Essays

The standard critical move is to treat the “planet” sequence and the lever pulling figure as either (i) symbol, (ii) dream image, (iii) projection of Henry’s psychology, or (iv) a deliberately underdetermined flourish whose point is affect. Those approaches thin the ontology. They either collapse what we see into a code for something else, or they treat it as a way of presenting an inner state. Either way, the strange creature is not something over and above Henry’s predicament, it is a representational device.

What is the “matter” out of which the person on screen is composed, bodies, voices, clothes, rooms, names, memories, institutional roles, photographs, and who designates which parts count as spatial parts and which as temporal parts. In the college example, the fellows can be temporal parts without fixing the college’s location. In film terms, a character’s lovers, fears, and humiliations can be temporal parts of the character, without being spatially where the character is. That is banal in life, but Lynch makes it visible.

Fine’s approach, condensed into a working set of lenses, is a disciplined generosity about what kinds of things there are, and about how the same underlying “stuff” can support more than one object, depending on the form, the structuring, the mode of presence, and the relevant perspective. Fine treats hylomorphism as a method, a thing is a compound of matter and form, where matter is the underlying base, people, buildings, artefacts, and form is the structuring relations and rules that make that base count as a committee, a college, a country.

So I've written far too much about contemporary analytic metaphysicians Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine and their respective approaches to modality, attempting to understand their claims via the lens of Lynch's films (and vice versa). I'll assume some of this has been absorbed. So, if we now let this Finean way of thinking about bodies, embodiment, and form range freely across the Lynch films already in play, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Inland Empire, a unifying pattern emerges that is deeper than narrative fragmentation, dream logic, or psychoanalytic allegory.

In the previous very long, and winding, essay I established an approach that placed contemporary metaphysicians Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine in relationship with the films of film director David Lynch. I presented the films as metaphysical machines, testing out what kind of modal metaphysics was being staged. It offers an alternative approach to receiving Lynch to the psychoanalytic, Deleuzian, affect theory and narratology approaches familiar in the critical literature. It offers an application of analytic philosophy to a field dominated by so-called continental approaches with a view to popularising the analytic approach. It also placed it (briefly) into a post-Kantian (at times post Aristotelian) context by gesturing to Frederick Beiser's work on German Idealism and Post Kantianism to show that even if analytic philosophy does not need historical awareness in a deep sense, it can be useful to know it!

The following is an attempt to track some of the salient elements of David Lynch’s films largely through the different but related lenses developed by contemporary philosophers Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine. I do so because I think they both offer models to understanding the films more fruitfully than competing interpretive models. Or maybe it runs the other way: I’m using David Lynch to model the modes of modality of Williamson and Fine. I guess I’m doing both. Kind of. And I end up with different conclusions depending on how far into the thing you get. One minute a film is definitely Williamsonian, the next absolutely Finean. The plot of this is as confusing as Lynch at his best, but unlike Lynch the confusion here is caused as by my own confusion rather than brilliant design. So bite me!

The third series of Twin Peaks begins as a metaphysical catastrophe whereby the structures which normally make identity, time, causation, and knowledge intelligible are still operating, but no longer line up with one another. The first episode presents a world whose joints no longer match the categories by which anyone inside it is trying to understand it.

Most people have had moments, often brief and difficult to articulate, when reality feels slightly unmoored. A conversation suddenly acquires an edge you cannot explain. Someone you know well feels present but unreachable, as if the person you are speaking to is no longer quite the person you recognise. A familiar place loses its sense of safety or intimacy without any obvious change in its appearance. You are not confused about where you are or who is there. You are unsettled because the situation no longer feels like the kind of situation it used to be. The ground has not vanished, but it has thinned.

Before thinking about films or philosophy, pause and consider whether you have ever had one of the following moments, not as a metaphor but as a felt experience.You are speaking to someone you know well and halfway through the conversation you realise that the interaction has slipped into a different register. The words are familiar, the tone is almost right, but something has shifted. You are no longer sure what kind of exchange this is. Is it affectionate, threatening, playful, manipulative. Nothing explicit has changed, yet the ground has fallen away beneath the situation. You adjust, not because you have learned a new fact, but because the situation itself no longer feels like the kind of thing you thought it was.

One way into the ideas this essay addresses is not through cinema at all, but through a familiar, unsettling experience. Many people can recall a relationship from years earlier that now resists understanding. At the time it was lived, it seemed coherent, even inevitable. There was a sense of forward motion, of shared possibility, of a future that, if not fully articulated, at least felt open. Yet years later, when one tries to think about that relationship from the standpoint of the present, something does not fit. Facts are remembered, messages reread, photographs revisited, conversations replayed in the mind, and still the story will not settle. Certain moments appear impossibly intense. Others feel unreal or strangely weightless. One might even encounter a detail, a memory, a third party’s comment, that feels like a shock, not because it is new, but because it arrives too late, as though it belongs to a different version of oneself or a different configuration of life altogether.

Imagine Kant as a sort of heroic but slightly baffled craftsman in a seventeenth century workshop, except the workshop is actually his own mind, and the tools are concepts, and the wood shavings on the floor are discarded Enlightenment certainties. Beiser’s account is like watching him frown and mutter politely to himself while dismantling the entire philosophical tradition that came before him, and then very carefully putting it back together so it still works but now looks nothing like the instructions on the box. Everyone before Kant thought ideas were like little internal pictures. You look at them, they look back at you, and that is experience. How charming and magical that sounds.

When you sit with Kant’s late notes and let them breathe a little, something interesting happens. The whole thing starts to feel like someone standing in a large room, turning the lights on bit by bit, showing you how even the plainest objects need a structure of light and air and atmosphere to appear at all. This is how his transition project comes across once you ease up on the jargon. It feels like Kant is trying to show that the world of experience is not just thrown in front of us. It is held together by an underlying system of pressures and resistances, a kind of general hum or vibration that stops everything from collapsing into fragments. If you lose that hum, everything falls apart and there is nothing to look at and nothing to think about, not even yourself.

You get to think that we know our own thoughts and perceptions better than the world outside our heads. Our inner life is supposed to be transparent to us in a way that the world and other people's inner worlds aren't. Kant abolishes that asymmetry. In placing both self-knowledge and knowledge of outer objects under the same a priori forms and categories, he denies that we enjoy any privileged cognitive access to an inner realm of substances or states that could serve as an unquestionable basis for inferences to the world. Our inner life, no less than the spatial world, is given only as appearance, that is, only under the forms of time and the syntheses that make temporal order possible. There is therefore no standpoint from which we could first survey our inner states as fully transparent and then ask whether what we take to be outer things really exists; for the very distinction between inner and outer already presupposes the categorial unity of experience. So what I think is going on inside my thoughts is like what I think is going outside. Woah!

Beiser's summary of the purport of Kant’s analysis of the object of representation in the first edition version of the transcendental deduction comes to this. The object is not something already there, confronting the mind, which the mind then passively pictures or mirrors; it is rather the rule according to which a manifold is combined, the unity of a synthesis that makes the manifold count as one and the same something. Objects are rules. To say that a representation has an object is therefore to say that it stands under a rule of synthesis that fixes what further representations must be like if they are to count as representations of the same thing. There is no question of comparing a finished mental item with an independently given thing in order to see whether the two are similar, nor of the representation having determinate content in advance of its role in such a rule governed synthesis. This is why Kant is complicated because who would ever have thought of saying chairs and people are products of rules! Wow.

Kant found himself having to face accusations that he was inadvertently becoming like Berkeley. For Berkeley, the patterning of experience is ultimately the outcome of habits, associations and the constancy of God’s volitions. Generalities emerge from repetition. There is no strict necessity that tomorrow resemble today. What holds the world together is not an inner lawfulness of experience as such, but the fidelity of a divine will whose reasons are opaque to us. For Kant, by contrast, the order of experience is grounded in the very conditions under which anything can be experienced at all. The rules are not discovered by noticing frequent conjunctions, they are presupposed in any act of noticing. This means that the contrast between reality and illusion can be drawn without appealing to a contingent history of associations, and without smuggling in theological guarantees. It follows from the very form of experience, not from any further metaphysical posit. He called these synthetic a priori principles and everyone wonders how they are even possible.

So Beiser makes it clear that Kant’s shifting treatment of idealism reflects more than simple inconsistency. It arises from the pressure of holding together two aims that are difficult to reconcile. On the one hand he wants to deny that the world of experience has any transcendental status. On the other he wants to assert that the world of experience is the only arena in which knowledge is possible. If one takes the first aim in isolation one ends up describing appearances in a thin formal way. They become nothing more than structured representations. If one takes the second aim in isolation one tends to thicken appearances until they look like independent objects. The movement between these emphases is not a lapse but the natural result of treating experience both as something constituted and as something given. It's a delicate balancing act.

Beiser says the attempt to give empirical reality a stronger sense without falling back into the very realism Kant attacks has created a long and complicated debate. The proposal that affection happens on two levels is intended to preserve the idea that appearances are genuinely given to us while also allowing the thing in itself to play some explanatory role. According to this reading the empirical self receives its objects ready formed and stands to them as something receptive, whereas the transcendental self stands in some kind of deeper relation to the thing in itself which affects it. This is attractive because it seems to give empirical objects a kind of stability and independence that goes beyond their merely formal relation to space. Yet as soon as one presses the details difficulties arise because the idea of a transcendental self being affected by a thing in itself looks very much like the sort of claim Kant says we cannot make. He constantly reminds us that the transcendental standpoint is not one from which we can describe hidden processes but only one from which we can outline the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. If one begins to speak of two selves or two levels of affection one quickly slides into the kind of metaphysical picture he wanted to avoid.

Since the historical approach promises the best chance of solving some of the most difficult interpretative disputes, Beiser turns first to Kant’s lifelong struggle with idealism. He traces this struggle from Kant’s earliest writings in the 1750s through to the Opus postumum, the final work of Kant’s life. Each stage shows Kant wrestling with variants of idealism, testing different distinctions and revising his own views in response to both critics and to his own developing sense of the limits of reason. What emerges from this long story is not a simple switch from subjectivism to objectivism or the reverse, but something more layered. Kant’s transcendental idealism is neither a purely subjective doctrine in which everything begins from the inner life of consciousness, nor a purely objective doctrine in which a rational structure transcends the subject. It is a synthesis that takes elements from both sides, while resisting the reductive tendencies of each.

Beiser thinks that the legacy of German idealism will only be properly understood when contemporary philosophers recognise not only how much these thinkers anticipated later debates, but also how they went beyond many of the assumptions that still frame current discussions. He has in mind, in particular, the loose group of ideas often called postmodernism, with its suspicion of grand narratives, its distrust of foundations, and its scepticism about claims to universal truth. Think Rorty and Derrida as parade cases. Foundationalism is the view that knowledge or justification must rest on some secure base, some privileged set of beliefs or experiences that cannot themselves be called into doubt. Many twentieth century debates, both modern and postmodern, turned on whether such foundations are possible. Beiser points out that the German idealists had already witnessed and responded to the collapse of older foundational projects in the late Enlightenment.

Beiser adds another distinctive point by shifting to something that, for a long time, sat at the edges of Kant scholarship and so at the edges of standard stories about German idealism. This is Kant’s last, unfinished work, usually called the Opus Postumum. Beiser insists that if we are serious about understanding how German idealism develops between Kant and his successors, we cannot treat this unfinished text as an odd appendix or as a curiosity produced by an ageing philosopher. We have to bring it into the centre of the story.

Beiser now turns his fire most directly on what he calls the Hegelian legacy, and it is worth slowing right down over it because a lot of later misunderstanding hangs on the habits he is criticising. Up to this point he has done two things. First, he has argued that German idealism is not the glorification of the subject that many people imagine, but a long, messy struggle against subjectivism, that is, against the idea that we only ever know our own ideas and never really get outside our own heads. Second, he has warned us against reading the whole period through the myth of the absolute ego, as if everything were secretly about a cosmic Self revealing itself step by step. Now he adds a third warning. It says that we also have to liberate ourselves from Hegel’s own story about German philosophy, because that story still shapes how people think about Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, often without realising it.

Beiser carries on trying to clear away a picture of German idealism that has become almost mythical. He has already argued that it is a mistake to see the history of these thinkers as a slow swelling of the human subject, a story where the modest Kantian self gradually inflates into a vast cosmic mind that creates everything. Now he turns to the special role played in that myth by the idea of an infinite self or absolute ego.

The first time you open Beiser’s introduction to German idealism, it feels like stumbling into week seven of a philosophy course you definitely did not sign up for. Everyone in the room clearly knows who Reinhold is, they are nodding about the Opus Postumum, and you are still trying to pronounce Fichte. Names everywhere, titles everywhere, long sentences that assume you were quietly reading Kant in your teens. You feel, very quickly, slightly despised by the book. So, naturally, you despise it back. But if you sit with it, something else starts to appear under the avalanche. That is what I am trying to do here, to slow the whole thing down, to let Beiser keep his seriousness, while translating his set up so that someone who has not been secretly living in Jena can still follow the plot.

Beiser’s picture of neo Kantianism begins from something quite simple. In nineteenth century Germany there is a huge success story, the natural sciences, and a huge crash, the collapse of the big speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the middle is philosophy, suddenly unsure what it is for. Scientists say that matter and evolution explain everything. The churches defend revelation and tradition. Philosophers face an identity crisis. Are they still needed, and if so, for what?

In Beiser’s account the neo Kantian revival is not the work of a few great names erupting in the 1870s. It is a gradual, uneven reawakening stretching over decades, involving many thinkers who are usually left out of mainstream histories. Some were university teachers, some were critics of materialism, some were historians of philosophy, some were psychologists, and some were independent scholars writing for a wider audience. Beiser treats them as the connective tissue of the movement. Without them the revival would never have taken the shape that later became the Marburg and Baden schools.

Let’s turn to Wilhelm Windelband, another major figure in the neo-Kantian story as framed by top philosopher Frederick C. Beiser. His work reveals how the neo-Kantian movement shifted from pure epistemology and science toward values, culture and the human sciences. His book was the book Sam Beckett made loads of notes about philosophy from and so we might have a good thought and say Beckett was responding to neo-Kanteanism. Not many people have had that thought until now so whew! It's a bit heady. We might even have the thought that Beckett is doing a kind of Windelbandian neo-Kantian thing! That might be going too far but Woah! It's a good thought so I'm going to keep thinking it for a little while.

Eduard Zeller appears in Beiser’s story as the quiet, methodical figure who shows that neo Kantianism can be serious and sober rather than dramatic. Where someone like Kuno Fischer turns Kant into a stage play about freedom and will, Zeller turns Kant into a discipline, almost a temperament. For Beiser, he is one of the central figures of the 1860s revival, the decade when “back to Kant” becomes an academic programme rather than a slogan, and when philosophy starts to redefine itself as theory of knowledge.

In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Paul Natorp stands at an important turning point. He is not as dramatic a figure as Hermann Cohen, nor as colourful as Kuno Fischer, but Beiser treats him as someone who quietly carries the movement from its early, exploratory phase into a stable, institutional form. Natorp helps turn neo Kantianism into something a university can teach, support and reproduce, and he does so by extending its concerns into pedagogy, education and the communal life of science.

In Beiser’s map of neo Kantianism, Kuno Fischer is the figure standing right in the middle of the crossroads. He is not quite a neo Kantian in the later, school sense, yet without him, Beiser insists, the later movement would not have taken the shape it did. Fischer is the man who makes Kant exciting again for a wide public, who teaches a generation of students to see the Critique as a living drama, and who, in the process, blurs some of Kant’s strict limits in ways that later neo Kantians have to correct.

In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Hermann Cohen is the point where the movement takes on a recognisable public shape. The early figures, Fries, Herbart and Beneke, look a little like pioneers who open a path and then get half forgotten in the rush of later developments. Cohen stands at the next bend in the track, where a loose trend is turned into a school, the Marburg school, with a programme, students and successors.

Johann Friedrich Herbart looks, in a standard history of philosophy, like a side character. He is tagged as a minor realist, remembered as an early psychologist and as someone who wrote a lot about education. If he appears in the story of Kant at all, it is usually as an opponent rather than as a follower. Beiser’s reconstruction turns this picture around. Herbart sits alongside Fries and Beneke as one of the original neo Kantians, part of the early movement to rescue philosophy from speculative system building and to root it again in experience and critical method. Beiser is saying - get this guy out of the shadows and give him a spotlight. So here he is.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke sits at the edge of Beiser’s story like a slightly awkward cousin. He is part of the same “lost tradition” as Fries and Herbart, the empiricist, psychological line that Beiser traces back to the 1790s, yet he pushes some of their shared ideas so far that he almost drops out of the neo-Kantian family altogether.

We've all heard about Kant, Idealists and Romantics and think they're the wild men of philosophy and so we like to think about them because we like the frisson and hope we'll get some. But we don't know the neo-Kantians because Hegel and his fans always talk about how there's really just Kant and then Hegel and then what we have now with nothing else. But Hegelians are lying about this because they know that's not true. I guess we think this is ok because we assume they're drunk on all that frisson. But neo-Kantians did exist and were important and they should come out of the Hegelian shadows. This is what Frederick C Beiser thinks. He brings them out and says we should listen to these guys and not just the wild men and all their frissoning.

Having read Beiser on Fichte, I now turn to his account of the Romantics. He moves from Fichte to a new generation who thought his philosophy was powerful but still not enough. They wanted something bigger than a theory that began from the individual “I”. They wanted a picture of the whole universe, and of how our minds fit inside it. Whew. That's ambitious. That bigger picture is “absolute idealism”.

This is a summary of what I think top philosopher Frederick C Beiser says about Fichte in a book on German Idealism.

Frederick C Beiser is a top philosopher. His book on Hegel is a lot easier to understand than Hegel himself. I've tried reading Hegel but there's a lot of density in him. His books are famous for being written in very dense and unclear prose and Beiser jokes that reading Hegel can feel like chewing gravel - tiring and not very pleasant. So I've read Beiser on Hegel instead and written down what I made of it because Beiser makes all that density go away.

White walls hold their breath. A bed is made into a field. A man and a woman count each other’s features as if counting were a way to keep time from moving. The lens comes close and refuses to own what it touches. Skin, hair, shoulder, knee, toes, mouth, eyes, voice. The counting is inventory and lullaby at once. It is also already the evidence for a later hearing. Desire rehearses tenderness and tenderness rehearses power. Light insists upon colour and then withdraws so that colour can continue alone. The music remembers a sorrow not yet earned. The opening is a promise that the camera will be permitted to touch everything and will rescue nothing.

A hotel arranges its corridors as if memory were an architect with an obsession for right angles. Rooms repeat with such courtesy that the body begins to suspect it has been here before even when it has just arrived. Ceilings carry stucco that refuses to age. Mirrors wait in their frames like obedient witnesses who have rehearsed their silence. Carpets hush steps into compliance. A garden holds rigid parterres as if the earth had signed a contract against weather. People move through this order with the measured caution of figures invited to a ceremony without knowing its purpose. The camera glides and the glide becomes the only form of kindness tolerated in this place. When it stops, time thickens. When it turns, certainty must adopt another posture. The hotel is the precise instrument by which a story is denied even as it insists upon happening.

A house presents itself before the people who believe they own it. Pillars speak to the floor and the floor carries their speech into the rooms without hurry. Paper doors breathe with the weather and draw narrow rectangles of light upon tatami that remember every footstep and forget nothing. A garden of sand has been arranged to persuade the eye that the sea can be made calm by attention. Stone sits with a patience that embarrasses talk. The film enters as if to apologise to these things for the time it will spend among human wishes.

Rain, before anyone thinks to name it. The screen turns the colour of churned soil and abandoned tins. Cattle drift through the opening minutes with the deliberation of clockwork that has forgotten there was once a design behind its movement. Wind presses its breath against panes and doors, repeating a message that no one in the settlement can translate. A scatter of buildings keeps company with rutted tracks that used to be roads and with fields that no longer recall labour as anything but gossip.

A film that accepts a kind of waiting that is older than explanation. The screen learns to breathe at the speed of sleep. A face that is not yet a person appears like a memory rising through water. The air has a winter clarity even when the light is summer. A town sits by the sea as if it had grown tired of being seen and had decided to be a picture of itself.

Another winter film. The room that receives it gives itself to a waiting more exact than curiosity. The light is grey and held steady. Streets are narrow. Restaurants are spare. A small office borrows a view of a wall. The camera sits and allows tables to do their work of keeping bodies within speaking distance. Two men and a woman come forward and then withdraw. One of the men makes films and talks about scripts with a seriousness that protects him from himself. The other owns a gallery and talks about money and about feeling in the same tone. The woman writes and carries notebooks and says little until her silence begins to stand in for a thought the others do not know where nor how to place.

A book opens and the room alters as if a slight subsidence. The title names crimes and love in one breath and the conjunction is already a sentence that refuses to choose its subject. We are placed inside short narratives that behave like chambers. Each chamber has a strict door and an appointed exit. Between both there is the light of voices that try to persuade themselves that they know what they are doing while another light, colder and patient, measures them without speaking.

A road accepts the day and denies the destination, imagine. Cars repeat politeness as patience becoming a monument. A sounding horn confesses that speech will not be enough. Bodies in vehicles learn that the community of travellers is only the choreography by which solitude pretends to be public.

A film , a voice speaks, a car idles somewhere beyond the frame, and the room gathers into a single attention that is neither curiosity nor suspense. The surface is calm, the words are even, the image is the world that is already ours of motorways, underpasses, a showroom with polished panels, a test track where cones and chalk marks pretend to be geometry. The film does not ask us to admire the machine. It asks that we notice how it inhabits us. The car is not an object among objects. It is the skin that moves across another skin.

A few pages survive. Rubble was the measure of a city. They were composed as if for the air, though the air that carried them was more the air of a room than the air of transmission. A town in Normandy brought low and given a new name by its own people, a name that confessed a ruin so complete that pride could only take the form of sobriety. A temporary hospital had been raised in huts and corridors. Doors were temporary refusals of walls. Visitors who came were received without charge and without questions that would make their poverty a second injury.

A winter film. The screen turns white and grey. Snow falls without hurry and the river continues beneath the stillness that pretends to hold it. A hotel receives a few guests who have not yet decided to be guests. A poet has taken a room because he feels a summons from an end that does not announce itself except as a rumour of breath. He asks his sons to come. Nearby two women shelter in another room. They drink coffee that cools too fast because the window lets the outside cross a threshold they needed to hold firm. A day is given to them and to us. The day is not an argument. It is a duration that will not belong to anyone when it is over.

A film, and it yields itself to a kind of waiting that is older than waiting for knowledge. The screen receives what it has been made to receive. A voice speaks in the manner of an announcement that pretends to have no centre. Faces come forward and withdraw. The world outside is held back for the length of a reel. What is shown is not a story that takes us in hand and leads us toward a proof. It is a sequence of certainties that already know their end and for that reason cannot end.

This is me playing with Derrida's Force of Law. Begin with a wager about value, not a doctrine about method, because the word play is usually reduced to a technique that lightens labour or a psychological garnish for motivation, while in Bataille it names a sovereign expenditure within immanence, a release of surplus that does not answer to a higher court. In the opening pages of his meditation on Nietzsche, Bataille speaks of ardour that refuses moral ends, of a burning that is not redeemed by utility, of an aspiration that seeks a summit beyond service to God or to any civic good, and he links this to laughter and to the sacred intensity that exceeds results. To remove obligation and to keep the flame is to risk unintelligibility, he writes, since common speech expects every blaze to power a machine, yet the point is precisely to defend a consummation without profit and a joy without owner.

Beckett’s Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, can be entered as a continuous rite of play in Bataille’s sense, where play means disciplined expenditure, sovereignty without possession, assent sustained at the brink where measure gives way to intensity. Each book builds a small economy that spends surplus with exact forms, Molloy turns walking, counting, and the calculus of sucking stones into a ceremony that consumes time and thought for no gain beyond continuation, Malone converts a bed, an exercise book, and a pencil into a liturgy in which listing and storytelling frame a lucid waste, The Unnamable reduces the scene to voice that goes on because going on is the only rule. Across the three movements the sacred is treated as something kept by taboo and tested in transgression, laughter protects the rite, embarrassment cleans the air, tenderness and cruelty are held in view with care so that intensity never hardens into domination.

This essay begins with a claim that guides all that follows. Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a study of lives and institutions that deny play in the richest sense. The denial shapes desire, work, courtship, and speech. It also shapes universities, where the novel sets some of its sharpest scenes. I read the book with Bataille’s idea of play as lucid expenditure that binds a circle through shared risk and shared loss. I see the same denial at work in our contemporary social arrangements. Homes and offices and platforms organise attention around return and around audit. Education has taken on that temper and has become anti play in the Bataillean sense. The cost is real.

Placed under Bataille’s lens the logic becomes a map of general economy. Desobra is the name of the community’s refusal to become work. It is the refusal to turn expenditure into accumulation. It is the refusal to turn the dead into capital. It is the refusal to turn mourning into identity. The sovereign time of mourning would otherwise become the tool of the state. It would become the ritual by which a nation feeds on its dead. Bataille calls this the worst misdirection of surplus. It is the moment when the city remains hungry after a feast and must therefore find victims. The only cure is to make rites that really end. The only cure is to keep the unworking of the rite intact.

I will use the word play to name what is at stake in Bataille’s writing on surrealism and on Manet. Play joins bodies to scenes. It binds a room. It spends a surplus that work cannot absorb. In Bataille’s vocabulary this means expenditure rather than accumulation. It means a movement toward continuity from the ordinary state of discontinuous selves. It means taboo held and then crossed under a rule, so that danger becomes knowledge rather than harm. On this ground surrealism is not a style. It is the invention of forms that let a culture without a binding myth still generate nights and rooms in which the sacred can appear without doctrine.

Eroticism is play in the specific sense that Bataille gives to excess. It is an assent to life that spends more than usefulness demands. It is a consent to risk that seeks an intensity which cannot be recovered as profit or lesson. It is a movement toward a summit where the ordinary measures fall away. To present this clearly I will introduce the main ideas from Bataille’s book on eroticism.

Play is the word I will use for what Bataille calls excess and summit. I choose it because the common sense of the word keeps the thought from turning into an abstract doctrine. Children play. Lovers play. Rituals in their oldest form are organised play. Festivals turn labour into play for a day or a week. When economies prosper, surplus becomes sport and spectacle. When they collapse, the same impulse returns as riot and dance and laughter that has no business plan.

Bataille is a writer who says he writes out of fear that he might go mad, and who confesses to an ardent aspiration that consumes him, an aspiration that cannot be translated into ordinary moral action or theological service, because it belongs to a region where obligation no longer commands, and where language itself loses its authority the moment it tries to persuade toward any useful end. In the preface to his meditation on Mr Nietzsche, Bataille sketches a solitude that follows once one no longer serves the good or God, and he laments that Nietzsche, who called for a new order of disciples, found only vulgar praise and misunderstanding, notably political misappropriations that he detested.

This essay begins with a simple claim. To understand the new politics growing inside today’s technological infrastructure we need philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner’s triple lens of rationalism, nationalism and civil society. Rationalism is a public craft of giving reasons that others can inspect. Nationalism is the standardised high culture that lets strangers work and argue together. Civil society is “that part of society which is not the state. It is a residue,” and the residue that matters is “large, powerful, and organised,” with “membership… optional or revocable,” able “to ensure that the state does its job but no more, and that it does it properly.” The three elements belong together, they tell us how arguments become binding, how a common idiom is sustained without being monopolised, and how organised counterweights keep offices separate from office holders.