the subject every time he achieves a certain dispositional goal. He exalts himself instinctively, under the pressure of the joyful outcome and event. The feeling that overwhelms him at that moment embodies the unity of the I and power. The subject identifies dispositional success with the self. If the subject conceptually doubles this immediate self-reflexive reality, it will transform into a immanent, cyclical, and dynamic relation of power and the I. In this experience and gesture, the unity of the I and power is shown frozen, expressively, and symbolically, regardless of whether they are conditionally and convergently distant from each other or are identified in the spirit of domination. While the subject freezes the relationship between the I and power in the empathy with the situation of demonstrated superiority, the first part of the principle of positive distance applies. The I and power are united in immediate experience, as much as they are united transgressively and modified in self-consciousness. The whole joy of the subject, and especially his sublime self-perception, is based on his successful relationship with the world. Therefore, both have a share in self-reflection. However, I is transparent, and power is repressed. The first takes away all the glory of power. If he had a more concrete or detailed insight into the affairs of power, the subject would quickly sober up from the feeling, to consider the situation reasonably within himself and to draw cold-blooded victorious conclusions. With one decisive move he would place power above the I in order to show it its place. But since power cannot be imagined without the I that impregnates it, the subject would have to transcend his intentions and put power through the ritual of humiliation. Thus it will establish the second part of the principle of distancing; it will unite the affective correlates on the basis of the unique possibility of convergence. After that, power and the I will unite in an unquestioning and apodictic way. The subject will be able to use their affective unity as a banner of self-reflection on every occasion in which he can show superiority and in every challenge that brings his immediate presence and the world closer together. He will direct his stern and confident gaze towards the challenge, to encompass the situation while embracing himself in the field of vision. Thus, power and I will merge with self-reflection and encourage him to act with a high awareness of his own possibilities.
It is perfectly clear (as perfectly clear as things can be from a metaphysical perspective) how they will function in unity. They will be equal in value and will represent the subject as an indivisible whole. The unity of the selfhood and the object (read the world) does not offer any goal-directed structure. It doubles in consciousness the visuogenic sphere with all its hypnagogic monstrosities. Even when the subject equalizes the selfhood and identifies it with an object, and not with the whole world, he localizes the principle of hypnagogic and visuogenic representation. When that which is obviously different from the other is presented as something that is completely identical to it, it is as if the subject says that he has separated the meaning from the image, although he has not yet created an image and cannot extract a meaning. The second factor in the comparison concerns the visuogenic sphere. The subject will find himself in a new absurd situation if he claims to have found meaning in the hypnagogic segment composed only of forms that do not associate with anything and can not be connected to anything. This last case indicates hypnagogic potentials.
I and power are extremely identical and extremely different at the same time. They are identical because both refer to the narcissistic-dominance habitus of the subject. They are different because: 1) power represents the objective and subjective qualities of the habitus, and 2) I represents the very being of the subject to which they refer. For example, will is a subjective quality, but in this case it does not belong to the self, but to power. The I is identified and equated exclusively with the subjective presence that is superior in time-space. We distinguish the I from the Ego. I is a pure correlate of self-consciousness. The Ego absorbs and identifies with itself all life manifestations of the subject that pass through his soul and form some kind of sensorimotor and intuitive syntheses as Jung defines it.18 Whenever the subject thinks of his I, he thinks of it as a pure mental correlate of himself as homogenic whole and of nothing more. It cuts itself off from any concrete identification with individual subjective attributes, although it sometimes equates them with itself through their unity with the whole body. Everything exists to enter into a distant correlation with it, but it does not commit itself to anything. It enters into a distanced relationship with the other, but does not commit itself to anything. The only thing it fully identifies with, due to the aforementioned similarity, is power. The only thing with which it is identified in its entirety, due to the aforementioned similarity, is power. Power and the I are united absolutely in the metonymic sense of the word. Immediate presence appropriates both the subjective and objective qualities of the narcissistic-dominance habitus. Therefore, power and the I are united absolutely, despite the fact that their beings have separate constitutions. Absolute metonymic unity implies that two things are united completely, and in doing so they manage to fit their different systems into the unity. For example, feeble-minded children cannot coordinate power and the I in their being.19 The I as a substitute value for power is an energy system. Once they have satisfied this system, they cannot channel its realized energies and connect them with power, whose energy system is original and needs to grow, after the first system has flowed into it. These children always satisfy one system, or immediately give up on it and move to the other, in hope that one of them will completely and easily satisfy their criteria for overcoming challenges. The I is an immanent center that suddenly fills their life with essence because it completely encompasses their immediate presence. In this sense, the I is not only a substitute value, but also a value that allows them to satisfy the disturbed boundaries of striving. Power represents the complex, psychic, operational and personal structures of overpowering challenges and antagonistic entities, and overpowering is a progressive aspect of dispositional states. That is why it is an original value, and children have great difficulty dealing with its energy system contained within them. One system is rigid, the other unattainable and seemingly compensated. When foolish children appear to exercise power, they are in fact replacing power with its extremely simplified and absolute personal correlate of who it should be reflected in, in whom it should be rooted, and with whom it should grow.
We have moved away from wild enthusiasm and its strong solipsistic affect, but we have deepened its relationship with the consciousness-of-power. We have separated them according to the dynamics of their emergence and development. When power-consciousness truly arises, it will manifest itself in other ways according to circumstances. Now it is time to return to the additional basic approach related to wild enthusiasm and shed more light on it.
The mystical description of wild enthusiasm convinced us that wild enthusiasm and self-love, or self-infatuation, are closely related. Components of general narcissism and consciousness-of-power are identically connected.20 All factors in the structure of general narcissism openly call upon the subject to participate boldly in the affairs of power. Their schizogenic proposals, which complemented each other, sought to make the subject aware of power and to awaken the consciousness-of-power. Vainly, but not hopelessly. They aimed at power but hit wild enthusiasm.
The subject adds itself in the same visuogenic style and in the same hypnagogic way to the representation that has a dispositional context. While maintaining psychomental contact with the contents of dominance, the subject, to put it symbolically, re-forms his image, projects himself as a mental double in the soul. He inserts these content into the progressive face-like image,21 attributes it to the image in an extremely overbearing manner, fills it with it, until the image begin to flow and overflow. This narcissistic gesture urgently gives birth to wild enthusiasm or exaggerates it if it is already present and active in the soul. The subject ascribes to himself prepotently the contents of dominance inherent in the “imagined” life sector (which do not necessarily include only existential representations, but also definitions, that is, representations of power and desire as categories). The subject knows that he inserts hybrid contents into the face-like image symbolically, not really, which means in an visually organized manner, so he is tempted to fill this deficiency. Wild enthusiasm absorbs the face-like image together with the contents of domination stuffed into it and subject’s self-projected personality. It represses them within itself to feed itself. It is infamous, stealthy, and quiet as the stomach. It doubles the negative appropriation committed by the subject, increases the deficiency and itself becomes its highest representative. But on the other hand, wild enthusiasm is a juicy psychic energy, because it directly stimulates the subject’s infatuation with himself. Hence, what is absorbed in it acquires a special hedonistic value. Wild enthusiasm is not a deficiency that reinforces the impression of absent abundance, it replaces abundance. Although it is its simulacrum, wild enthusiasm originally imitates the affective properties of the material structure of abundance. In a sexual sense, the phallus is a sexual symbol of deficiency that shines through the fertile structure of the subjects’ narcissistic relations with themselves. But the phallus is an object that responds readily and powerlessly to the absent abundance. It symbolizes lack more than need. It resents by giving physiological responses to abundance not letting it know that it has responded.
This positive property of wild enthusiasm can even be understood as an approach by which it encloses the subject in its hermetic psychoenergetic field. As the subject enters the field of wild enthusiasm, this function of deficiency, which is abundance itself, is transformed into an approach or a method.22 Once the subject has entered and continues to hypnotically enjoy the state imposed on him by wild enthusiasm, the approach is standardized and becomes a regular procedure. The world seeks the subject back, but at the same time it is acutely aware that wild enthusiasm has hopelessly conquered him. The subject returns to reality, but each new period spent in the embrace of wild enthusiasm fatally distorts his interests, behaviors, and relationships.
The ontological status of deficiency-as-abundance is opposed to psycho-physiological anxiety in the affective sense. Deficiency-as-abundance has enabled the subject to experience himself as a self-integrated narcissist. It brings him closer to the objects of narcissistic pleasure (with the contents of dominance and with narcissism as such) paradoxically, by sacrificing them to the affective solipsism. Psycho-physiological anxiety, for its part, in a subtle and eerie vitalistic way proves that the phallus is a reactive and inferior object that represents the deficiency that is, the need for compensation. It is a penetrating form of phallic reaction. It is that unpleasant urge that drives the phallus forward, to satisfy its own appetites. This form of anxiety conquers, paralyzes, terrorizes and terrifies the subject, but at the same time forces him to feel an irresistible pre-ejaculatory and pro-ejaculatory pleasure.
At first glance, the psycho-behavioral states of the wildly enthused subject are same as these. But depths are measured and compared at the bottom, not from above and provisionally. While being wildly enthused and wildly enthusing himself, the subject is not deeply paralyzed. His paralysis is latent, half-acted and half-staged. He becomes mysteriously petrified, assumes rigid postures, but enjoys in an inexpressibly subtle way, arbitrarily and freely. The (sexually) disturbed subject also enjoys subtly his stance, but his enjoyment, and especially subtlety, is only pro forma, behind which hides the beastly terror and violence of compulsion. Psycho-physiological anxiety innocently observes the behavior of the sexual needs, but must play the role that they will determine for it in order to carry out the compulsion and make the subject act. They attack the subject fiercely through anxiety and encourage him to be periodically brave, but in a one-dimensional direction, sexually, not in the complex operational and behavioral sense of the word. The subject enjoys its automatic ferocity, but at the same time he is in severe agony.
Compensation will work if the bountiful influx of abundance washes away the deficiency. The phallus tries to reach the ontological level of wild enthusiasm. He wants deficiency to appropriate the affect of real abundance. It imposes on the unsatisfied physiological need the pleasure based on the thought of sexual acts that inflame the instincts for reproduction. To eradicate the deficiency at all costs, the phallus forces the physiological need to anticipate its own pleasure vividly in order to feel that it is achieving it. But psycho-physiological anxiety spoils the phallus’s calculations, because it spoils the simulated pleasure, makes it bitter. Bitterness helps pleasure and enjoyment to become unbearable because of the pleasantness. Bitterness intensifies the unbearable pleasantness of pleasure and enjoyment. The mental projection that transforms pleasure into anticipation limits pleasure, further embitters enjoyment, and makes outbursts of pleasure even more unbearable. Тhe subject imagines the future act purely while anticipating it hyperhedonically. The pure mental projection that transforms pleasure into a energetic anticipation of the real act limits pleasure, further embitters enjoyment, and makes outbursts of pleasure even more unbearable. Meanwhile, the sexualized subject is faced with yet another affective enigma. He knows that he is anticipating real pleasure and that this pleasure is strong and and originates from pure impulse. But the fact that anticipation and pure imagination of the concrete act double the pleasure is surprising. They create a layered hyperhedonic simulacrum, or a phantom and “two-component” pleasure if you like. It exerts a stronger influence than real pleasure in its own way only because the limited access to real pleasure and the insufficient alternatives shape its unbearable irresistibility. All these actions are convergent because they serve one purpose: to remove the deficiency from the “life” of the phallus. They are transformed into elements and currents of the sublime expectation of an outcome. Sublime expectation is embodied energetically in the contemplation of sexual acts. It characterizes the meta-real pleasure of desired sexual relations.
These differences between the subject of wild enthusiasm and the phallic subject help us to understand why deficiency of abundance that is common to deficiency-as-abundance and to deficiency as the fatum of abundance differs from the latter two. The two ontological statuses, that of wild enthusiasm and that of the phallus, possess, or are symbols of, the deficiency that presupposes abundance in one way or another. Modulation in this-or-that-way fills in advance the gap between deficiency and abundance. It allows the sexual deficiency of abundance to unite with the affective field of wild enthusiasm, to grow with it. Immediately after that, they will terrorize the passionate subject with combined forces. It is enough to recall Aquinas’s concept of concupiscentia, where wild enthusiasm is identified with evil lust, only in this case, the element of evil is excluded from the affective and psychoenergetic relationship. Pursuit of power requires the subject to intellectually invest himself in the overall narcissistic-dominance challenge. If it is a question of lust, then it is not an ordinary passion, but a passion grounded in the love of the subject for his own cogito. Therefore, lust is transformed into wild enthusiasm. All in all, on the surface, ontological statuses contradict the natural relationship between deficiency and abundance. The natural relationship presupposes a certain distance. Deficiency must be greater than abundance. The distance depends on their quantitative ratios. For example, someone has an abundance of something, but still lacks the same thing. However, the solipsistic dialectic of wild enthusiasm and sexual drive (and urge) convincingly refutes this empirical prejudice.
9.
Wild enthusiasm turns deficiency into abundance. Itself is transformed into an abundance that is inherent in the deficiency. It replaces the abundant object just as I suppresses power. But it is stingy enough not to distort the false image of a saint. It allows the subject to taste delusionally all the charms of the object of interest that he desires. The object of interest seduces the subject because the subject wants to be seduced and does everything to be seduced. This manic self-compulsion is transformed into a mania, into an objective affect that gains power over him. Wild enthusiasm certainly does not encourage the subject to act, but it does encourage him to experience the object of interest strongly; to enjoy it while empathizing with the idea that in some way he is establishing an expropriatory relationship with it. Especially the second transpositional phenomenon of affectivity inculcates in the subject such persistence in trying to gain courage that he overturns all mental possibilities and tries all variations of mental structure just to materialize the expropriative idea. Wild enthusiasm overwhelms and overplays the subject. While closing himself off from the world in the affective field of wild enthusiasm, while totalizing its solipsism and totalizing himself in it, in the name of the desired value, wild enthusiasm instills in him an absurd belief. It forces him to believe that his very empathy for the idea of appropriating value is an transcendent act of appropriation, akin to the disturbing feeling of pleasantness. Wild enthusiasm rivets the subject’s attention to courage and action through the idea of appropriation and at the same time distracts the subject from the actual starting efforts.
Courage is not an element of action but its functional correlate. Without courage, the subject cannot act, and without action, courage is only a brazen thought, a short-lived and shameful (or ridiculous) outburst, an irrational experience. The subject does not change his interest in their values. This means that the more he becomes aware of the traps of the wild enthusiasm, the more resolutely he will modify his mental structures in order to find the most appropriate approach. No matter how much he has come to recognize the dirty game of wild enthusiasm, he knows that it is the spontaneous product of his unbridled bias. Above all, wild enthusiasm is a necessary all-embracing moment that intensifies desire, passion, and intention, although it absorbs them, disfigures them, and from their amalgam makes its substance. Thus, our brain sometimes rushes, making a mistake that masks productive potentials. It connects two different parts of two different words, or replaces their first letters that create melodic correlates because they are composed of consonants. This usual damaged reflex of the brain reveals its primordial panoptic ambitions. Wild enthusiasm is the product of several fierce drives and convergent urges. It synthesizes them and transforms them into a single predominant affect. Closest thing to it in terms of the affective impression it leaves is passion. It completes what the brain begins to produce instinctively and without awareness of its innate tendency.
Wild enthusiasm has exhausted itself as an additional basic approach. The subject cannot free himself from it, but he also cannot help thinking about courageous action. He gradually leans towards the latter, although wild enthusiasm holds him tightly in its arms. The objective situation drives the subject towards new transitional approach. It is not surprising. Since every new approach is, as we have said, a kind of step towards victory, wild enthusiasm helps the subject to eradicate weakness from a long-term perspective. Eventually, the subject will have to free himself from wild enthusiasm in due time, or tame and cultivate it by uniting it with the affects that are related to it but are more subject to the disciplined self-consciousness. Whether there are higher affects related to wild enthusiasm and whether it can unite with them and thus be tamed will be examined later. However, there is one truth that neutralizes all predictions and assessments. If the subject hopes that wild enthusiasm will tame itself, that it will cease to hold him in slavery, and that at a certain moment it will become his object, he is deceiving himself. The affective tyranny of wild enthusiasm cannot be changed and is incorruptible. Its solipsism greedily devours, violently digests, and slowly dissolves all the interests of the subject, until he is horrified by the fact that his failure and the fruitless infatuation are one and the same. Together they turn into an endless urge that stagnates and cannot get out of its shell, while it thinks it flows endlessly into the glorious infinity.
The approaches are replaced progressively and convolutionally, and prepare the subject to gradually free himself from weakness. Otherwise, wild enthusiasm will become an ever greater correlate of weakness and a lesser driver of methodological persistence. It produces the subject’s retreating weakness to the same extent as the urge for courageous action. The subject must take advantage of the knowledge of the primordial Archimedean status of wild enthusiasm, in order to position himself correctly both in terms of approaches and in terms of weakness. This antinomic role of wild enthusiasm in the subject’s psychomental life, which influences the quality of his behavior and nourishes inferiority, is the main and perhaps the only positional act that explains thoroughly why and how the subject becomes its object. Its object, not an object for it. If the subject is an object for wild enthusiasm, it treats the subject somehow, but this does not mean that it has appropriated him and turned him into its object. If the subject is object of wild enthusiasm, then wild enthusiasm directly gains power over him.
We are moving away from the main goal: the description of the transitional basic approach. Therefore, we will go back. Such a discrepancy is not accidental and plays a very important role in the analytical-descriptive process. Previous reviews led us to the connection between wild enthusiasm and weakness. If we had not cut through wild enthusiasm and peered into its “womb”, we would never have learned that wild enthusiasm is not only related to weakness, but is one of its aspects, and even appropriates its paralytic function. Weakness is an abstract syndrome. It encapsulates, equivocates and generalizes within itself all the reasons that can threaten normal action, regardless of whether it is associated with courage or other problems. If something disrupts the spontaneous manifestations of the subject, then it is an element of weakness. The only original indicator that roughly reflects weakness is the distorted spontaneity of both mechanical and deliberate movements. This indicator is original because it is not reduced to the complex of pathological meanings that characterize impaired action and distorted spontaneity, but contains exclusively the general and individual impressions associated with the appearance of weakness. Since the sequence of ideas has forced us to conditionally equate wild enthusiasm and weakness, we will also need to show their fundamental difference. We will benefit from this in many ways. Weakness itself and wild enthusiasm as a “modifier” of weakness hinder action, the measure of which is non-spontaneous movement and mechanical impressions.
The transitional basic approach is based on the concrete action and the intention embodied in it. This initial step brings the subject back to the essence of operating for dominance and, in particular, to the intentionalized operational action that we presented earlier. That, and this is expected due to the previous diagnoses, will not help the subject to encourage and act. Action as an element of approach will continue to be dysfunctional from the perspective of its methodological role in the soul. It will not be dysfunctional, in the sense of inarticulate mechanical and inappropriate contextual movements. Because of possible conceptual misunderstandings, it is good and necessary to know the differences between weakness and wild enthusiasm. But their distinction will not help us to understand why action is impaired and what are the various causes by which it degenerates. The action will be a mental entity, an aspect of visual representations that works perfectly. The subject will imagine it in order to transform it into a perfect symbol of aspirations towards power. On this side of the spectrum, things could not be better. In parallel, the in-depth classification of wild enthusiasm and weakness should help the subject understand how he will undermine the solipsistic power of wild enthusiasm by means of approaches after discovering the classification difference. At the very least, we expect the transitional basic approach to help the subject to undermine paralytic affects through difference. For this reason, we move in roundabout ways. Instead of talking about approach first and then difference, we will show difference, then consider approach. This asymmetrical order of descriptions and connections will help us to present the picture of things non-schematically, as it manifests itself in the subject’s life, with all its contradictions, curves, and seemingly messy relationships.
To explain the effect of weakness as an abstract symptom, we will need to interpret several metaphorical depictions from Frank Herbert’s science fiction book Dune. Before that, we will present several one thesis about universal use of metaphor related to our idea of the abstract form of weakness.
A metaphor is a word that belongs to a certain class of practical activities and properties, but we use it to describe actions and qualities of another class. The possibility of a word from one class to replace a word from another class, without artificially distorting the idea, is provided by the isotopic nature of words that replace each other and belong to opposite classes. The shared genetic similarity of the words is not visible in the grammatical structures that constitute them, neither when they are replaced by each other, nor when each word is placed in the example of its class. Two different verb forms can represent the same practical logic, even though the mechanical movements are seemingly different. The meaning of the actions can coincide, bringing the different movements closer together and connecting them on a genetic level.
Our representational metaphor will not include different verb forms that have the same context in two different practical spheres. What our metaphor will include will also exchange its “goods” with each other. Such metaphorical actants that will help us describe weakness symbolically will be: a1) the representation as something that symbolizes the other and a2) the interpretation as a symbol that we extract from the symbolizing, from that-that-symbolizes-the-other. Whichever of these two objects of interest we put in the place of the other, its meanings will become completely analogous to the replaced representation, that why 1 and 2 belong to a, that is, to the center of the analogy. And whichever of the objects of interest initiates the process of analogization, it can always be reduced to a symbolic means of the object of interest that produced it. By doing this, we complicate the metaphor and elevate it to a higher level. We abolish and upgrade its grammatical monism. It becomes a qualitative structure of the analogical exchange between textual and pictorial contents. Interpretation that turns the symbolizing upside down represents textual contents, and symbolic representation, obviously, represents pictorial contents. While interpretation reveals the meaning of the representation and inverts it, it itself becomes a symbol of what it interprets. The inverted is nothing other than an integral interpretation that has taken on the analogical form of what it interprets. Interpretation transforms the form of what symbolizes the other by revealing the symbolism of the other. The revealed symbolism offers new content. The new content is not entirely identical to the content of the representation. The representation shows something. Interpretation and its content represent the symbolism of the other by rethinking the thing depicted in the other. They try to present the same context with a new content – that is, the thing-in-the-other. They strive to referentially retain the old content, the content of what symbolizes the other, by introducing a new form that will reflect the same context in a different way. The different way is a form that seeks to save both the content of the symbol and to depict the self-identical context from a different perspective.
The metaphorical verb also has such a function. It replaces the corresponding member in the sentence, its epitome, but does not distort the meaning of the grammatical structure. We see this here too: the meaning of interpretation does not abolish the meaning of representation. The text reflects the symbolism of the other, which is at the same time same and different from the representation. The depiction and its vivid content, which symbolizes the other, are absolutely analogous to the textual symbolism of the other. Whichever aspect of reversal we take, it will always reflect the same context, provided that the analogous difference of coherent objects of interest is taken into account. The latter explanation shows us more specifically how the powers of metaphorical operations and the limits of metaphor increase.
Having explained this aspect of symbolic actions, the metaphorical approach to the essence of fear, which is the greatest sign of weakness, will become more acceptable to us. Hesitation and seeking justification for unfaithful behavior are next on the list of top inferior “values”, and are signs of incoming fear. That is why, we will focus on fear. But fear is unthinkable without pain. It is an unconditional adversary that comes from the transpositional exterior and reflects all fantastic dangers. Therefore, a necessary introduction to Herbert’s metaphorical depiction will be pain, its essence and phenomenological dynamics.
Pain transcends the circumstance. Taken by itself, it is a transcendent object that affects the living being by emerging from the field of the objective circumstance. As an affective object, it goes beyond the framework of the circumstance because it is part of the interior of the individual living being. Pain is an object-at-the-circumstance-but-not-in-it because the subjective interior isolates it from the orders and objects in the environment. Pain attacks the most important object in the environment – the bodily self-awareness and forces it to experience its own circumstance in a special way. Pain forces subjectivity to exploit the perspectives of perception and the reality that are offered to it, and to extract consequent meanings from them, in accordance with the degree of the presence of pain and the proximity the pain establishes with the body and the soul. The eye that expects pain unites the psychophysical self-certainty of the subject with the real environment and identifies them because it does not know from where the pain will strike, even though the source of danger is often obvious. This is so because the expectation of pain is different from the blow and the feeling it causes. The expectation of pain is seemingly more frightening than the feeling of pain. The expectation hurts the most. When we talk about pain that is not a consequence of the physical and verbal blow or the blow of phobic panics, we always think of the expectation of pain and its affectivity, which is equated and identified with pain. In the same sense, pain is an object-at-the-circumstance because it is one of the factors of interaction that the subject maintains with the entities in the environment. But until the blow materializes pain, pain is an actual duration that has not occurred and an actual consequence that passes by the subject. It acts as an absolute premonition that carries with it and radiates all the characteristics of what will happen. It is an omnipresent transcendent influence, which in its reduced form, embodies, or rather re-adapts the highest manifestation and makes it dependent on its conditions and twisted standards.
Pain is an affect of subjectivity that manifests itself immanently in two ways: causally and cyclically, but merges into the body together with the blow and its strategic determination to attack. It is an object-at-the-circumstance in every sense, because it plays an affective role that connects the external and the internal, creates an expectation in which they merge until they become impersonal. It is not a material element of the environment, nor a bodily factor of the blow and the attack. It is completely absent as a material object that establishes a relationship, and yet the subject fears it, even before he thinks of the blow. It is reflected in advance and symbolically in the antagonistic action of others. Therefore, the way in which it is present and absent is paradoxical and extremely unusual, but not incomprehensible.
While the subject expects it, it is also not an object that affects him from a great distance, nor an object that affects him from a small distance. It is a priori transpositional. It is an active immanence that approaches as a reduced highest manifestation, or attacks as a concrete affect that thickens, embitters life, and shatters the dignity of the subject. Pain is in an internal way infinitely distant from the being of the victim in which it manifests itself, in order to appear as an absolute element of the circumstance and return to the deepest regions of the subjective interior. Thus, pain makes a full circle from the interior to the exterior and back, and is active in a certain way, regardless of whether it is actual or expected. It circles and at the same time encompasses the subjective interior and the surroundings in their entirety. Pain merges with the circumstance even though it does not belong to it, because it manifests itself contradictory and directly in the actual life space. If pain is concretized, it will only confirm its topological predispositions. If it remains an affect-that-is-expected, the subject will not cease to identify its reduced terror with the concrete injuries it will inflict on him. The proof that it is present through its absence is its immaterial immediacy, which the subject experiences as he feels his own exaggerated psychic states. Only the feelings are immediately fused with the subjective interiority. Pain is transposed into reality as a transcendent object that attacks and approaches the subject from every pore of the circumstance and the living space.
The semi-spontaneous, semi-mechanical spasms of the body and the constricted soul stimulate the transcendent influence of pain. Not only do they unconsciously summon it, but they are so ignorant of what they are doing out of fear that they exaggerate its reduced terror and thereby increase and sharpen it. Accordingly, pain is in the circumstance immediately, but it is not in it materially. More so, the subject knows that pain is present in the circumstance (which obviously concerns the subject) because its reduced and concrete transcendental action is what is immediately present. Its immanent thrust disperses everywhere and continues to disperse as long as it lasts wave-like in sub-intervals, that is, pseudo-causally. It is a phenomenon-without-appearance, which does not have to originate from a concrete object. Transcendence itself can be the cause of pain, for example, unconscious phobia. The first is a pure transcendence that encourages the pure transcendental influence of the second. In fact, it is difficult to say whether pain is pure transcendence, when the subject identifies it with everything around him and first of all with his own unfavorable situation. We believe that pain stands out as a transcendental object. It places itself above everything with which is associated, even above everything with which is identified, because the subject is singularly preoccupied with it.
While it is reduced, that is, while the subject expects it, pain is factually absent. It cannot be made present by any non-factual intermediary, nor is there any symbolism that can justify its absence. And yet, in spite of this, reduced pain manifests itself through its own absence. Expectation is not just a painful premonition, but a surge of pathological fears that erode being. Fear itself is a mirror in which the subject sees the deficiencies that he will acquire, or inherit, if he does not overpower pain. Considering the latter, pain is an absent presence, that is, a transcendent abundance that grows. It reflects an affect, fear, which directly confronts the subject with deficiency. From this fundamental ontological perspective, reduced pain is a mode of presence that is paradoxical in the same way as deficiency that somehow manifests itself as abundance. It is abundance that mediates deficiency. Once it becomes concrete, the reduced pain is transformed into an abundance that affects the subject more and more convincingly, even though it has no visible being and therefore reminds of deficiency. After that, it grows as a consequence of the concrete pain that is increasing and consequently is becoming more acute.
Pain is bizarrely apodictic. It is a closed whole that spreads concentrically and centrifugally, no matter how much the subject looks around because he does not know where it will attack him. Therefore, it categorically escapes from the circumstance, even when the subject does not want to admit it. It absolutely correlates with the subjective interior. The subject confirms this without question. After being overwhelmed by the pain, he focuses entirely on his being, gathers in himself, tightens, that is, self-consolidates, all bathed in agony. So, the concrete pain discards all topological excesses and shows where it truly belongs (depending on how strong it is). If the concrete pain is not too great, it solidifies itself with the reduced pain. But in that case, the subject stops being afraid of both and changes his attitude towards the environment: from an obviousness full of absolutely certain outcomes, he transforms it into a relieving homely atmosphere.
Reduced pain cannot save its own mode of presence called being-at. After the subject realizes that he has had a good time, he compares the reduced and the concrete pain. He concludes that they are the same and equally harmless, despite the fact that previously he was waiting in panic fear for the reduced pain to become concrete and knock him to the ground. The subject behaves even more contemptuously towards the concrete pain and its intensities. He feels superior because he has managed to avoid its terrible and gloomy threats. Light-hearted and even traitorous to himself and his honesty, he forgets what the opposite outcome would have been. The mode of being-at would manifest itself most fiercely and most obviously if the subject exposed himself to terrible pain. His reactions, no matter how much he suppresses them and whether he has successfully suppressed them, would reveal pain as a presence that is not absent at all, although it is not seen as such and as an absence that is absolutely present in the reactions of the subject. The painful sight would say everything about the pain and its ultimate presence and influence.
An even more shameful situation than the moment when the subject completely surrenders to pain is the expectation that the reduced pain will turn into a concrete pain that will grow until it takes out his soul. He singles out the piece of circumstance that threatens to cause him pain. This piece may be part of the external world and contain an object that causes pain. Even though the object will be corporeal, it can cause the subject transcendental pain. For example, the habitus of the object or some of its properties or characteristics can trigger an unconscious phobia in him; a phobia that connects old traumas with new symbols. The segment of the object that terrorizes the subject transcendently is not a material source of pain. On the other hand, the piece of circumstance can be part of the subjective interiority, be a psychic representation that the subject connects with the given reality in which he exists. Then the representation itself becomes a transcendent object, a circumstance in itself, which will make the subject’s encounter with reality hurt.
Regardless of what the piece of circumstance will be and what terrifying objects it will contain, the subject takes it as a model of terror and transforms it symbolically. The piece of circumstance threatens to disrupt the subject’s behavior because it will negatively affect his position in the existing toposphere. The dynamic content of the piece of circumstance is transformed into a real phenomenon that operates around him and moves towards him to hurt him. Meanwhile, the reduced pain becomes an instrument in the hands of the terrifying circumstance. It is so close to the subject that he feels the terrible breath of the sadistic intensity that will be embodied in the concrete pain. Thus, the reduced pain is gradually induced. Heidegger coined a special notion of being-which-is-already-at23. This concept coincides ideally with our idea of the dynamic location of the reduced pain, its movements, intentions and the outcomes of its action. The concept is equally valid for the frightening phenomenon aka piece of circumstance, that surrounds the subject. If the frightening circumstance is a being-which-is-already-with the subject, then so is the inducing pain. Both threaten him within the same ontological mode and both are implementing the dehumanizing operation. Analogously, the pain that will be induced is equally frightening. It is the center of the circumstance that seeks to destroy his dignity.
The subject is riveted with his whole being to the piece of circumstance. He connects the frightening circumstance with the reality in which he finds himself, and symbolically transforms the two into one sinister entity. He distorts ordinary reality because he sees it in the context of primordial pathological impressions. The subject fabricates the state of unconsciousness. It seems that he deliberately acts to provoke that state before the pain has time to seize him. He makes such forced psychomental gestures when the antagonistic entities are closest to him and have just passed from frightening to real action. But the subject is confronted with the terrible truth before he can automate the simulation and turn it into a compulsion. In those moments he witnesses the most terrifying possible being-which-is-already-at him. Whenever a character in a movie faces an experience like this, the scene ends, and he is left waiting to receive hell with wide eyes reflecting absolute horror.
For Heidegger, being-which-is-already-at is not an object, or a material relation that can be concretely transformed. He does not mean an existence that reflects a transcendental idea with a demiurge form. Heidegger takes into account the intuitive conception and intuitive experience of what he unconsciously strives to conceive and whose concrete essence he can discover here and now. He does not produce essence because he does not have the instruments for it, but because he allows the self-imposed and superiorly clear essence to take over his being, which opens itself to it completely and turns into a here-being. This state overwhelms the epistemological apparatuses and prevents the possibility of essence being transformed into a product. It is a supra-intuitive state. Its pure being is sacred. For it, anthropomorphic ecstasies are a thing of the past. Its pure being is sacred. He does not covet its immanent scope that has great potential. What is so close to his reach and in such pure form leaves a stronger impression from the moment he takes it in his hands to conceive it. Its pure form is only a sign of his unattainable identity and epiphenomenal individuality. If Heidegger grasps the essence, he will abolish the quasi-ecstatic stream of revelation and blur the overabundant clarity that flows from it. Being-which-is-already-at is an absolute characteristic of essence extremely isolated from its own contexts. It is the center of intuitive attempts, but to which no intuition can reach. Despite this, he is madly pleased to have noticed it and to show infinite awareness of its presence. The subject tries to reach a similar state with the help of hasty and improvised simulations, in order to distance himself from pain. But instead of achieving the desired absolute state, he rushes into the opposite state. Instead of falling conditionally, symbolically and falsely dead, he enters the torture chamber of immanent agony.
If the subject “survives”, he will discover the deepest secrets of pain and will capture them forever in the hermetically sealed experience. This last fact will tell him a lot and will lead him to additional conclusions.
The subject feels the pain himself, but that does not mean that it cannot become present for others. Also, it can be present to the subject because he feels it, but not seen by others. One medium builds relations of opposition, the other avoids such relations. Pain always needs two such media: one medium that will frighten and another medium that will be frightened. Frightening does not always manifest itself physically, in the sense that it is not a destructive physical act. Therefore, it causes pain based on premonitions. Since the subject has not tasted physical pain, he assumes what will happen, he is horrified, and the state of horror and humiliation hurts him deeply. Such is emotional pain and has a reduced form. The pain that arises from the knowledge of the inevitable consequences is due to physical frights. In that case, the subject knows exactly what awaits him. Therefore, he trembles at the thought of not heeding the ultimatum of the one who threatens him. The fact that he became an accidental victim of such a monstrous situation hurts him most.
Pain is permanently symbolic. Both the one who feels it and the one who sees it cannot see its being, because it has no material expression, except for the expressions made by those who are touched by it. It is not absent because it has no material expression, but because no one feels it at a given moment in time. If it begins to be present affectively through the media that symbolize it, the fact that it will not have any expression in the exterior will not shake its presence. Not having its own material expression is its deficiency. But it itself becomes a desired deficiency whenever it is absent affectively, regardless of symbolic manifestations. The fact that its being does not have its own material expression reflects a lack. But the lack acquires significance, to the extent that it is significant for the medium that terrorizes to shake the medium that is terrorized and to show that it has shaken it seriously. Pain is a deficiency in and of itself, in terms of the expressions that are attributed to its pure being. But once it appears, pain indicates that it is potentially self-abundant and that the abundance will grow as the reduced pain deepens and as the concrete pain gets sharp. Consequently, presence and absence have to do with its abundance, not with its deficiencies. The deficiencies are ephemeral and relate to arbitrary symbolic objects, that is, to opposing media. The more abundant the pain, the more present it is, regardless of how it manifests itself, into which expressions it is channeled and which of them it modifies, and in which impressions it becomes the dominant factor. It is not absent because it lacks expressions that will bear witness to it, but it is absent because its affective influence is small. The expressions will come of themselves, if the pain is concretized and intensifies transcendently. Its being is pure because it is composed of pure transcendence. The greater its strength, the stronger the pain. Its impact is reflected more in the feelings it evokes than in the appearance that reflects the feelings evoked.
Pain is a being-at-the-circumstance. It gradually turns into a being-that-is-already-at-the-subject: it distances itself from the general circumstance, connects and solidifies with a certain intentional toposphere that is directed towards the subject. Together they crave towards it. Pain is the tool of the piece torn from the general circumstance, but it gives the impression of working independently, although it does everything in coordination with the piece. All the while, pain is an absence present in affective sense and a presence absent in material-aesthetic sense. It can be reflected as a generalized being-at only if it is the center of the affective interaction between the frightening medium and the frightened medium. The integral appearance and integral phenomenon of the relationship between the injured object and the object that injures is brought to the surface by the ontological mode. The role of the mode narrows in direct proportion to the expansion of its grammatical form. From being-at it is upgraded to being-which-is-already-at. The object that injures, with physical and symbolic frightening, does not reflect the pain in itself. By itself, it strongly refers to it. But, without the visual co-component that complements the expressed affect, that is, without the object that is injured by the other object, pain cannot manifest itself as a generalized being-at. The object that injures will direct the subject’s attention to the object that is being injured. This one reveals his own condition expressed physically and mentally, and through it symbolically and associatively shows how strong the pain is. The situation identifies pain as an expression of agitated psychic energy, which fully represents the subjective interior. Psychic energy is a part of the object that has its own consciousness and its own body. The way its movements change appearance shows how strongly the object is connected to its own subjectivity and its interior. Pain reveals the subjective interior as an intimate structure on which the entire ethos of the object depends.
First, pain was a priori transposed both in the subjective interior and in the prevailing circumstance. After that, it moved into the subjective interior. The last description only supplemented the same situation from another perspective. Now the subject transposes pain again, this time into material interaction. In doing so, he approximates its a priori transposition. He focuses on the pure material interaction, so he equates the expression of pain with it and its visual content. Whichever segment he sees, every other segment is automatically and associatively or literally, i.e. equi-existentially connected to it. Even if he cannot see the material interaction of the objects in its entirety, because he himself is an object affected and attacked by the object that hurts, the subject can imagine transceptively the affective and visual whole of the interaction. Transception means that the subject imagines the part of the interaction that he cannot see with his own eyes and complements it artificially with the visible part. He wants to know the affective appearance of pain in its entirety. Therefore, when the victim-object is his body, he imagines what he can anticipate and joins the visible to what he imagines. In fact, what he imagines is a copy of the current reality for which it is not difficult to invent an analogy based on the pattern of photographic memory.
Insight into pain transcends the material interaction that has now become a unique circumstance. Pain embraces the circumstance and transforms it into itself. If the subject cannot follow the sight to the end, it means that the pain has reached its maximum and has transcended the interactive circumstance without a trace. The subject identifies the writhing or screaming personal expressions with the agitated psychic energy. He attributes their unity to the material interaction and its circumstance. If pain were not to manifest itself in this way, it would forever remain closed in the subjective interior. By “closed” we also mean the cases when it is outlined as sublimely as possible on the objective expressions of appearance. If nothing else, in order not to be constantly tormented by the sadistic sight, the subject must discover compulsive islands, on which he will find peace from the excessively disturbing dynamics and activities. Pain follows such actions, because it lies at the basis even of the segments that do not depict its material-aesthetic core.
The all-encompassing perspective of material interaction transformed into circumstance limits the subject’s possibilities of seeing pain only as an affective element of subjectivity. For example, he tries to limit the perceptual horizons to the relationship between subjectivity and pain. But because of the inert manifestation of extensive experience or because the comprehensive perspective is too intrusive, he does not see pain as a passive immanent point that spreads throughout the entire expression of suffering. In his current outlook, pain is not identified with subjectivity, with the psychic energies and their bodily expressions that are under its influence, nor is it isolated in the frightening environment. It is a living everywhere transposed core that separates and simultaneously unites the interior and the exterior, the circumstance and the subjective interior. Pain is a general being-at only if it is reflected absolutely in material interaction: as the suffering of the tortured and the pleasure that the torturer derives from the sight of his own crime. The expression of inflicting injury and the expression of the harm suffered co-constitute the circumstance with the primordial objects and their tragic connections, because they are an aesthetic part of the material process. Even the tragic interaction itself is a dramatic whole if the sadist enjoys it as an artistic gesture.
Although pain is a general being-at which is embodied in material interaction, it does so conditionally. Although pain is a general being-at which is embodied in material interaction, it does so conditionally. The complex of interactive events radiates pain in three ways depending on the perspective of the frightened or tormented object, from the perspective of the tormentor or frightening object and from the perspective of the witness and his threshold of tolerance towards the tense sadistic atmosphere. Thus, in material interaction, apart from the objects, the expression of their interaction and the expression of the consequences of the interaction, the spirit of interaction also enters, which is purely phenomenal. It is based on material events, but at the same time it depends on the psychomental constitution of the subjective factors in the process. The interaction and the expressions are implied in the material process. But the approach of the subjective factors is something that comes out and depends on the psychomental constitution, which in this case is classically monadic. Accordingly, the general being-at of pain is also divided into three segments. They contradict each other. More precisely, the third, distant and passive interactor, is open to establishing an approximate relationship with one of the subjective factors that have entered into direct interaction. It all depends on his inclinations and the relationships he cultivates towards them.
Pain and the spirit of interaction arise through the material relation of objects that are opposed in a particular way. Pain would be embodied as a flawless general being-at in the complex of sadomasochistic interactions if the spirit of interaction was impregnated in the interactions. Before we discovered the spirit of interaction, pain was an independent entity that rose above all the phenomena to which it was affectively co-present. Its being-at was not only general, but it did not break down into the elements of the circumstance, although they were its vivid medium. After the spirit of interaction appeared on the scene, pain began to depend not on the dynamic appearance of the material relation, but on the impressions that the objects leave on the receptive reflections that somehow participate in it. Each subjective factor treats in its own way the common and causal scenographic segments.
- Робертсон С.Дж., Герцог И.И., Исторія христіанской церкви въ двухъ томахъ, Томъ Второй: отъ раздѣленія церквей до нашихъ дней, С-Петербург, 1891, с. 241. ↩︎
- Šmit J.Z., Estetski procesi, Gradina, 1975, Niš, s. 62. ↩︎
- Philips E.H., The darker steed: Reason, passion and self-awareness, University College London, 2018,p. 116-117. ↩︎
- Шлајермахер Ф., Дијалектика (1811). Октоих, Подгорица, 1999, с. 16. ↩︎
- Niče F., Zora, Moderna, Beograd, 1989, 41-42. ↩︎
- Free from every other being – Майнонг А., Самоизложение, Москва,2003, с. 21. ↩︎
- Zahavi, D. (2003). Intentionality and phenomenality: A phenomenological take on the hard problem. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 29, 63-92. ↩︎
- Characterization and ontology are tautological concepts. There is no being if it cannot be characterized. There is no characterization, characteristic and character that are not part of some being, which are not beings themselves and which do not represent certain beings. However, by ontological characterization we mean the division of pure ideal forms, ideal nominal forms and forms full of content, expressions and contexts that are bound to a nominal unit and directly associate its unified appearance. ↩︎
- Шилер Ф., Познији филозофско-естетски списи, Ноги Сад, с. 75. ↩︎
- Luhmann N., Društveni sistemi. Osnovi opšte teorije. Novi Sad, 2001, s. 360-361. ↩︎
- Sublime intention as a concept without content is a nominal ideal form. ↩︎
- Фрейд З., Малое собрание сочинений, Азбука, Санкт-Петерург, 2011, с. 738. ↩︎
- Бодријар Ж., О завођењу, Октоих, Подгорица, 2001, с. 76. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Luhman N., Društveni sistemi. Osnovi opšte teorije, ↩︎
- Lerner, H. D., & Peter, S. S. (1984). Patterns of object relations in neurotic, borderline and schizophrenic patients. Psychiatry, 47(1), pp. 77-92. ↩︎
- Delez Ž, Logika smisla, Sandorf + Mizantrop, Zagreb, 2015, str. 160. ↩︎
- Whenever the subject thinks of his I, he thinks of it as a pure mental correlate of himself and of nothing more than that. It is cut off from any concrete identification with the other. Everything exists to correlate with it, but it does not commit itself to anything. ↩︎
- Lewin, K. (1936). A dynamic theory of personality: Selected papers. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 84(5), p. 180-191. ↩︎
- (Consciousness of) power, wild enthusiasm and narcissism form an irregular affective triangle. The three points of connection differ according to the strength of their role in the process of dominance and their various appearances on the scene, timed by the development and change of soul structures. ↩︎
- A progressive image is one that is moving towards concrete arbitrary contents, but has not produced them yet. ↩︎
- Мethod is approach insofar as it enables the subject to develop semantic structures. And approach is method insofar as it contains its own structures on the basis of which the subject performs advanced procedures. It is obvious that both forms of progressive activity are closely correlated with every immanent mechanism. ↩︎
Spirit and Society 
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