Extracts from the Journals of a Coward

There was a time, during the folly of youth, the halcyon days of my studies in the humanities, where I became a ruthless social determinist. I believed I could be reduced completely to my circumstances – to my history, my culture, my language. These beliefs gave me comfort and satisfied a certain masochism within me. But, for a reason I would not understand until far too late, they also inspired anxiety and ungovernable rage.

My journals at this time read:

When I look in the mirror I do not see anything worth seeing.

I do not see a kind man.

I do not see a brave man.

I do not see a joyful or happy or good man.

I do not even see a human.

When I look in the mirror I see another mirror.

I see a collection of points bound together by physics and history. Aleatory fluke. By a process that is not in my control.

I see flotsam in the flow of time. A particle dancing on the shafts of light. I drift unwilled to the ground.

I see a man determined by his circumstances. The flow of capital, the storm cells of money, the speculation of the masses.

I see a man crushed beneath the weight of history and ideas; a hollow body groaning with logic and context and the laughter of others

I see a man forced to think and speak in a mongrel tongue that has licked every corner of the world. 

I see a man garbed in fictions written by the most self-important white people from the most self-important countries in history: Germany, Austria, France, Britain, America.

I see an idea instead of a man.

I see a man seeing himself as an idea and I wonder if it would be better if I saw no longer.

After a time dwelling in this sunken position, I could bear it no longer. And I wondered if the only escape from the omniscient, all-powerful “social” was either silence or suicide. For obvious reasons, neither were acceptable.

It was then that I developed my first strategy of escape: confounding and obfuscating the other. I wrote in my journal:

One day I will write an unending manifesto that cycles dialectically through each and every mode of thought conceivable. In one text I will be a Deleuzean accelerationist, a paleoconservative, a liberal, a fascist, an anarcho-communist, a techno-libertarian, a postmodern luddite, a decolonialist revolutionary, a White supremacist, a Black Power Afropessimist, a stochastic terrorist, an extremist of all religions and none, a radical individualist. My text will include all the most important words, both endorsing and refuting their logics: contingency, finitude, necessity, universality, nihilism, meaning, biopolitics, subjectivity, rhizomes, simulacra, performativity, essentialism, intersectionality, identity, indeterminacy.

People will read it, believing they might learn how I justified my life. They will be wrong.

In complete and total contradiction, my reasons will become inscrutable. I will become opaque. Finally mysterious, I will have won. They will not know me at all. They will only intuit that I did not want to be known, that I hoped to confound them. Whatever they theorise, they will never be sure, and returned to their ignorance they will know the gift I have given them.

An organised intellectual chaos would act as a screen, shielding me from the glare of the social. The strategy, I conceded, would achieve my ends. Nobody could say they knew me, that they could predict me, if any and all correlations in my behaviour were foreclosed in advance. But its success relied on my isolation in an unending quasi-psychotic practice; if I sought something like freedom from determination, this was ultimately an even worse prison.

I then thought that my visions of the totalising social turned it into a powerful, sadistic entity; accepting these visions, I was simply indulging a disturbing masochism. Desublimation eventually became my answer to social determinism. I allowed my masochism to reverse into violent aggression, and I secretly sought an uncommon purity of hatred. But knowing there is no hate untainted by its object, and therefore by the givenness of the social, I multiplied the objects of my hate, allowing the hate to become visible through its irrational excess, to evade the grasp of the social through its prolific reaching. Again, in my journal:

I hate men, women, and children. I hate conservatives, I hate progressives, I hate anarchists, I hate authoritarians, I hate Americans and Europeans and all White people of the Global North, I hate adults, babies, adults and the elderly, I hate the mentally ill and the sound of mind, I hate the pathetic, the weak, the ugly, the stupid,  the idiotic, I hate the beautiful, I hate the capable, I hate the fit and able, I hate the strong and intelligent and brilliant, I hate the competent and incompetent, I hate the entitled, I hate the charitable, I hate all sex and sexualities, I hate sexuality itself, I hate celibacy, I hate people who decide to breed, I hate people who abstain, I hate anti-natalists and pro-lifers and I hate the undecided and anxious, I hate kings and I hate capitalism and I hate socialism and I hate fascism, I hate the disengaged and anyone who supports anything, I hate you and your family and families in general and I hate myself, I fucking hate myself, I hate death and erasure and I hate life and presence, I hate God and all gods, I hate Christians, I hate atheists and nihilists and agnostics, I hate believers and dogmatists as much as I hate doubt and sceptics. I hate meaning and value and I hate meaninglessness and worthlessness, I hate people who try to be artists and I hate people who fail to do so, I hate the uncreative, I hate intellectuals, I hate people who are well read and I hate people who are ignorant, I hate authenticity and inauthenticity. I hate people who hate things and I hate people who are indifferent and I hate people that love. I hate noise and silence, I hate suffering and I hate peace. I hate relationships and I hate loneliness, I hate freedom and I hate confinement. I hate you and I and we and us and they and him and her and it. I hate everything and nothing and I hate difference and similarity and identity, I hate the original and the simulacra, I hate everywhere and everyone and every time and I hate the non-spatial, the atemporal, the non-relational, and above all I hate this feeling of hate, I hate the liveliness and love that hate creates, I hate the attachment to hate as much as I hate indifference to it, I hate so hate might be eternal, so I might exhaust hate itself.

My hate spread outwards anarchically, seizing upon any and every object in its path. But as it cleared an opening for me within this world, as I became an agent, an individual, I felt an unbearable sadness at the isolation my freedom required.

Outwitted and exhausted, I eventually gave up my efforts. Other desires entered my life, pressed me in unanticipated directions. And it was only then that I understood: it is through the chance encounter between contingent object and desire that the indeterminate exists. Through brutality and domination, they can draw out our hatred. But nobody can force us to love. In that moment, the grief I felt for my ruined life was predictably unbearable.