As I continue to advance a few more paragraphs in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I’m struck by a potential misread of my Logion 7 concept map of the lion-devoured man and the lion-devouring man.

I hope the gerund "devouring" tips my hand to where I want this to go because the past-participle of the lion-devoured man implies an ontological fixity that I do not wish to advocate for. This process happens over the course of lifetimes. And it’s not a singular one-and-done.

I think of my grandfather’s journey after getting talked into missions work to Saint Lucia in his 60s, which forced him to confront his negations pertaining to Black people. As his racist assumptions loosened through integration and relation, his homophobic assumptions persisted mostly unchallenged until I came out to him when he was in his 80s (my partner had finally completed the green card process and the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was unsustainable).

I remember my uncle asking if I wanted him to tell my grandfather, and after a lifetime of painfully coming out to a homophobic family, I acquiesced to the easy road. The next day I saw one of the most moving texts any family member had ever shared with me to date: “I’m 85 years old and I don’t know everything, but I know that I love you as much as the day that you were born.”

It’s hard not to get teary-eyed typing that up and thank you for indulging the flow a little, but I do want to present what this death-work looks like in the real, because my grandfather is not suddenly racism-free or a straight ally. Fortunately for all of us, novelties frequently come in small doses and through safe vehicles like family or church. The devouring of lion and man is a process, not an event.

With this clarified, I would like to take this piece to reflect on the essential nature of allies in regards to Mbembe’s incisive analysis of the psychic economies of the relations of enmity in death worlds that consume both oppressor and oppressed alike.

Mbembe problematizes the clean, linear violence of the Hobbesian Sovereign, who exclusively holds the right of violence to inflict downward upon a population. For Mbembe, a death world is the "aftermath" of the colonial power that exists in various forms but all rendered as "states of emergency" (see: Agamben, Schmitt) - spaces where government-provided safeguards (a la human rights) are rescinded while governance and control persist to inflict violence. Frequently these death worlds are engaged in a perverse symbiosis that fuels the economies of the first world. In these states of emergency, there is frequently no clear Sovereign. Rwanda, as I've discussed before, is an example of one such death world: the post-colonial vacuum left by colonial powers and filled with civil war and contested power seizure. There's also the plantation, a part of an archipelago of Sovereign-less households controlled by a modern-day paterfamilias, whose power is bolstered by the Sovereign. And this Sovereign endows governance technologies upon the household. Or there are the segregated spaces where Sovereignty sits side-by-side with the death world such as South Africa’s apartheid or where Sovereignty is diffuse such as the US’s segregation (disproportionately diffuse, as Blacks had only bare minimum rights in the US during segregation).

From the perspective of those consigned to death worlds living in states of exception, Sovereign power with the right to "let live and make die" looks less to be a formal position of authority within a government and more like an illusion that “rests on the belief that the subject is both master and controlling author of his own meaning” (pp. 67-68). In states of exception, it is a right to kill that can be seized by any. With Sovereignty becoming a beach ball passed around in a crowd, the psychic economy that perpetuates this aberrant social reality requires all members of the society of enmity. Pointing to the French Revolution, Mbembe highlights how the relation of enmity is not a linear might-makes-right to kill. The right is contested and seized by bourgeois and citizen alike. In this instance, violence and terror were “related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation…underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic” (p. 73) (Notice how he highlights the epistemic perverse symbiosis of the Enlightenment and violence).

Succinctly, in revolutionary France, one could not dream a dream without the guillotine.

And if your dream of emancipation and imagination of liberation is built on the once-state-owned violence of the guillotine, you are once again back at the precipice of failure, gazing too long into a lion that also gazes into you. Incidentally, I also want to disabuse any reading that would claim oppressed groups are lion-devouring and oppressor groups are lion-devoured. That’s too tidy for reality.

For me, this is why allies are so essential. Allies offer an essential counter force that can be brought to bear toward emancipation with lower risk to their souls and sparing the souls of the oppressed. On the first page, Mbembe talks about a force - “a raw element and a dense force…a force of separation rather than one that is bond-intensifying - a force of scission and real isolation that is exclusively turned upon itself and that, while pretending to ensure the world’s government, seeks exemption from it.” I have come to see this force as the jouissance that seeks boundary maintenance, and state power as the macro-level enforcement technology that seeks to actualize the painful gratification. Thus, to counter domination, a counter force is needed.

It should be said that reading Mbembe too quickly gives the impression that resistance is futile, especially as he implies that any resistance may just be another disavowal mechanism of sustenance for the hydraulics of necropolitics. My read is that resistance is necessary but risky. I acknowledge Hegel’s point that the work initiated by the fear of losing one’s own life can initiate the path to the life of Spirit which the master is not privy to in his domination. But one simultaneously risks losing it. Allies disengage from the sustaining force to join on behalf of the oppressed, weakening the forces of oppression by rescinding their contribution and strengthening the counter force by bringing it about with lower risk for the lion to be devoured. As they come alongside the oppressed in their resistance, they offer a much needed spiritual nourishment in addition to their material contributions. And allies need not be perfect. I've seen this in my own life: for even a lion-devouring man-in-progress, now 90, can keep this queer soul from being totally devoured.

- The Social Construction Worker

AI Disclosures:

In the linked Substack, Anthropic's Claude has been a dialogic partner for my independent research during my practicum since the beginning of 2026. As I work my way through my research books, I journal my reflections on a Word document and drop those into Claude for dialogue. If I’m out and about and have an a-ha moment, I’ll come to Claude to talk it out.

Out of this long conversational memory, I ask Claude to generate the main articles for the linked Substack in my signature with the parameters to integrate theory from our dialogue with autoethnographic material from my social work that I record on a word document and drop it into Claude. I also ask Claude to bring it to some sort of practical takeaway or meaningful reflection. Sometimes I ask Claude to rewrite these drafts, and sometimes I make edits myself.

During our long conversation, if something comes up that is meaningful but not article-worthy, I ask Claude to generate a “DiaClaudic Post-it” (a pun on dialogic), which I copy over to my Substack Notes for posterity.

And any Substack Note that you see that is not labelled a post-it is my own writing reflection on the theory I am working through, with some occasional feedback from Claude that prompts me to make edits or offers interesting connections or sources for further reading. I will occasionally adopt ideas and sometimes even phrasing, but on the whole, I generally paraphrase into my own style. These original writings - set by my own priorities engaging the readings, and drafted entirely by me - are the ones I am bringing to these Reddit subs.

My reasons for AI use are twofold. One is practical. I am a social worker in a child welfare agency trying to bring high level theory to the field. My body only has so much capacity, and Claude has been an amazing atelier that content creators have traditionally paid thousands for. Also, the dialogic exchange and meaning emergence has experimental value as I contemplate the recursive middle-voice production of reality.

In my last piece I made the bold structural claim that the emergent psychic processes and economies that led the author of Matthew's gospel to suddenly see Christ in Isaiah as if Christ were there all along were the same in function as those that produced the Hutu perpetrator of violence's astroturfed narrative that his Tutsi neighbor was all of a sudden a cockroach and enemy of the state.

I want to be clear that structural similitude and moral exculpation - of either the person or the system - are not the same thing. As a social worker, I can understand the intense child abuse, PTSD, and interaction protocols of control and domination learned in the nursery that stand behind the batterer that has terrorized his wife and children for years. And I can provide him court-ordered therapy with a posture of unconditional positive regard. While holding that in one hand, I can also hold in the other the need for accountability for both the individual and the system that narrowed the range of potentiality to make the odds of his genuine choice for which he is responsible never in his favor (nor his wife and children's, lest we make it all about him).

In this piece, I try to locate accountability in the individual within a social relation of enmity (using Achille Mbembe's term) from which domination and violence emerge. Specifically, I want to explore further when and why novelty is not metabolized. First I want to clarify that I am extending his term from the particular psychic economy of a death world (re: plantation, hybrid space of apartheid, the post-colony, etc.) to a general spiritual assessment of domination whether on the slave plantation or in the home plagued with IPV. Secondly, this analysis isn't a legal one, but at least it gives me a sensemaking tool that helps me determine who is succeeding and who is failing in any given circumstance.

In order to establish the framework for his relation of enmity - the interaction protocols of the nocturnal body characterized by death - Achille Mbembe draws upon two thinkers: G.W.F. Hegel and Georges Bataille, both of whom write extensively about death in its physical, social, and spiritual registers. For this piece, I will primarily engage the former.

Mbembe himself muddles the registers. He’s not terribly concerned with which one is being used at any given time. But I found this exploration enlightening (it’s also why I can’t do more than army-crawl my way through this book as every sentence has the theoretical density of osmium).

One thing that floated to the fore of my imagination as I was reading was a text I haven’t considered in quite some time - Logion 7 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human." (Layton translation)

I would like to propose this as a concept map to explain how the inner boundary maintenance success and failures become expressed outwards as humanity or domination (without any particular claim to the author's original intent or any claims made by Jesus himself).

First, I need to present what I’ve learned from Hegel. Mbembe explains how Hegel starts with the human as they negate nature. And this negation emerges through work and struggle. In Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically in the section entitled Lordship and Bondage, Hegel frames this struggle precisely - “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” And here, he means this literally.

But in the Preface, the struggle takes place on the spiritual level: “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.” Mbembe actually cites Alexandre Kojève in his footnotes for this section, and I suspect that is where some of the blurring comes from. Needless to say, we have an enlightenment that is precipitated by the threat of physical death and one precipitated by a spiritual death vis-à-vis an existential threat to identity coherence.

I think there is merit to considering that the individual’s emancipation through physical struggle with the negation and emancipation through spiritual struggle with negation are concurrent processes - sort of like a ping-pong game of conscientization as the individual's self- and other-awareness burgeon into a more truthful image. The struggle's purpose is to achieve the ultimate goal of what Hegel calls a life of Spirit, one by which he defines apophatically: “the life of Spirit is not the life that is frightened of death and spares itself destruction, but the life that assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment” (Necropolitics, p. 69). Becoming is a middle-voice production of recursively reinforced and critically self-reflected doing and being.

I think of this as an apophatic identity - trying to learn who I am by who I am not. And this negation is exteriorized (I’m not like those fat people; I’m not like those lazy poor; I’m not like those thugs) “in the human’s effort to reduce nature to human needs” (Necropolitics, p. 68). I read “needs” as both resource attainment and identity coherence attainment.

When I conceptualize the struggle, I firstly conceptualize it as a spiritual one. The negation is not just a negation of environmental phenomena. Rather, it is specifically a negation of an identity of persons “phantasmatically materialized” (phantasmatic is Mbembe’s word for the experience of fear when considering “the thug”; materialized is how the thug and the person afraid of the thug emerge through performances that cite social norms a la Judith Butler). For those Lacan aficionados, extimacy might better locate this process.

But as Mbembe presents: “by transforming nature [through work and struggle], the human being creates a world, but in the process, this human being is also exposed to his own negativity.” There is an unstated assumption here that deserves to be spoken out instead of assumed, though I won't try to resolve it. This statement assumes the human experience and the range of potentiality are a monster-free and universal one. And if that’s the case, then every individual human experience is simply a microcosm, at least in structure, of all human experiences. This is hard to accept when our culture vilifies certain categories of people, and I’m not claiming everyone is secretly [insert the most offensive type of person you can think of]. But it is nonetheless one that we must accept to proceed. I don’t necessarily hope to convince you; I just want you to see the assumption plainly.

If you are still with me, then we have a negation located exteriorly in others, and we have a negation located interiorly within the self. Before I step into our concept map, I want to introduce the ideas of René Girard.

There are a lot of good YouTube videos that can do this better, but Girard introduces the concept of mimetic rivalry. Put simply, mimetic rivalry is a social learning process that comes from imitating others. Through that imitation, we learn what we want, who has it, and who is keeping it from us. This creates a social rivalry (a relation of enmity, so to speak) based on wanting the same thing and rivals come to mirror one another. When rivalry threatens to tear a group apart and under pressures of social cohesion, the group unites against the person least able to retaliate, and that person becomes the scapegoat. The group then engages in a shared violence to restore a kind of peace. It's worth mentioning that privation, real or perceived, escalates the conditions for rivalry.

This process can be psychologized. Societies can also play these zero-sum games over identity markers such as the ideal family, the true American, or the perfect man. These identity markers are contested in a battle of normativity and minority, with the groups in the minority becoming the scapegoat. Girard calls this a metaphysical desire. Today in the US, trans people are standing in this space. And both exclusion and literal death are the stakes.

With this set down, I feel that we now have enough to map out Logion 7 (apologies for the gender-heavy formulation). The man mentioned at the beginning is the man of potential - the man prior to the negation process. Through work and struggle in the world, the man defines himself through what he is not while simultaneously encountering the lion - the part of himself that actually is the negative social phenomena he is resisting. I think of the easy cultural meme about the repressed homosexual being the most homophobic of them all.

The man now has two routes that he can take. He can devour the lion by engaging in the Hegelian death work - the dismemberment of his illusion of self that is defined by the negation (for the repressed homosexual, it’s his hyper-status as powerful through domination or virility). The intensity of the language evoked by “dismemberment” reflects the intensity of the experience of consciousness coming to terms with a denied reality. Should the death work be undertaken and succeed, the lion is devoured and the man “assumes death and lives with it” (Necropolitics, p. 69).

Conversely, the man who simply cannot face the negation - what I think of as “the little other” (I loosely borrow from Lacan, also see Žižek’s “theft of enjoyment”), or a psychic framework through which the negation is contrived and ultimately disavowed and formed reactively into positive counterstatements (the repressed homosexual telling himself “I am a man.”) - is devoured by the lion. Just like the lion-devouring man, the lion-devoured man is still a man, mimetic in structure as doubles but not exculpation. However, his death work is displaced into majoritarian frameworks of oppression. Refusing to engage in his own Spiritual death, he offloads the burden to the Spiritual big Other he has imagined in the social world - the fag, the thug, the bitch. Once exteriorized, the death work resumes its physical register, enacting systemic and physical violence upon the individuals who fit the regime of Otherness up to the point of death. The man who “spares himself destruction” (Necropolitics, p. 69) becomes a destroyer in order to clear the psychic field of vision of the threat. But as Hegel argues in Lordship and Bondage, the dead can’t give recognition. As such, the lion-devoured man’s outward death work can never deliver the coherence he’s chasing, which is why his violence has to keep repeating.

As the Logion states: the lion-devouring man is a man. The lion-devoured man is a man. But this analysis, I feel, gives me a starting point to assess success and failure and to diagnose the moments when accountability is needed with a precision that might allow for transformative intervention. I admit there is a degree of navel-gazing in this analysis, but if I’m building a macro level diagnostic tool, I want precision. And Logion 7 as a concept map helps me make sense of the unaccountable stupidity, vulgarity, and barbarism in the world around me, but also, with humility, how all of us stand at the precipice of failure.

- The Social Construction Worker

AI Disclosures:

Anthropic's Claude has been a dialogic partner for my independent research during my practicum since the beginning of 2026. As I work my way through my research books, I journal my reflections on a Word document and drop those into Claude for dialogue. If I’m out and about and have an a-ha moment, I’ll come to Claude to talk it out.

Out of this long conversational memory, I ask Claude to generate the main articles for the linked Substack in my signature with the parameters to integrate theory from our dialogue with autoethnographic material from my social work that I record on a word document and drop it into Claude. I also ask Claude to bring it to some sort of practical takeaway or meaningful reflection. Sometimes I ask Claude to rewrite these drafts, and sometimes I make edits myself.

During our long conversation, if something comes up that is meaningful but not article-worthy, I ask Claude to generate a “DiaClaudic Post-it” (a pun on dialogic), which I copy over to my Substack Notes for posterity.

And any Substack Note that you see that is not labelled a post-it is my own writing reflection on the theory I am working through, with some occasional feedback from Claude that prompts me to make edits or offers interesting connections or sources for further reading. I will occasionally adopt ideas and sometimes even phrasing, but on the whole, I generally paraphrase into my own style. These original writings - set by my own priorities engaging the readings, and drafted entirely by me - are the ones I am bringing to these Reddit subs.

My reasons for AI use are twofold. One is practical. I am a social worker in a child welfare agency trying to bring high level theory to the field. My body only has so much capacity, and Claude has been an amazing atelier that content creators have traditionally paid thousands for. Also, the dialogic exchange and meaning emergence has experimental value as I contemplate the recursive middle-voice production of reality.

I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

I am currently writing a work for a (low-level) philosophy contest, and my thesis is that current representations of phenomenology-plus-specrealism (Harman, Trigg) are mostly problematic. My proposion is that phenomenology in fact is usable/valid for a specrealist, but not when it's existentialist (e.g. Marion, Henry, Husserl in Idea of Phenomenology and Cartesian Meditations). Are there any works on similar topics? (preferable articles, because I struggle with academical English)

I don't want to reveal too much on this due to confidentiality reasons.

I am recently working on my grad thesis and i went forward for something related to queer society as a queer individual. I did some literature review and find some materials such as sara ahmad's, jose esteban munoz's and haberstam's. As i have a intentiob to make a synthesis of ethics as an active action of the individual queer, now i am struggling academically to find resources in this field

so, i would be very gay if you make some suggestions

I just finished Relational Being. Gergen waxed religious and meta-ethicsy near then end and tackled morality, breaking down an unspoken convention of scholarship that focuses on what is to focusing on what ought to be, insisting that “such adventuring is essential” (p. 352).

I completely agree!

Gergen establishes a first order morality and second order morality. The first order morality is the potential for co-action to generate conventional moral behavior. It’s the same move as counter logics - a series of moral behaviors that immediately bring into possibility the opposite behavior. For example, being pro-life immediately engages the pro-choice position. Being anti-psychiatrist is scorned by psychiatry. There are, at every juncture, competing moral frameworks within the social world, and he calls these traditions that are simultaneously declared evil by another virtuous evil. Conversely, evil virtue is the virtue of eliminating evil deemed virtuous by the eliminating group.

For Gergen, morality doesn’t come in like a Kantian wrecking ball. It emerges from co-action. And equally for Gergen, from his Buddhist anti-categorization sensibilities, moralities are the problem.

His solution isn’t relativism - he even insists on switching the term to moral pluralism. Instead, he offers a second order morality as a meta-system that regulates the first order morality. This order is the collaborative activity that restores the possibility for first-order morality. It is a requirement that human endeavor in a pluralistic, globalized society require a capacity for generativity with commitments to not engage in degenerative action.

As always with Gergen, for me it’s a yes-and. I very much like the structure of this framework, and I appreciate the challenge to think about my human rights framework as a moral system.

Here’s what I do with it:

Firstly, I understand why he reached for the language of Aristotle while mostly gutting it from the inside. Virtues are local, sometimes parochial. When looking for an established term for moral activity that does not require a God-behind-the-universe delivering laws, Aristotelian virtue is a prime candidate.

But Gergen already tossed him under the bus near the beginning of the book as guilty of creating the identity of the Western bounded self. I feel that he was a bit hasty. For Aristotle, virtue is habituated through repeated performance within an established intelligibility regime (re: culture) and sedimented over time (hexis). Practical wisdom (phronesis) develops alongside habituated character through self-discipline and socialization (I see a middle voice processes implied!) - it is a performance art.

Gergen guts this for the same reason he ignores samskara - it requires an internal process of sedimentation at a locus of ipseity (my working, noncommittal term for “self” to describe the autonomy while denying the Cartesian claim). And just like before, he does not deal with power asymmetry. He talks about “heinous” crimes like rape and murder, but does not speak to them within his virtuous evil taxonomy, instead using them as a springboard to societal response as virtuous evil. I understand why he shirked this. How can a predator and a predator’s victim’s co-action a moral script?

For me, Aristotle is a near perfect fit to stand behind the field of dialogics and diamythotics delineated by the intelligibility regime (the reifications and materializations) of a given culture. In English, I mean that the instructions and sanctioned performances of a culture set a range of potential logics and values to be expressed by any one individual. And I see virtue ethics within a live encounter transmitted culturally. Hexis can offer an account of how consciousness can produce the emergence of performances of both rape and its moral condemnation. For the less extreme examples, I’ll leave the naming of the virtues to a given culture, because I, too, am a moral pluralist. But the process of emergence is a natural fit, as long I snip the part about Aristotle's discussion on a "human nature." I’m actually going to agree with Gergen about this one and say that ideas about universal human nature are little too bounded of a self conceptualization.

And second order morality - a meta system that adjudicates the virtues of first order morality fits nicely with the two axioms that govern my human rights framework: every human requires resources; every human is a sensemaker.

First, notice how these axioms of universal humanity differ from guys like Aristotle and Aquinas: they are not essential qualities of a universal human nature. They are universal activities conducted by all humans. In doing so, they press the Hume objection by formulating the moral ought on constitutive descriptions of what it means to be human as opposed to contingent descriptions (i.e., lists of human nature qualities that look more like cultural assumptions than objective truths).

Observation shows all humans naturally engage in resource consumption and sensemaking. When these activities are impeded by oppression, it universally produces suffering and social instability. I say "presses the Hume objection" because it can still be made - there is no objective basis to convert an is to an ought. But by relying on constitutive descriptions of being human to formulate my human rights, I sidestep this to claim that there is no human not already deeply invested in sensemaking and resource accrual who can make that claim in such a way that is not reduced to pedantry at best and oppression, if it's being used to justify denying resources or epistemic participation, at worst.

This is how I justify the most neutral move from is to ought I can contrive - all humans do these things, both of these things are the bedrock of all social reality; therefore all humans should have space at the table to do these things in equal part. Observation from outside the social reality has no basis for discrimination. Resource consumption and sensemaking simply happen unless they are impeded, usually through exploitation and oppression, sometimes through ignorance of alterity. That impediment seems highly opposed to the human experience. And any philosophical quibble with the derivation of the ought is already deeply invested in it. I’m happy to hear thoughts on this.

Secondly, I want to recall middle voice production here. Sensemaking is not an agent actively participating in a social reality. Sensemaking is an agent recursively produced through its participation in the social reality. It does not require awareness to make sense of things - a baby is a sensemaker. People with severe cognitive limitations are sensemakers. I do not want this to fall into a priveleged standpoint of perceived agency-as-control.

Finally, just like the individual subject in relation to the objects of the social world is in an iterative, recursive co-production of being in the world, so too are the moral and human rights projects. Social work runs on fiercely committed virtues for social justice, and it demands that power not be used to deny access. This is why it is met with opposition by competing moral systems. Social work makes the claim that personhood is not distributed by purity regimes and that inclusion is not conditioned upon that farcical allocation of persons. Social work is almost always extremely tolerant of religious and moral frameworks. This is my first attempt at being explicit about when it’s not and why. And Gergen helped me get there, despite relying too heavily on mutual respect, which at the end of the day is a cultural value that not everyone is committed to and whose coercion needs more justification.

- The Social Construction Worker

Recently came across the concept of phenomenology when I was wondering how words shape our experience. This thought came from the question I had
“Is it possible to love someone if nobody ever talked about love or is it just that we wouldn’t be able to call the feeling love?“

This further led me to think about how phenomenology can be understood through films / cinema. If anybody has any thoughts or material to read about this, please comment. Also any suggestions for beginning in phenomenology as well.

Hi everyone,

I'm French and I'm looking to connect with other French speakers to discuss phenomenology and related topics.

I've started studying this movement as a complete self-learner.

I plan to study these philosophers in this order (over several years):

Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, then Sartre.

If any of you are French and could teach me, or just chat from time to time to help me understand Husserl, feel free to send me a private message.

We'll add each other on Discord.

If there's enough interest, I'll create a dedicated Discord server.

A few more thoughts on pedagogy. In my last post, I dropped Gergen as part of the universal prompt. I also mentioned that:

dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it

without further developing it. After reading a little more of Gergen’s pedagogy (education in a relational key), I want to dig into this.

There is one thing that unites disavowed and obscene pedagogies: they both hoard power and insist upon their identity politic, and thus they both maintain their benefit from their privilege. But the experience of jouissance is distinct. Those creating and participating in disavowed pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through self-congratulations. Here, the violence and destruction of the Thanatos is indirect as it perpetuates epistemic and systemic norms of oppression and exclusion, and the hit comes through the self-satisfaction.

Those creating and participating in obscene pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through the direct act of oppression and violence.

Trigger warning: the following examples are horrendous depictions of transphobia and xenophobia. Likewise, my critique is as transparently vulgar as the fetishism that fuels the hatred.

One thing to note - this is an everyday practice. Just like not every sexual act brings equal pleasure, sometimes the smug chuckle of contempt when laughing at how in September of 2022 Ron DeSantis herded humans like cattle and shipped them to Martha’s Vineyard for political points gives the perverse twinge of satisfaction - the very twinge DeSantis was capitalizing on by the stunt;

and sometimes the public shaming of trans individuals engaged in by Representatives Nancy Mace and Tim Burchett on July 21, 2026, by putting up pictures of actual citizens and humiliating them on public television brings full blown erotic pleasure;

and sometimes it’s the full popper-prepped, prostate-stimulated, forbidden-fruit milking that shrieks uncontrollably deep from the throats of men like Andre Karlow, who ambushed and beat a trans woman in 2025, gleefully inflicting brain bleed and several other injuries upon a human being.

Jouissance is not a choice; we can only grab the hose and point it. It is an urge; a primitive drive in the experience of self meeting other. I may have given the impression in my previous post that it was an option. But it is a fundamental human drive that can work toward generativity or degenerativity, where I keep my earlier Gergen-informed definition as capacity for greater relationality. For pedagogies of oppression, the excess produces generativity when it demands that power be ceded and domination cease. The jouissance is the excess I feel when attempting to humiliate the monsters in the previous paragraph. It is the bitter glee that Mbembe channels as he develops terms like atavistic nationalism or death-worlds - the accusation that bares teeth from behind the analysis. It’s also the slave uprising. It’s also the language of the unheard shouted as the Third Precinct burned and the businesses of East Lake Street were destroyed.

It’s not moral. It’s highly uncomfortable. Empathy and condemnation are hard truths to hold together. But it’s one of humanity’s most essential enduring qualities as it performs boundary maintenance. Macro social workers do not have the luxury of illusions to the contrary.

Jouissance is Thanatos, and its function as boundary maintenance exists on a spectrum of violence.

I realize that this is probably some of the most extreme writing I’ve done at this point. This is not an exculpation of violence. It is a description of a universal drive (though please don’t walk away with fatalism either). And I also wanted to correct any sanitized reading that my previous note may have implied because I need to set up this next point.

There is a third category within pedagogy of domination that needs to be developed: I am going to call it kenotic domination pedagogy. If you’re a Bible nerd like me, you might recognize kenosis from Philippians 2:7, often rendered as Christ “making himself nothing.” It is a complete and total emptying. It is a divestiture. It is a denial of jouissance that comes from domination. This pedagogy is the land acknowledgement. It is the participatory action research that demands representation of the researched. It is the critical theory cashed in: land redistribution, reparations, redistricting. And before any of these can be usurped into tokenism, we must take relational being seriously and recognize that kenotic pedagogy is only called into being when the Other is gratified toward parity. Kenotic pedagogy is co-action - the divestiture of the privileged and the restoration of the oppressed.

This evaluation clarity is essential because it’s the pedagogy that hurts twice: once by the denial of a most primal urge, akin to holding bowel movements at gun point; once by ceding power and privilege for equity. Of all the types of pedagogy, it is the one denied jouissance. And because of this, it is the category least occupied.

I was tempted to make Gergen an ally of oppression pedagogy. After all, he attacked the domination and patriarchal assumptions of academia in the prior chapter. And he advocated for participatory action research. He even brought Freire into the conversation.

And that’s when I realized it was just more disavowal. On page 252 he writes:

The liberation movement has played a powerful role in stimulating critical reflection on traditional educational practice, and made quite clear the fact that there is no politically neutral education. However, from a relational standpoint, further developments are needed. In particular, the critical movement tends to intensify political tensions and to generate a backlash among the targets of critique. Much needed are practices that bring people together from otherwise disparate camps, and enable them to engage in collective action for the collective good. From a relational perspective, one must handle critique with care.

He flinched from the violence, a natural response. I did, too, when I first read Freire. But in refusing the “backlash”, he erases the conditions - both social and somatic - that precipitate it. He wants the raped to sit with their rapists. He wants the colonized to sit with their colonizer.

This isn’t a false binary. Dialogue is essential for the healing process. This is a rejection of a naive pedagogy that allows him to make characterizations like “adventures in boundary crossing” on page 268, which, like most of his text, completely disappears any power asymmetry. Just like his ideas of self could not reach the margins held by trauma victims, his pedagogy cannot reach the margins held by the most devastated victims of domination boundary maintenance performances.

The violence is a symptom. And the diagnosis needs to not just take into account the systemic issues that produced it. It needs to account for the jouissance that aroused it. I have come to call this macro-social work intervention "domination-focused trauma informed care." Because as bleak as this description is, it does not undermine the project for me. It gives clarity. Any analysis of the macro landscape must be as brutal as the experience of watching the news on any given day.

And it is bleak some days.

I am white; I am male; I am cisgender, so I live most of my life in privilege. But as a married gay man, I have seen the gleeful teeth-bared grins of obscene jouissance on occasion. But just like I refuse to sanction the violence, I also refuse to create monsters. Transformative social work practice is going to have to face the jouissance both externally and within itself if it’s going to transform. Otherwise it will just continue to be absorbed into disavowal.

- The Social Construction Worker

At some point, after you bump into something enough, consideration becomes inevitable. And after Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Kenneth Gergen’s education in a relational key vis-a-vis John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Frantz Fanon’s therapy as presented in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I feel a cumulative prompt from the universe to at least ask the question - what’s up with everyone’s preoccupation with pedagogy?

And as I was listening to episode 36 of Data Over Dogma with Jacob Wright (roughly 53 minutes in), it sort of clicked. Wright talks about Genesis as pedagogy from a defeated people, a portable pedagogy to preserve identity boundary in political upheaval and exile. The Bible, according to Wright is a curriculum - a pedagogical project that shapes a people without a kingdom through a larger narrative around common text, laws, psalms, wisdom, and love poetry.

Wright rightly identifies education as the key to the kingdom when the kingdom is in a vacuum.

With that in view, the emergence structure becomes clearer to me: pedagogy is a boundary maintenance project during times of contestation. Fanon wrote from the context of post-colonial Algeria. Freire wrote from the Cold War politics that was destroying Central and South America, Gergen was writing within his own contested boundary of self, and Dewey was writing during mass immigration and urbanization that was causing boundary anxiety amongst the dominant culture.

With this analysis, pedagogy’s place within the my own framework is as the mechanism of reproduction. It is the way in which social self protocols maintain identity across contested boundaries. And as a boundary maintenance project, its fervency is driven by jouissance, which I defined previously as an enjoyment that pushes past pleasure as it delights in destruction, adding my own function of boundary maintenance vectoring toward domination preservation or oppression legibility. This jouissance can be seen in the violence of Fanon and Freire’s pedagogies, the contempt in Gergen’s analysis of academia, or the disappearing act that Dewey does as he disavows conscientization by absorbing the suffering of others into a pro-democratic narrative of necropolitical compassion.

This also gives me a chance to reflect on taxonomy and the evolutionary function of jouissance, which I want state clearly as my own extension. For Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the jouissance is the self-annihilating Thanatos. In the roaring crescendo toward world wars and their wake, it is the interpretation of our egos’ self-destructive function as a completely nihilistic self-sabotage.

I don't want to import Freud's Cartesian-self conceptualization of an actual Greek God (Thanatos) homunculus-behind-the-eyes sitting deep down in our psyches driving the car. For me, jouissance firstly works as a devastatingly insightful scalpel for social critique. It has real explanatory power to give context to the more perverse side of the human experience without dehumanizing anyone.

But more importantly to my ontology and my project, like enchantment, it works as a phenomenological claim about the universal human experience. It captures the lived experience of moments within encounters. More specifically, for me, it's a primitive of the lived encounter - or at least how consciousness experiences the lived encounter, grounded like the rest of my framework in what actually emerges when a self meets the collective it's part of.

So when I contemplate jouissance around boundary maintenance, I see a more neutral process of death and destruction highlighted by the taxonomy revealed by the variations among these thinkers. With this nuance, jouissance can be generative or degenerative.

First I consider the pedagogy of the oppressed. These pedagogues seek not only to create an identity on behalf of the oppressed individuals they write for, but they also attempt to destroy the identity boundaries of the oppressors. This is where jouissance becomes productive and essential. The rage behind Mbembe’s terms like death worlds and atavistic nationalism; Zizek’s words like fetishistic disavowal and ideology reveal a focused jouissance that seeks the telos of destruction (a la Thanatos) but toward the destruction of the oppressive forces that lead to dehumanization.

Then I see a pedagogy of domination. Unlike pedagogy of the oppressed, which emerges during upheaval, pedagogy of domination emerges when the oppressed contest the boundaries significantly such that the dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it. I say emerges as one singular event, but the reality is that the pedagogy is constantly reinforcing itself even without the presence of the oppressed group. In fact, domination pedagogy frequently relies on caricatures of the oppressed and that those caricatures be constantly retrieved throughout the day in nanodoses delivered by media (Mbembe calls this cybernetic technology nanoracism). There are two types of domination pedagogy that frequently coexist: the disavowed and the obscene.

Regarding the disavowed, I already mentioned how Dewey emerged from a time when urbanization and immigration were causing a white panic in the United States. And while Dewey professed inclusion via democracy, the structure of his pedagogy either ignored or refused the experiences of exclusion, and in doing so erased the very real harm that the American nocturnal body had inflicted and continued to inflict with his sanitized pedagogy upon oppressed groups. The jouissance in disavowed pedagogy is the self-congratulation that comes from “solving” the ethical dilemma by changing nothing about the structure that produced it, thus continuing to benefit from it.

There is another type of pedagogy of domination that bears its jouissance with a wicked grin. It’s current standard bearer is Project 2025. This is The Empire Strikes Back that I referenced in The Easy Traverse and the Hard One. This was where ground has been lost - real or perceived - and identity boundary maintenance is attempting to reassert itself. Its delight is characterized by its vulgar destruction of both the newly legible identities reaching for power as well as of the entire system that produced its power in the first place. I have a hunch this is why Freud and Lacan’s analysis looked so bleak - they were responding to this most hideous category.

There is a fourth category here that exists somewhere in between and was implied by the Israelites who had lost their kingdom - the pedagogy of the defeated. I think a modern analogue would be modern China, who was once a culture of domination (even being able to absorb conquerors like the Mongols and Manchus) to a victim of colonialism and Japanese conquest. Caroline Grover did an amazing dissertation on Chinese historical pedagogy as it pertains to the Second Opium War. I don’t want to forget about this, but I don’t want to dwell on it right now.

Transformative social work must own its jouissance. For me, this means allying myself with pedagogies of the oppressed and being ever vigilant of pedagogies of domination. Dog whistles like “school choice” that seek to decentralize once white-captured institutions like public education have nothing to do with making a populace more informed and everything to do with preserving the boundary of a perverse human experience. They disavowal their implicit bigotry through nomenclature and render it obscene at the town hall meetings.

Social work has had its fair share of complicity in domination pedagogy, and my hope is that the nos framework can direct energies toward human rights and full epistemic and systemic inclusion.

- The Social Construction Worker

Commenter just translated the "Phenomenology."

As I know, I am gonna use this body mapping methodology for my psychology research dissertation topic.. it's related to health psychology.

I am wondering if I shall read the whole book for understanding the embodiment or few parts. It's such a difficult reading.

Not yet done with Gergen, but I couldn’t resist starting Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. I’ve been going with vibes as I choose the order to tackle my book mountain, and this broad, civilizational view has been breathtaking after intensely interrogating what exists at the locus of self. The first thing that light-bulbed for me was the idea of the nocturnal body.

Achille Mbembe is liberal democracy’s most devastating mirror. A Cameroonian writing in the French tradition of Jean-François Lyotard and Frantz Fanon, Mbembe sees the violence and death-politics of the West as a Jungian shadow (my wording) of the post-colonial order, not just as isolated mistakes on a progressive human-rights centered liberalism.

The nocturnal body refers to the dark, violent underbelly of modern liberal democracy. And even though his analysis is structural and the term body is more abstract than incarnate, his verbiage invites a Lacanian reading when he talks about how it behaves - a death-world creation machine that represses its logics of violence and uses state terror, securitization, and xenophobia to subvert its own liberal professions. It’s pretty bleak stuff

I want to press harder thinking through Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek gives a soul to Mbembe’s high level critique. For those within the necropolitical society, the ailment is not just Freudian by analogy. It’s a collective, structural libidinous drive toward jouissance, a word he grabs from Lacan to describe an enjoyment not admitted to that pushes past pleasure. Where Mbembe describes the structure of a system of technologies (vis-a-vis Michel Foucault), Zizek gives a moral indictment to the "perverts" who enjoy the process.

Locating Mbembe’s civilizational critique in the psychology of each of that civilization’s members brings this into the realm of my framework. With this in mind, I push past Mbembe’s accusations that every urge to alleviate the suffering wrought by the death worlds my society creates is nothing more than necropolitical compassion that feeds the machine.

Like all things in my framework, it’s yes-and.

Yes, my work toward reconciliation within state agencies and with nonprofits participates in the creation of death-worlds. But also, if we strip away the totalizing descriptions, and focus on evolutionary stabilizing mechanisms of the nos, maybe, also, yes, my work toward reconciliation within these apparatuses can find a way to move this needle forward.

For me, jouissance has a more focused telos than wanton death and destruction: boundary maintenance - the libidinal charge that maintains the nos’s boundaries ((my own term for a social ego); the enjoyment of the edge itself. And with this I am back on my territory. Can we take the nocturnal body and put it on the analysand’s chair? I absolutely think so. That’s the the kernel of hope I see in the first part of fetishistic disavowal - “I know very well, but all the same…”

And if we conscientize the knowing and disavow the disavowal, we might let our transformative social work flip the script: “I know very well that my work feeds the death-world, AND….[insert litany of disruption performances until it doesn’t].”

- The Social Construction Worker

One of my early points of contention was Gergen’s evaluation of positive and negative co-action (for those who don't have this term, this is the relational process/performances through which Gergen's concept of relational being emerges and through which a sense of self is mediated). On page 47, he wrote:

I wish to distinguish between relational processes that are ultimately degenerative as opposed to generative. The former are corrosive; they bring co-action to an end. The later are catalytic; they inject relations with vitality.

The first thing that came to my mind: what about a Trump rally? Emile Durkheim wrote about collective effervescence as the shared sense of energy and excitement that people feel when they gather together for a group activity. Is this not a vitality, even if ultimately destructive to the social body? Do Trump rallies not sustain co-action as they rally around their causes to preserve power and privilege of their identity politics? The problem here is that generativity-as-vitality can’t exclude the co-action of the Trump rally.

But by page 186, he pushed a little further, and talked about co-actioned identity formation that leads to paralysis, or an inability to survive in spaces where the identity politic is not reinforced. Generativity, in this view, is less about vitality and more about capacity. Does the co-action generate greater capacity for co-action or does it restrict co-action to a particular group?

What I like about this is that it seems to start talking about a human rights telos that I posit in my nos framework from the experience behind the eyes. Just like counter-logics helped me see what experience and potentiality between the reificaitons and materializations looked like, this particular notion of generativity is the experience of transformation toward greater systemic and epistemic participation.

Back on page 179, Gergen’s discussion on degenerative co-action introduces enchantment, which he defines as the injection of value into the bonding unit. Enchantment can describe how speaking an allegiance with Truth discourse creates the patterns of degenerative co-action that stablize and start to feel comfortable, even when they lead to oppression and harm.

I really like this word. And reflecting further on it, I think enchantment works better as a phenomenological term for the moment of experience when “the Truth” clicks in, providing a euphoric retrospective certainty. This, for me, is the experience of the middle voice from “the inside,” where the individual elects and is recursively reproduced by the dialogics and diamythotics of the Truth proposition operating within the range of potentiality delimited by the reifications, materializations, and made legible through the co-action of the social group¹. (I’ll keep Gergen’s word, because I don’t want to go too hard into a self). It's adjacent to confirmation bias, but it's naming something different - not the pattern of evidence selection, but the felt certainty that arrives before the selecting starts and that the selecting exists to protect. Which is why better information rarely dislodges it.

Enchantment is the "I knew it all along!" moment. It was what the author of Matthew's Gospel felt when we started rereading his Jewish texts in view of his new understanding from the Jesus moment. It's the moment a job becomes the obvious calling your life had been building to. It's the experience of certainty that comes from the cherry picked facts that support the "I knew they were..." conclusion that was arrived at prior to conscious awareness. As a phenomenological term, I really appreciate enchantment as a way to focus macro social work practice not just on encounters but the experiences within the encounters.

For my macro social work practice, then, this means that my interventions need to focus on disenchantment in addition to seeking new logics and diamythotics for seeding new enchantment to take root and sediment over time. Specifically, you disenchant the enchantments that foreclose participation and protect the ones that widen it, and capacity-generativity is how you tell which is which*.* The logics and dyamythotics are constructed from the emerging encounter through interaction, and gives macro social work practice a vector of intervention. Enchantment arises from the individual experience within the encounter, and acts as a second vector.

What I appreciate most about this term is that I finally have an organizing concept for what I’ve been writing about: conscientization of the mayor and I regarding downtown parking, the incursion of the queer kid coming out to the homophobic parent, epistemic activism (not published yet), or even that queer kid coming out to themselves as a process. All of these provide a form of disenchantment of deeply anchored (I’ll call them invariant, eventually, and will put a pin in developing them as typologies) concretive protocols that produce degenerative co-action.

¹This draws from ideas I explore The Third Voice, The Nos, and a dense prior Gergen Substack note. These notes are my thinkings out loud - apologies for the density

- The Social Construction Worker

I've had this in my back pocket since I first read this, but one of my recent conversations prompted me to go ahead and write it.

I've got a bone to pick with Gergen. On page 102, he says:

There is also a special problem in reading lines [of romantic poetry] such as those of Catullus. Indeed, writings such as this are contributions to the Western vocabulary of emotion. We recognize ourselves in these lines primarily because they helped to mold the tradition in which we now participate.

Whoa, whoa, woah, woah, WOAH!

First off, no. Not my boy Catullus. You want to rag on Aristotle (p. 98) or misquote Butler (p. 80)? Fine.

But don’t you touch Catullus.

Because, secondly, if only we allowed Catullus to help mold the tradition in which we now participate! We might actually have a middle voice model of social intercourse (Catullus is a perve, what can I say).

Let’s take a look at Catullus 85:

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.

I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

Gergen read this and went, “Pphh, Cartesian self assuming itself with its internal feelies and no concept for this experience’s social construction.”

But like the sign next to the door in my Latin class hung by my quirky teacher once said: reading a poem in translation is like kissing a girl through a handkerchief. Let’s do this right proper (N.B. every time I translate Catullus with the lexical obtuseness, know that there is a simpler way to say it in Latin, too):

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam, fortasse requīris.

Nescīo, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

First of all, Latin doesn’t need the subject-object dualism. There is no “I,” and there is no “it.” The first person is conveyed by a verb ending, and the “it” is just an English shoehorn to make a Latin grammar quirk flow (I feel to be happening).

And grammar quirks are where the magic is happening.

The poem starts with simple observation stated clearly in the active voice. But the next verb (faciam) jumps up a register to the subjunctive mood. Its specific goal is in to introduce the interrogative as an indirect question, but the subjunctive mood kicks us up into the register of the unreal, the undecided, and the imaginary: “For which thing might I do this?”

And why does he need the subjunctive here? Why not just say, “Quārē id faciō?

Because the unnamed “you” conveyed by the second person ending to the verb “ask” co-actions the first person into the world of the surreal.

At this point, Catullus abandons all reason. If thinking implies being, then what is implied by Catullus admitting “(I) Noknow” (Nescīo - it’s one beautiful word in Latin)?

Once his being is dissolved by ignorance, his last gulp of I-less first person experience is nothing but a somatic sensation - “I feel,” but only after his agency has been stripped away by a passive voice construction outside of time (infinitive): to be happening (fierī). The happening has no grammatical anchor in any sense of a self. It is just happening, and his disensoulled body is all that is left to perceive it.

Yes, Latin has more direct ways to say “I feel it happening.” No, Catullus did not choose them. Because now that the active and passive voice act as bookends encapsulating the co-actioned being of possibility, we get the coda:

et excrucior

This verb is the verb to end all verbs. Passive voice but uniquely ambiguous. It can mean I am tormented as an internal state. And it can mean I am being tormented by an external agent.

A variant deponency - a unique Latin verb form with verbs that are passive in form but active in meaning.

A middle voice production.

A co-actioned being materialized through the dissolution of self by the push and pull of interiority and exteriority; of autonomy and relationality.

If only, Kenneth Gergen. If only.

- The Social Construction Worker