TEKEL

I.

In his studies on the politics of boredom, Ben Anderson argues that after the era of overpowering monotony brought about by the Fordist division of labour,¹ boredom began to function as a signal of dissatisfaction—the intrusive feeling, creeping under the skin, hinting that, perhaps, one might want more from life.² He draws on Tolstoy, who called boredom the “desire for desires”: a longing, which in this case, could not be satisfied by the monotonous and repetitive organization of life offered by Fordist logic. The feeling of boredom fueled protests among assembly line workers and gave rise to the “artistic critique” expressed within punk art and music. Finally, it was in response to this rising dissatisfaction, claims Anderson, that the development of neoliberalism founded its “promissory legitimacy” by offering unlimited intensity as a response.³

The cure for too little became the condition of too much, and the promise of intensity curdled into something far more disorienting—an overwhelming, simultaneous feeling that life is both too much and too little—a state Anderson believes produces a true “crisis of intensity”. He describes a world in which we consume news about WWIII before breakfast, between a Labubu haul and a TikTok dance: a world in which life is filled with rows of consumer goods that make us cry out in excitement—it comes in all possible colours!—only to leave us paralyzed, sitting for hours in front of a computer screen, unable to choose.

The recent addition of “over-stimi” to internet slang may be the most telling indicator of the mass overstimulation we are experiencing as a society. The language of overstimulation captures the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by the constant acceleration of intensity—and it has, predictably, generated a booming demand for wellness products promising stress relief and peace of mind. But—and here lies the twist Anderson makes so clear—beyond a certain threshold, once the skin of paranoid stress and hyperactivity is shed, what arrives is not peace but a dawning existential dread. When the world goes quiet and we look into ourselves a little too deeply, we find not stillness but a flat, depressive sense of distance—from ourselves, from others, from any animating force that might lead us forward. The modern-day Ouroboros, in its saddest form, is simply an endlessly turning wheel of depression and anxiety, in which it is never entirely clear which state feels preferable.

In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the self is constituted by a fundamental sense of lack which renders desire inherently unfulfillable.⁴ What we desire is never the object itself but a fantasy we project onto it: what we imagine as capable of making us whole. This promise, however, is fictional. Lacan argued that its origins lie in an early and formative misrecognition—as infants encountering their reflection in the mirror for the first time, we perceive our body as unified and complete and on this basis assume the wholeness of our being. From this illusion the ego is born, but it almost immediately collides with the disorganization that is the true nature of the self, and an irresolvable inner conflict takes hold. Lacan argues that we spend our entire lives in pursuit of resolution, fixating our desire on object after object through which we believe—always in vain—that this lost wholeness might finally be restored.⁵

The crisis of intensity operates in much the same way. The Ouroboros locks us in its coils and devours, producing a bipolar logic in the organization of the modern self: in moments of overstimulation, we project our desires onto objects that promise peace; but when peace fails to resolve the underlying sense of lack—and instead confronts us with the existential dread of life’s emptiness—desire migrates and begins once more to seek out objects of intensity.

II.

You have been weighed and found wanting

—blasts onto the walls, as if spilled, the “writing on the wall” becoming literal. The phrase itself reaches back to the Old Testament and the Book of Daniel. There—during a blasphemous feast at Belshazzar’s palace in Babylon—words began appearing on the wall, traced, it seemed, by a “bloodless hand”.⁶ Terrified and unable to decipher their meaning, Belshazzar finally sends for Daniel, who interprets the Aramaic words: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, which in translation turn out to be a prophecy of the fall of Belshazzar’s rule. Tekel, in particular, delivers its verdict plainly: you have been weighed and found wanting, failed under divine measure.

In early English, wanting meant predominantly lacking, but the word has since shifted to carry a sense of desire. The two meanings are not opposites but rather a loop: we desire because we lack, and we lack, therefore we desire. The very grammar of the word becomes a reflection of the Lacanian relationship discussed above—desire produced as a result of the constant and fundamental feeling of lack. Though the story of Belshazzar is a tale of judgement of an unruly king, Tekel understood in the light of Lacanian logic might serve as a vessel for a much further-reaching interpretation—the mythological construction of lack and desire.

III.

For a second, it feels like God is dead when looking at the face of Boros Lőrinc’s steel Holy Mary holding in her hands a newborn from which sticky, black tentacles reach outward. The monstrous has both devoured her and erupts from her, collapsing the line between what she is and what has taken hold of her. The first glance indicates that we just found her unmasked, caught out in the open with the terrifying guts she normally hides before us—but the possibility that something is eating her alive from the inside is just as real. The tentacles spill beyond the frame and pool onto the floor, like a cup of black coffee overturned onto white sheets. The presence of this creature is somewhat Lovecraftian. Kálmán Matolcsy pointed out that tentacles in Lovecraft’s horror always carried an implication of alien threat that transgressed what’s readily available to the senses, while implying a form of cosmic risk—the instantaneous information that the danger exceeds what’s readily visible and relates to the registers of the beyond.⁷

Yet the greatest revelation of the monstrous is not that it can be dangerous or malign—but that we feel drawn to it. Standing next to Weighed Found Wanting, what one feels is not fear but fascination. Looking into the uncanny face of the Holy Mary, enclosed in the embrace of this dark energy, one does not feel pity or dread so much as magnetism. There is no right move to make here. To stand still is to surrender to the neurosis that freezes us in place, incapable of moving forward. To walk further is madness—but no greater a madness than standing still.

… and found wanting.

IV.

In the words of Hungarian poet Mário Nemes Z.: “Borsos Lőrinc are neither one, nor two, neither husband nor wife, neither art nor anti-art. Rather, this name denotes the place where all of these movements and convulsions converge …” Just like the boundaries of the steel Holy Mary’s identity which crumble under the force of the tentacle-being, making her both the mother of the darkness, a nucleus in herself, but also its victim—the boundaries of Borsos Lőrinc’s identity move and reshuffle.

Before I meet them, on their website I read that in the span of their lives, they

“were members of the Evangéliumi Keresztények Gyülekezete (Evangelical Christian Church) in Székesfehérvár between 2003 and 2010, and later of the Omega Gyülekezet (Omega Church) in Budapest. … During this period, the artists largely set aside their visual art practice and focused primarily on building the community: they hosted weekly home-group meetings in their apartment and proselytized in Budapest underpasses. Toward the end of this nearly seven-year period, after distancing themselves from the congregation, they began creating work under a shared name.”⁸

Indeed, a quick scroll through their portfolio reveals how religious references move through the work of Borsos Lőrinc much as they do through the religious art of the past—not so much work of artists inspired by faith but of artists accountable to it, even if critically.

When we talk, Lilla and Jano tell me about a work they once did. In it, they have created their own Ouroboros figure as a form of illustrating their biographical cyclicality—they portray the cycle of their life as a constant turning of the wheel functioning with three main points: drugs, religion, and art. We talk about how the wheel of this process turns by the logic of lack and desire: from the lack created by the previous form of relating to the world, the realization of its insufficiency in providing to all our needs, its inability to make us whole, a new desire is born—ultimately realizing itself not in fulfilment but again through facing the immanent lack to which neither the previous premise nor the next one will ever be able to fully answer.

Here again we see the fundamental logic of Tekel.

V.

What happens if we consider the recent shifts in religious devotion through the figure of Tekel—that constant compression between lack and desire? On one side stands the familiar disenchantment thesis. Though rooted in Protestant thought, and therefore less readily applicable to historically non-Protestant societies, Weber’s account nonetheless traced a direction of secularization that finds broader purchase in the ideological logic of capitalism. For Weber, the rise of rationalist and scientific discourse—necessary to the emergence of capitalist logic—rendered mystical, cosmic, and esoteric meanings incompatible with the narratives of the modern world.⁹ Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), extended this line of thinking:¹⁰ where pre-modern man was open to external and cosmic forces, modern man has become “buffered”—turned inward by the psychologizing impulse.¹¹

Jason Josephson Storm destabilizes this thesis. Examining Weber’s own biography, Storm notes that after advancing the disenchantment thesis, Weber spent several years at the esoteric commune of Monte Verità in Switzerland as well as extensively engaged in occult circles in Vienna—a life hardly consistent with the claim that disenchantment produced an already accomplished historical reality. Instead, Storm proposes that we treat the disenchantment thesis as a regime of truth: not a settled condition, but a myth in continuous construction—and continuous deconstruction, with just as equal force.¹² Storm’s reframing of disenchantment as a regime of truth—perpetually constructed and deconstructed—points to something more intimate.

The desire for the cosmic, the divine, the enchanted persists not because modernity has simply failed to eradicate it nor just because we want to enchant the dark character of modernity, but because it runs much deeper than historical momentum. When countless forms of spiritual engagement have flooded the market through New Age commodities—each promised to close the existential gap society has been feeling as a result of the gradual stepping away from institutional religion—the desire, yet again, has not been fulfilled. We have been left not merely abandoned by God but abandoned twice over—first by his death and then by the intensities offered in the “spiritual buffet”¹³ that were supposed to fill his place. The new forms of belief were supposed to bring salvation closer, to deliver it to Earth, so that we need not yearn for it in the afterlife. Instead, we find ourselves in a drastic predicament—unable to find salvation on Earth yet too distant to locate it in Heaven. What remains is not the silencing of the longing but the recognition of it as force which is constitutive of the subject. Tekel names not so much failure as a structure: to be found wanting speaks not so much of the verdict but the foundational part of the self. The point, then, is not to overcome lack but to stop misrecognizing it. Once the demand for final resolution is suspended, the question of faith changes its character entirely—it becomes not a search for the object that will finally deliver wholeness but an ongoing and necessarily open-ended negotiation with the conditions of one’s own existence.

Jeffrey Kripal, an American scholar of religious studies, describes this feeling as “being lost at sea”—where waves sway us between the meanings of different forms of belief, where we explore and test them without ever reaching a land of utter certainty, where we maintain the conviction that we no longer wish to return to the dry land of hard truths and the dogmas of the Church. Leaving that land, we depart onto the sea—at first perhaps only to swim as far as the wind will carry us, but later staying there, amid the waves that pull us both closer to and further from the different islands of truth.¹⁴ In the end, it seems, belief happens in motion.

VI.

Very similar thought makes its appearance in a compilation of texts, dreams, and snippets of pop-cultural references that Boros Lőrinc have published after leaving their former Pentecostal community:

“You balance on a cord above an abyss, somewhere between the status of believer and non-believer. You stepped onto the bridge when you gave up your former life so that by the time you reach the other side you might be transformed into something new. Everything or nothing. You inch forward under extreme conditions. The wind grows stronger, and you either see into an absurd distance or not even the next centimetre ahead. But will you arrive on the far shore as a ‘knight of faith’, or turn back and leave empty-handed like a ‘tragic hero’**? Is it impossible that you might never want to arrive anywhere at all, but simply live there on the rope, above the abyss? To cling to Sodom like Lot, yet still step away before the bomb is dropped? To watch immense structures collapse and still survive?”¹⁵

Their strategy is not unlike Lacan’s claim that “true atheism” is structurally impossible—that to recognize oneself as an atheist, one must first internalize some form of God in order to be able to refuse it.¹⁶ A version of this problem preoccupied Žižek too: in constructing his Christian Atheism, he argued that only through the acknowledgement of Christ’s sacrifice can a path be cleared toward materialism and earthly solidarity.¹⁷ Perhaps the same dynamic applies not just to disbelief but belief as well. To be entirely certain that one believes, one must first pass through the possibility of God’s absence. In this movement, I believe, we find a reflection of Borsos Lőrinc’s abyss—the condition of never arriving “anywhere at all, but simply living there on the rope”.

There is an almost ready-made trap when looking at Boros Lőrinc’s Weighed Found Wanting, knowing their biographical context. The monstrosity, sticky, black, and overpowering, stemming from the insides of the Holy Mary creates a sense of claustrophobic paranoia. But to accept that these forces simply want to snatch, brainwash, and eat us alive would be a form of repressing the chemistry, the desire we actually feel in their presence. Weighed Found Wanting first reads like a judgement of inadequacy in the eyes of the higher power, but when we put our ear to it, it starts to mutter the fundamental tale of not just lack but desire. The tentacles start to move to the rhythm of the cosmic—through their multiplication, routes start opening and proliferating, paths multiplying and growing out of their frame. In their movement, they start to utter the processual ambiguity of wanting: not as a lack to be filled but as an ever-expanding web that traps, sustains, and feeds us all, the fuel of our lust for life—far beyond the singular self.