The Hegelian Egirl Manifesto

We live in a polarized time. Trust between political factions in the West may be approaching an all-time low; even the most prominent politicians in electoral democratic systems tend to frame the situation as one of existential struggle between fundamentally incompatible visions for the future, cutting through each society internally. The struggle is clearly not limited to governmental power as such, either. Even the most mundane interactions have become politicized, and minute details in behavior, speech, and so on are treated as shibboleths for loyalty-testing in the battlefield of the culture wars, regardless of one’s own cultural background. It seems the one thing that almost everyone can agree on is a desperation for radical change to the status quo. It is this status quo which has given rise to these radically contradictory demands for change in the first place; they are symptoms of the paradigm that birthed them, a paradigm of entitlement to expressing one’s voice politically for little more than the purpose of demanding immediate gratification according to one’s most antisocial impulses. This is the self-interested nihilism of bourgeois democracy.

Instead of refining one’s impulses with the soul turned towards an absolute that may guide their social mediation in a process sustaining desire for what is yet to come, bourgeois democratic ideology is oriented towards eliminating the tension that sustains desire in its reduction to an immediate satiety, increasingly slipping into the demand for an absolute realization of one’s own personal Utopia, with those who disagree treated as disposable—simply in the way of one’s own correct political drive (taken for granted, an emotional “given” beyond question), not even fully human, at least as long as they disagree. This political affliction is almost universal—distinguishing friend from enemy, as in Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political, is the order of the day, a process that follows a predictable cycle. More and more individuals are painted as enemies, until finally the process exceeds a viable limit, and the ones identifying enemies are themselves identified as enemies—a dialectic that can only resolve through an even more repressive return to the status quo, rather than any sort of sublation into a new paradigm. This is the logic of fascism as the objective unconscious truth of liberal democracy itself—the emergence of mass waves of scapegoating at the hysterical limit of democratic immediacy, with the sacrifice of the scapegoat standing in for one’s own failure to more effectively mediate one’s desire socially.

The price of our modern antisocial culture of immediacy is this ping-ponging between liberal and fascist excesses, as two sides of the same coin—a coin fungible only in a fundamentally failed society, where the hard work of social mediation has been utterly abandoned by the trained professionals of which it should be demanded. The dream of most professionals today is simply to defeat or out-compete their enemies, not to discern anything more fundamental than those economic and political oppositions—a discernment which must be accomplished if they are to put themselves to work for its actualization as a concrete universal. Such universalism must be properly speculative if it is not to be domesticated into a form of liberalism subservient to the worst tendencies of the status quo’s cult of immediacy; this is the truly positive dimension of Hegel’s philosophical vision, what presses the dialectic forward beyond a pessimistic hypostatization of the friend/enemy antinomy through which endless excuses for one’s inadequacy can be offered.

We must demand better of both ourselves and others if we are to truly raise ourselves to adequacy in confronting the task at hand, which is to restore a culture of genuine mediated intelligence under conditions where “the humanities” have been reduced to an instrument serving vulgar immediate gratification impulses, impulses which are routed economically through capital and politically through bourgeois democracy. We must be at once untimely in standing against this cult of immediacy, and more timely than its servants ever could be, because the task of a mediated intelligence is to grasp one’s time in thought. It is only by standing against the present that we can present this present to itself in its own dialectical truth, in the immanent becoming which it resists in its refusal to transform the familiar logic of abstract opposition, friend and enemy, to which we have become accustomed.

The “Hegelian egirls” are therefore calling for a new piety to the absolute—to a speculative identity through which an ethic of mediation can take priority over the echo chamber cul-de-sac mentality to which contemporary political discourse increasingly reduces itself. It is the norm today for adults to act like children, desperate for the parentified embrace of stereotyped certainties provided by the narrative that is standard for their respective political culture. Anything that challenges this narrative is typically rejected in an autoimmunitary fury; this is evidence that the primary function of these narratives is only to provide comfort, to trap the irresponsible adult in a perpetual childhood, rather than to achieve a true mediated intelligence through which responsibility for improving the world as it exists is actualized.

On Egirls and Agency

The logic of “the political” we are most familiar with is one of control—control over that which is unruly, a setting right of what is wrong in accordance with the presupposed dominance of a political will. In this text, we will take a dialectical detour through philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis and, of course, politics to arrive finally at a standpoint of “order without control”, passing through the fiction of control animating the legitimizing narratives of contemporary politics across the spectrum from democracy to dictatorship. This standpoint is closer to what Roberto Esposito terms the “impolitical”, a view that reckons with the paradoxes of politics in the fullest sense only to recognize that, ultimately, the essence of politics is not itself political.^[1] There is a more deeply seated social and libidinal register out of which political contradiction grows, indicating that political problems cannot entirely be solved politically. We must have other methods at our disposal, ones with a more dialectical understanding of agency and will.

While a full psychoanalytic engagement with the question of structural differences between men and women will be fleshed out in a later section, suffice it to say that the concept of agency takes on a different valence according to the sexuated conditioning of one’s fantasy. Women typically maintain a greater distance from the cult of agency, the fantasy of the world’s reduction to a will controlling it as an inert object, than men do. The “Hegelian egirl” project seeks to tap into this distance and actualize it as itself a paradoxically political force, calling stereotyped political fixations back to the symptomatic unconscious coordinates that exceed the scope of control by a conscious will. In this first full volume of our manifesto, the reader is presented with “the Hegelian egirl vision according to Anna K. Winters”, while the second volume will follow up with a “Hegelian egirl vision according to Nikki Kirigin”.

We “philosophy egirls” represent a new type of intelligence which calls into question the traditional fealty paid to academic hierarchy, and instead demands para-academic accountability to a socially mediated universality of truth into which any dedicated individual may enter, regardless of their formal or professional training. We seek to end the reduction of philosophy to an academic exercise and open the way to a sublation of rigid distinctions in the division of labor between the manual and the intellectual, recognizing that the manual is already unconsciously intellectual, just as the intellectual is already unconsciously manual (in a form that it projects outside of itself, onto others, the manual workers taking care of the conditions of existence which make intellectual work possible).

Exploitative divisions of labor are not the only dualisms that the Hegelian egirls seek to challenge, however. There are many more, such as: Reason and the passions. Clarity and mystery. Enlightenment and obscurity. Thinking and being. We ask: how much of human experience is conceived as overcorrecting one way, only to better motivate overcorrecting the other way? Situating the problem at one pole so as to find salvation in the other—at the cost of its opposite being reduced to a tedious abstraction to be purged, sacrificed to the glory of the fetishized pole, a fetish made into an idealized shadow of what it was when it remained in the subordinate position, a well of dialectical opportunity yet to be tapped. Once tapped, the well is found to be dry, only for further sources to be promised, revealed one after the other to also be mirages. The cost of abstract opposition—unmediated dualism, with underlying identity rejected out of hand, “dialectics” entering into the picture only as antagonistic contradiction. Bellum omnium contra omnes—a hateful life, broken without hope of repair.

VGR and the Mysterians

In the intellectual wasteland of the analytic philosophy of consciousness, the term mysterian has come to mean, in Daniel Dennett’s words, those who “claim that there is an insurmountable barrier to the brain’s understanding its own organization”.^[2] Much of the discourse in this corner of philosophy is devoted to bickering over whether this barrier exists, with some, like Dennett, taking a more “reductionist” position, aiming to reconstruct rationally the generation of consciousness from its material conditions as a sufficient explanans, and others, the dreaded “mysterians”, throwing up the barrier and complaining that thought can go no further (while a third position insists that we must give up until we can build a better framework for the “hard problem of consciousness”, without being able to actually provide one). Each side jealously guards its “symptom”; whether the capacity to explain the seemingly unexplainable, or the joy found in excluding something provocatively from the realm of explanation, what’s most important is ultimately proving the other side wrong, taking up a position, ensuring that one’s naive other of choice has had their argument debunked, abstractly negated in favor of its opposite pole. Engaging with this sort of thought can hardly proceed otherwise, as indicated here also by the form of our discourse; it remains to be seen, then, if this empty dance of negations can itself be negated.

Our contention is that the barrier thrown up by the mysterians can be approached in an entirely different way. What we’re calling meta-mysterianism proceeds from this claim: that every “barrier to understanding” itself has a shape that can be understood qua barrier. In other words, the “mysterious” excess to what is understood to be “reason” can be raised to the level of reason’s own privileged object; the seemingly irrational, often unconscious byproducts of thought can be recognized to partake in an even more sublime form of reason, a properly speculative rationality refusing to abstractly oppose itself to the “irrational”. From this speculative standpoint, nothing is more self-defeatingly irrational than the claim that something is “irrational” itself, regardless of whether it is done in the name of reason or in the name of the rights of what it is thought to exclude. Irrationality is only the self-fulfilling prophecy of abstract opposition; but qua opposition, it cannot simply be wished away and must be recognized precisely in its irrationality as the bearer of a rationality of which it is not conscious.

In We Are All Dennettians Now, Venkatesh G. Rao engages similarly with Dennett’s critique of mysterianism, in an effort to save the irreducible from Dennett’s “demiurgic” reconstructive reduction, openly counting himself among the mysterians’ ranks.^[3] His argument quickly morphs into a confusing polemic against Husserlian phenomenology for its influence on Dennett, holding it responsible for a kind of empiricist purification of reason too eager to exclude all things mysterious from philosophical consideration. Rao interprets the phenomenological quest for essences as a method of reduction to empirical immediacy, missing the extent to which Husserl’s method is far more rooted in Cartesian rationalism and Kantian transcendental critique than it is in empiricism; this highly symptomatic oversight indicates well a typical underlying distortion we see in the “analytic” tradition, where the “transcendental ego” in Husserl’s sense is not differentiated from the empirical ego. The exercise of phenomenological bracketing, from the standpoint of this empiricist reduction, could only appear as a form of obsessive epistemic hygiene, cleansing the surest empirical regularities of phenomena from contamination with risky speculative leaps. But this is not at all the transcendental form of bracketing Husserl practiced, the entire premise of which is to rescue a philosophical thinking of essence robustly irreducible to empirical regularity; rather than cleansing reason of speculative risk, Husserl sought to save speculative risk with reason, with the prioritization of phenomena serving not to privilege sense-data, but instead to preserve a connection between essence and appearance through which essence remains meaningfully thinkable, not so metaphysically remote that we must resort to the Humean empiricist conventionalism which analytic philosophy constantly flirts with. Phenomenology is not phenomenalism.

That said, there is something fundamental in Rao’s objections which surely must stand: the Husserlian phenomenological passion for maintaining abstract oppositions between the essential and the inessential undermines the full dialectical capacity of thought. It is well known that Husserl struggled to understand Hegel; he was a thinker trapped at the limit of the abstract, unable to follow Hegel in the turn to a concrete philosophical thinking, wherein each pair of opposites abstracted from the real process in which life is lived is understood as still expressing, in a partial manner, an underlying identity in the process itself. The inessential, for Hegel, necessarily returns on a higher level at the point that an abstract essence is realized concretely under its true concept; this is the “meta-mysterian” vision of the Hegelian dialectical standpoint, which neither clings to the mysterious as intrinsically excluded from rational essence nor doubles down on the allegedly “rational” effort to exclude it. What is mysterious for reason is at once and so much more its most rational core; thought must raise itself to it, instead of either demanding it reduce itself to the existing state of thought or, what amounts to the same, rejecting the possibility of thought to grasp it on the assumption that thought must necessarily be reduced eternally to its existing state.

The Dialectics of Meta-Christianity

It’s also for this reason that thinking trapped in abstract essences can never be truly historical; it can only think from the point of an endlessly repeated eternal present. For the empiricist, this present is experienced, a projection of the empirical ego, but for the transcendental philosopher, it’s an a priori structure without immediate transparency to perception. In Kantian terms, the empiricist bets on sensibility while the transcendental philosopher bets on the understanding, with speculative reason conceived by both sides as incapable of true mediation due to its antinomic structure; Hegel’s intervention is to accept the antinomies of pure reason as a historicized process of their own mediation rather than giving up on this mediation because it, being mediation, cannot be achieved immediately. This standpoint is “meta-antinomic” in precisely the sense of “meta-mysterianism”; the speculative is a meta-layer that preserves what it negates, abandoning mere abstract, immediate, or unhistorical negation in favor of a determinate negation process carried out through negotiating the immanent limits of that which it negates.

This move requires a shift in one’s conception of what “the absolute” is or can be. Hostility towards the possibility of founding reason in an absolute irreducible to the play of relativity tends to rely on an often deliberately vulgarizing conception of such an absolute; the absolute is treated as an exception to time, something preserved from any impact of the historical, temporal process. Whether such an absolute is affirmed or negated, investment in such an abstractly exceptional absolute is preserved; the possibility of an altogether different kind of absolute is foreclosed. What is required to recognize the absolute at work within history is a recognition that the true identity of the absolute cannot exclude anything from itself prejudicially, that even or perhaps especially the most “inessential” things are themselves also moments of the absolute. This absolute can have no scapegoats; it is all-loving. Thinking from this absolute is characterized by the consistent return to a particular dialectical thought-pattern: what fails to be absolute is only what tries to reduce the absolute falsely to one of its moments, or, what amounts to the same, to reduce its essence to the abstract negation of any of its moments (scapegoating). This false reduction could be called “idolatry”, following the Biblical tradition; it is wrong not due to any external judgment by an absolute normative standard, but because the very absolute normative standard it itself props up is inherently self-falsifying. The true absolute cannot be “normative”; norms prop themselves up within it only through the absolute process of their speculative self-falsification. Anything opposing one side of speculative identity to another makes itself finite before it; and this finitude, while real in and through the absolute, necessarily limits itself according to its own premises of abstraction from true identity. It is constitutively impossible for this true, historical absolute not to “win”, though how any given individual subject is able to partake in it cannot be determined by a purely passive suspension of how the absolute also works constitutively through their free activity (whether they like it or not—freedom itself being a forced choice). Any critique of the limits of Hegel’s thought must pass through this reality if it is even to raise itself to the same level of conceptual engagement.

The position just sketched out could be described as “meta-Christianity”. While it makes use of a philosophical perspective to step beyond the stricter theological limits of Christian dogma, it is in a certain fundamental sense unthinkable without the perspectival foundation provided by Christian faith. Christianity can be conceived here as the full dialectical realization of the still-abstract prohibition of idolatry introduced by the Jewish tradition; while Judaism negatively prohibits positive idolatry (paganism), Christianity indicates Judaism’s immanent limit at the point of the dialectical reversal of this norm—this could be called a positive salvation from negative idolatry (scapegoating), the inherent reverse side of the logic shared between paganism and its abstract negation in Judaism, with Christ as the figure giving culminating body on the higher, Jewish level to the compulsion to ritual sacrifice that the absolute conceived as abstract normativity alone (Mosaic law) failed to overcome. The fundamental “meta-Christian” principle is that, as is articulated through the Christ narrative, the absolute dialectically prohibits that which stands against it through either a positive or negative reduction of the absolute to itself (ritual worship or sacrifice of a moment conceived as immediately absolute, as standing for the absolute without the mediation of time—rather than being a mere example of these idolatrous principles, Christ is a divine testament to their dialectical impossibility, the culminating spiritual gesture of their abolition with the entry into holy history, henceforth allowing a dialectically mediating incarnation to be distinguished from idolatry, as in the distinction between icons and idols).

The Dialectics of Wokeness

The acrimonious debates over what is called “wokeness” show as well as anything else how the most pressing historical issues philosophy is forced to confront emerge as if from outside of its own history. Bearing a rationality of which it is not conscious, “wokeness” appears forged in the fires of concrete cultural and political struggle over the logic of acceptable behavior beyond the law, in a time of profound crisis of faith in the moral authority of existing social institutions, a crisis of faith in the logic of the law’s enforcement itself, notably the logic of police and policing. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality in the United States, a cultural ferment came of age around the utter rejection of the existing normative order for the transparent injustices it makes possible against those who appear as scapegoats for “the system” as it exists (proving, we may add, its intrinsic unholiness)—principally racial and sexual minorities. That the disproportionate violence experienced by these individuals indicates real social contradictions, real cultural fault lines where discursive mediation has decayed well past the point of a “broken middle” should be beyond doubt—but the controversy that the movement labeled “wokeness” by its critics has generated has resulted in something that cuts to the very core of the possibility of law itself, which is why, for so many, it now appears as a site of contestation over the very continued existence of social order, security, or safety, from both “majoritarian” and “minoritarian” positions. That the signifier “wokeness” itself was chosen, or at least was what stuck, should also be recognized as deeply significant—it has a profoundly Gnostic ring, indicating an awakening in the manner of lifting a veil, of revealing, of “apocalypse” in its literal sense, a passage to the other side of the law, from which law can be perceived in its intrinsic essence as unjustified. The problem of wokeness is the problem of the growing perception of an incommensurability between law and the category of “justice” itself.

This abstract incommensurability can be understood as the near-absolute failure of the absolute itself, the collapse or suspension of any principle of mediation through speculative identity in favor of an endless process of differentiation whereby violence is perpetually re-inscribed in a compulsive, traumatic repetition, with individuals separating and schisming from one another, putting up walls that cannot be crossed, an incredible proliferation of what Walter Benjamin called “law-making violence”; “wokeness” is imagined by its nationalist critics to be against borders, but its abstract negation of national distinction, incapable of confronting its concrete conditions with a dialectical transformation, leads instead to an infinite multiplication of borders, an anarchic, “bad infinity” in the Hegelian sense, a collapse of the mediating connection between the finite and the infinite, with the principle of immediacy ruling to its fullest extent, in an a priori refusal of mediation, such that the fundamental agency of symbolic law is reduced to each individual against each other individual, which, in Lacanian terms, actually takes us outside of the symbolic order itself, the order of genuine alterity. “Wokeness” engenders a hall of mirrors of purely imaginary others, each a reflection or projection of an immediate sameness, a radical individualized identitarianism returning from the repressed of absolute identity itself. Absolute difference reduces all relativity to a play of identities; absolute identity raises relativity to the genuine discovery of difference.

In this respect, we can also understand the typical right-wing “anti-wokeness” as a symptomatic expression of the same historical situation and principle as “wokeness” itself; both cling abstractly to different forms of particularist identitarianism, having lost sight of any actuality for universal mediation.

Perhaps, despite (or even because of) the profound social disorder we witness today being exacerbated in the name of the incommensurability assumption, there is an irreducible and powerful truth to this thesis of radical incommensurability between law and justice. Perhaps what is required, then, for a “justice” adequate to these conditions, is something more like a meta-law, according to the dialectical logic of the “meta-layer” developed in the previous sections. But we will return to this at the end of the text.

In What is Wokeness?, Émilie Carrière has provided us with a helpful encapsulation of the inner phenomenological structure of the “woke” phenomenon, from the “woke” standpoint itself, radically opposing it to the dialectical position, in a creative reading of Kant that develops a new fundamental category she calls “sensitive reason” (identified with the essence of wokeness).^[4] It seems, however, there is a profound, symptomatic issue in her presentation, on which the acceptance or rejection of such “sensitive reason” stands or fails: is “cancel culture”, as a manifestation of “woke”, sensitive reason, really “divine violence”? Carrière, invoking Walter Benjamin, claims that it is. In a reading of the Critique of Violence, we will argue that, in fact, this could not be further from the truth.

Divine Violence—By or Against God?—at the Limit of Dialectics

We will begin by profiling some aporias within Benjamin’s text itself. Contrary to what Benjamin seems to think, we are not convinced that God can be abstractly opposed in a fully exclusionary relation to nature or “fate”, because if this were so, then the prohibition of such fate would become the perverse principle of fate itself. This antinomical conception of God constitutively undermines its own principle of messianic realization, by hysterically demanding, on a level still unconscious to itself, precisely the same principle of fate which it hysterically prohibits. As such, the logic of Benjamin’s distinction between properly divine, “law-destroying” violence, with its characteristic messianic ring, and merely mythic, “law-making” violence simply cannot hold as it is presented; there is no mediating mechanism in Benjamin’s text which prevents the simple dialectical passage between destruction and creation at the limit of their identity. This is not to say there is no difference between divine violence and mythic violence, but that the true principle differentiating the divine and the mythic, within violence and without, must be conceived dialectically in a mediating radicalization of Benjamin’s own opposition.

A further question, then, must be asked: can violence ever be mediating? The answer, we will insist, is yes, but only if it depends not simply on immediate reference to itself as violence, but also on reference to the logic of its own dialectical passage between violence qua “exterior” force and structure qua “interior” cause, that is, only if the principle of its violence has the immanent capacity to suspend the cycle of law-making violence itself, not simply by commanding a fearful obedience to the preservation of law (Benjamin’s category of “law-preserving violence”), but by introducing a true meta-layer: a principle of absolute identity arresting the cancerous proliferation of abstract differentiations by binding force with itself, discovering its limit, with the interiority of exteriority, binding actuality’s self-annihilation with the real becoming of actuality recognized as absolute-in-time. This principle, of course, is that of God within history (though Simone Weil called it beauty), maintaining, according to the premises of meta-Christianity, a double resistance to both idolatry and scapegoating, each the positive and negative mirrors of the other; thus, divine violence is not law-destroying, but rather law-sublating, grappling with the self-falsifying destiny of law temporally without imagining, legalistically, that it could be destroyed in an instant (at least without thereby making a new law).

We could imagine this divine violence as the reverse side of law-preserving violence—while Benjamin tends to contrast the mythic as law-making and the divine as law-destroying, law-preserving violence sticks out in the text as a kind of failed instance of mediation. What if the truest form of divine violence draws out law’s destruction through a process of self-falsifying before an absolute which is not the mythic guarantor of law’s creation in opposition to what it suppresses, but the divine appeal to its necessary insufficiency as reductive and abstract in comparison with the speculative identity of a truly concrete and historical divine absolute?

It is not that we live under the yoke of an evil law which must be lifted by us as if from outside of itself (rather than immanently self-falsified); it is that the organizing fantasy of lifting the yoke of the law on command, as a leap out of history, is the principle of law itself, whether as fear or as promise, just as Mosaic law in Jewish religion is structurally founded on the promise of the messiah realizing the law beyond itself, an expectation hysterically organized to prevent itself ever being realized, which is equally to say that the true messianic realization is there is nothing left to realize—that the absolute is already realizing itself, but are we? Law sustains itself through oppositions, and as such, abstract opposition to the law can only ever re-state law’s underlying logic; Carl Schmitt provided us a rendition of this principle with his theory of the sovereign determining the law as necessarily exceptional with respect to the order of the law itself.^[5] This is not our true reality, but the self-sustaining fantasy of the legal order by means of which it pretends at sufficiency to the absolute.

It is this false sufficiency that manifests positively as idolatry and negatively as scapegoating. Divine violence, against Benjamin, therefore, cannot be sovereign, for the sovereign is trapped in the snares of law-making relativity, idolizing some and scapegoating others; it can only be absolute, all-loving, meta-Christian, and irreducible to the political order itself, which Schmitt characterizes as founded on the opposition of “friend” and “enemy”, or in other words, idol and scapegoat. It must be “in the political more than the political”, to paraphrase Lacan, or even “impolitical” in Roberto Esposito’s sense. This is where thinking from speculative identity does require recognizing the incommensurability of law and justice, not simply so as to imagine some future commensurable order of law, but to seek the solution outside of our present conception of law itself—a present conception that reduces it to a form of control in the service of some immediacy.

This is why Carrière’s use of the concept of divine violence to describe the methods of “cancel culture” is so perverse. Such activities cannot be compared to violence by God, but, in their current disorganized form, are closer to violence against God, to a logic of scapegoating that parallels the scandal of Christ’s crucifixion, a parallel that cancel culture’s often ignominious targets have discovered they can use to their own advantage as a kind of negative idolatry, further demonstrating the bankruptcy of the practices associated with this label. Another way to put this is that cancel culture makes its own enemies into its true God; it lacks faith in its own capacity to sublate existing social contradictions and so rebels in a regressive manner that implicitly recognizes its failure from the beginning, conceding fully the true possibility of a more just resolution to enjoying the repetition compulsion of its own current powerlessness, expressed in the disorganized, anarchic nature of its wrath, which is not to be confused with any renunciation of the impulse to control. Law-making violence has simply been individualized—we are now all as if mythic gods, but at what cost?

Second-Naturalism in the Impersonal Field of Woke Sensitive Reason

Before arriving at the question of divine violence, Walter Benjamin begins the main argument of his Critique of Violence by calling into question the premises of natural law theory, and opposing his critical standpoint to the naturalizing view that “perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than a man sees in his ‘right’ to move his body in the direction of a desired goal”.^[6] This can also be conceived as the standpoint of instrumental reason as critiqued by Adorno & Horkheimer,^[7] which Carrière attempts to oppose to sensitive reason in “What is Wokeness?”.^[8] But how different, really, are these two conceptions of reason? We will argue that both instrumental and sensitive reason are two forms of ultimately abstract, antinomic reason, each of which fails to reach true speculative reason, and that they can be differentiated on this premise: while instrumental reason operates by reference to nature proper, or “first nature”, sensitive reason operates by reference to what Hegel calls second nature, which manifests in Carrière’s text under the name of “the impersonal field of sensibility”. This second nature could also be conceived as a law-making anti-nature; it is nature’s shadow or double, conceived by Carrière, in Heideggerian fashion, to reside in the reflex of anxiety. For both types of reason, instrumental and sensitive, call upon symbolic violence as a means in the service of an immediacy which is ultimately self-naturalizing, whether its valence is fundamentally positive or negative, secure or anxious.

Hegel refers to second nature as “the world of spirit”, which he situates as constituted by the freely willed self-activity of rational thought (also notably that which separates the human from the animal, a difference which can even be re-inscribed within the human itself). For Carrière, meanwhile, the “shared ethical field” she conceptualizes as underlying the activity of sensitive reason operates essentially as the “spirit of wokeness”; but this spirit is constituted not according to the immanently self-historicizing movement of speculative identity. It is constituted, rather, according to a principle of differentiating “universality” that is “absolutely anarchic, and all that it wills also is without delay, so that all that is, is its will”.^[9] Paradoxically, this absolutely simultaneous, atemporal “anarchy” of the will is actually entirely the reduction of the will to the abstractly mastering abstract negation of mastery—“no order can issue from it or be derived from it or imposed over it”. It keeps itself trapped at the moment of the pure emptiness of sensuous-certainty from which Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit: “It is pure thisness: as universality is always here, there is no there for universality, as it is everywhere and finds nothing outside of itself.”^[10] It is a pure “impersonal” closure within the individual self from which the individual self is denied to itself; it abstractly and compulsively disavows any immanent logic of spiritually self-undermining transformation, at every moment refusing to work through its objective limits before absolute identity, in favor of a “pure production without identity”.^[11]

In this, Carrière’s sensitive reason shares with Hegel’s second nature the quality of being “a work”; but it is a work from which nothing follows, only ever repeating itself in the closure of its eternal same-difference. It is the true speculative identity of reason in exteriority, which is also how Hegel defines “nature” proper. It is the minimal moment of differentiation from nature in the abstract constitution of sensibility; the “sensitive” in sensitive reason is nothing but an immediate affective resistance to absolute identity, ultimately reducible to the function of anxiety. It is thought refusing to think itself, retreating into the register of the purely affective will. It is the collapse of mediating reason into a kind of Gnostic transcendental empiricism, an abstract deduction of the empirical ego as one’s internal refuge from the transcendental itself, not unlike the immediatist reduction previously associated with analytic philosophy in the above section “VGR and the Mysterians”. And it shares a further similarity with the “heterophenomenological” empiricism of Dennett critiqued by Rao:^[12] it continually demarcates essential and inessential, or inside and outside, in its ontological privileging of difference, situating it in a reactionary tradition of thought that begins with Nietzsche and Heidegger. “Heterophenomenology” wouldn’t be a bad description of Carrière’s method; while Dennett’s Darwinian naturalist philosophy thinks empiricism from first nature, Carrière thinks it from second nature. Perhaps Rao’s conception of Dennett’s method as “demiurge phenomenology” is also an apt description of Carrière’s “woke” standpoint, with its penchant for self-contained law-making violence.

Despite the creativity of her reading of Kant, Carrière’s immanent critique of his thought thus ultimately reduces itself to a sub-Kantian empiricism, caught within the transcendental in and through its insistent but merely abstract refusal of transcendental subjective identity. It is parasitic on subjectivity, denouncing it only by assuming it in its negation, presented by fiat as an affirmation, but still constantly at pains to negatively disambiguate itself. It ultimately projects itself inside an inverted world, an anxious negative of the pagan submission to fate, “divine” only in its transposition of fate to the level of the abstractly denaturalizing agency of the mythical gods who are themselves the keepers of nature’s hierarchy. The “woke” impulse projects this natural hierarchy in reverse; hierarchy can only ever appear to it as “universalist” in Carrière’s sense—“universal” only in the name of authoritarian particulars—and so unjust, leading to its abstract reversal where the last are made first in the manner of the wretched made gods. It is a philosophy of mythical tragedy and strife; the scapegoats can only ever remain scapegoats, and enjoying the perversely disavowed moral privileges derived from their scapegoated position, they make themselves into idols, thus abstractly reversing the ethical picture which scapegoated them so as to regenerate it in its own mimetic image through the agency of “cancel culture”: the “anti-woke” then embrace their own abject status as scapegoat in a similar negative idolatry (quoth Nina Power: “[T]hey can’t kill you if you’re not afraid to die!”^[13]).

Everyone involved gets off on being targeted and hated, in the sure belief that because they suffer this fate at the hands of those whom they themselves target and hate, it must prove their perverse morals (often disavowed to the point of becoming aggressively contradictory sub-morals) ultimately right. But both sides—left-wing radical-liberal “wokeism” and right-wing reactionary “anti-wokeism”—thus reveal themselves as essentially the same, essentially unholy, and essentially invested, symptomatically, in refusing any rational or divine mediation under the aegis of a concept of absolute identity; those of us who think from such a position can only pray for their souls and contribute to the process of their own immanent self-falsification, the logically necessary spiritually suicidal tragedy following from the abstract faux righteousness of these doubly abject scapegoat-idols.

Second-Naturalism in the Moral History of Dasein’s Communist Logos

If Carrièrian “wokeness” is trapped within the immediatist reduction to sensibility, there is, however, an “anti-woke” tendency which can at least overcome this vulgarity with a full historical-transcendental metaphysics of the understanding, sadistic as it may nevertheless necessarily be; the “MAGA communism” of Infrared’s Haz Al-Din. Al-Din ultimately overcomes an antinomic conception of dialectics, and at least stands for the rationally moral moment within the abstraction of Kantian practical reason, while Carrière’s sensitive reason stands for the pathological moment in her critique of Kant. This universe of Kantian abstraction shared between both of these “woke” and “anti-woke” philosophical tendencies follows from Kant’s abandonment of the speculative due to the antinomies of pure reason, leading him to construct the specter of a noumenal “outside” inimical to the possibility of dialectical transformation—an “outside” revived as fundamental to the Kantian accelerationism of Nick Land, an important shared influence between both Carrière and Al-Din (although Al-Din, unlike Carrière, explicitly singles out this concept for critique). Ultimately, Land’s neoreactionary compatriot Curtis Yarvin (otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug) will emerge as the true polemical target of this text.

In Marxism is Not Woke, Al-Din fully lays his cards on the table.^[14] An at once subtle and combative text with a palpable Hegelian dialectical perspective, the oppositional structure intrinsic to Al-Din’s Marxist standpoint nevertheless confirms on several counts Kojin Karatani’s thesis of the fundamentally Kantian character of Marx’s thought.^[15] That is not to say that this Kantianism is not also filtered through a very welcome historical materialist perspective with a great debt to Hegel’s speculative philosophy. While he expressly opposes a vulgar sort of “Kantian Marxism”, which he associates with György Lukács in a principled manner in this text, his attempt to develop a new form of Heideggerian Marxist synthesis ultimately leads him back to a kind of transcendental materialism that cannot overcome the Kantian antinomic reduction of thought to practical reason. This is further confirmed by Al-Din’s reliance on the concept of “phronesis” in his theory of the philosophical relevance of the historical experience of Marxism-Leninism.^[16] Furthermore, while he critiques various forms of the antinomic “outside” from philosophical history, including Spinoza’s substance and Kant’s thing-in-itself, his defense of Dugin’s notion of Chaos still effectively leaves him trapped within the Kantian antinomic universe. This principle of Chaos, reminiscent of Schelling’s transcendental theory of the Urgrund as an irrational principle at the core of his still-antinomic “speculative” ontology, effectively keeps reason trapped in abstract undialectical opposition with itself in the name of a “materialism” attempting to found thought in a naturalistic principle conceived as preceding thought itself (though still in an utterly abstract manner).

In this respect, Al-Din’s reading of Dugin is reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s claim that Schelling was the original “dialectical materialist”;^[17] what we are offered here is a strange sort of dualistic moral-historical Naturphilosophie mapped onto the dynamics of class struggle, which claims to oppose itself to Gnosticism, associated critically with “wokeness”, but nevertheless continues to recapitulate quite a few of its key tropes. Dugin himself is explicit about his rather heavy Gnostic influence (visible especially in his engagement with sophiology, an Orthodox Christian philosophical tendency, which Al-Din also explicitly supports, reclaiming a concept of “Sophia” that was introduced specifically within the Gnostic tradition), and Heidegger, too, Al-Din’s other prime influence outside of the Marxist tradition, has quite a few affinities with Gnosticism; Eric Voegelin’s critique of Gnosticism, so influential on James Lindsay’s claims about the Gnostic nature of “wokeness” which Al-Din makes a point to respond to in this text, was largely conceived specifically as a critical response to Heidegger’s perceived Gnostic tendencies (in particular the doctrine of the Ereignis or Event, also adopted explicitly by Al-Din, critiqued for its apocalyptic orientation towards “immanentizing the eschaton” and its political association with Nazism).

As such, it is crucial to take a step back from the vulgar, abstract identification of “wokeness” with any form of what can be construed as Gnosticism or influence from the Gnostic tradition. “Wokeness” should be limited to forms of Gnosticism which are reductive to the faculty of sensibility, while the transcendental materialist phenomenology adopted in Al-Din’s reading of Heidegger instead privileges the faculty of the understanding in the Kantian sense, developed in the context of practical reason—in this way, Al-Din is able to critique the reactive “woke” pretension to immediacy, which could also be conceived in the Heideggerian terms of “the metaphysics of presence.” There is a strong case, as well, for a link between this immediatist metaphysics of presence and the phenomenon that Marx critiqued under the name of “commodity fetishism” (see also Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism^[18]). It is for this reason that any “woke” standpoint will always remain sub-Marxist in its critique of the immanent metaphysics of capital, whereas Al-Din’s Marxism is actually capable of a) recognizing the compulsive reduction to immediacy as the problem and b) calling for, in principle, a mediating solution, even if his thought prohibits itself from thinking past the specter of Chaos and its associated abstract dualisms to the underlying speculative identity through which true mediation is possible.

Al-Din, and arguably Karl Marx himself, therefore remains at the limit of Kant and the extension of his essentially dualistic project of transcendental philosophy in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, failing to truly integrate the radical nature of Hegel’s immanent critique of dualistic, abstract or transcendental thinking, carried out thoroughly in the dialectical self-falsification of transcendental thinking in The Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating in Absolute Knowing as the speculative identity of thinking and being.^[19] One does not need to accept the full premises of Hegel’s absolute idealism to recognize this profound truth, which follows from his critique of Schelling: there is something in logic, or the dialectical patterns emerging immanently through the concrete logos of speculative identity, that is structurally irreducible to nature, which is merely the same logos held in antinomic exteriority from itself, dehistoricized and eternal, repeating itself without true dialectical becoming or transformation. “Chaos” in Dugin’s sense is fundamentally an undialectical principle; Al-Din, to his credit, does recognize this insofar as he blames Dugin’s metaphysics of Chaos for the “pluralistic” (i.e., insufficiently universal) tendencies of his thought, which Al-Din compares to Spinoza. (Perhaps Deleuze would make for an even better comparison here.) At this point, Al-Din attempts to move beyond Dugin dialectically with a somewhat under-developed affirmation of Marxist humanism, a move that is deeply respectable but ultimately unconvincing. “Humanism” is not enough to achieve true speculative identity; here we simply return to the Kantian problem of the abstract identity of the transcendental subject as the supposed true human universal. In this respect, it seems that Al-Din is still too Lukácsian, unable to entertain a concept of speculative identity beyond the abstract opposition between human and nature.

Heideggerian ontology, founded on the principle of ontological difference, simply will not cut it; this just digs the antinomy deeper, appealing to a tautologically abstract and dogmatic principle of Being endlessly separated from the underlying dialectical identity of subject and object that Al-Din claims to endorse. Ultimately, in his text we cannot escape the premises of abstractly normative or moral history; and this is borne out in Al-Din’s incapacity to think beyond the limits of legal authority itself, leading to an ultimately undialectical and abstract opposition to “wokeness” that at the limit does threaten to approach reactionary politics. The real structural incommensurability between law and justice cannot be evaded with appeals to the dualism of class struggle, which ironically leads only to a liberal privileging of political immediacy in the name of the proletariat, a structurally self-defeating commodity-fetishistic view that at best is only capable of achieving a more mediated state administration of capital itself.

Let us return, however, to the issue of Gnosticism. The concept “Gnosticism” itself is famously tortured and difficult to define; this is, perhaps, due to the fact that any theory of it can never simply be a matter of empirical or historical scholarship, but must itself be a metaphysical critique capable of making sense of the underlying structure of Gnostic thinking and its patterns of re-emergence outside of the field of historical Gnosticism proper. Gnosticism can first be approached by defining gnosis as its fundamental category, according to terms offered by the contemporary self-identified Gnostic thinker François Laruelle (whose daughter Marlène also happens to be a Dugin scholar); thinking from the One as radically immanent.^[20] While in principle the Hegelian approach of thinking from speculative identity also falls under this definition of gnosis, it is crucial here to distinguish between gnosis on the one hand, as a true speculative exercise of thought required as the baseline condition for even entering into these metaphysical debates, and Gnosticism on the other, which we intend to critique here as a kind of anti-social overdose of gnosis, which results in privileging the abstract antinomic oppositions that emerge in the course of thinking from an immanent notion of identity (or “the One”) without the capacity to work towards sublating these oppositions rationally on a meta-layer, as outlined in previous sections following the model of “meta-mysterianism”.

While the privileged locus of the gnosis at work in the respective discourses of Émilie Carrière and Haz Al-Din differs respectively between that of sensibility, on the one hand, and that of the understanding, on the other, both thinkers can be understood as taking fundamentally Gnostic perspectives that also amount in each case to a kind of “second-naturalism” which is ultimately in the service of a transcendentally processed immediacy in the last instance. As such, neither one offers a politics which is capable of breaking fully from the capitalist premises of commodity fetishism; Carrière’s woke standpoint offers only an abstractly mythical individualist gnosis of (disavowed) imaginary identity and compulsive hysterical differentiation, tethered to the “second nature” of the “impersonal field of sensibility”, while Al-Din’s Marxist humanism, rooted in a communist transcendental morality following from the symbolic logos of a culture’s collective Dasein, is also trapped within its own “second nature” in the guise of a half-hearted humanistic-naturalistic principle which can only treat the human as an internally differentiated transcendental alienation of nature from itself, deeply reminiscent in this respect of Jean-Paul Sartre’s humanistic revision of Heidegger.^[21]

Neither standpoint is truly capable of thinking dialectically due to being in thrall to this Gnostic “second-naturalism”; if we truly want to break from this abstract paradigm, however, we have to understand its deepest underlying structure. To do this, we will proceed to an analysis of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, as the contemporary heir to the political theory of Carl Schmitt;^[22] we will argue that the Schmittian perspective, which Yarvin effectively radicalizes to its limit, functionally forms the entire Gnostic horizon of modern politics, as an underlying libidinal identity between the economically indirect fetishistic immediacy of liberal democracy (i.e., all are submitted to the market economy) and the politically direct fetishistic immediacy of the impulse to ritual violence in the fascist state of exception (i.e., there is one that is not submitted to the market economy: the extra-legal sovereign). These are idolatry and scapegoating, respectively, exactly the fundamental abstract antimony opposed by our perspective of dialectical meta-Christianity. Ultimately, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan will be upheld as fundamentally debunking the perverse fantasy of the Schmittian political horizon. The essence of politics is not itself political; it is libidinal, as libido is the material manifestation of real abstract oppositions conceived from the dialectical standpoint of speculative identity.

Second-Naturalism in Fnargl’s Kingdom, the Thousand-Year Fnarg

Yarvin, too, is a Gnostic. He talks about the “red pill” he dispenses, his term for his reactionary gnosis, waking one up from the alleged Orwellian mind-control of the Puritan theocratic structure he clocks as underlying the viewpoint-mill of American academia, which he refers to as the Cathedral^[23] (a point which, ultimately, also situates him in a normatively inverted position of descriptive agreement with Kojin Karatani, the Kantian Marxist, who defends the contemporary left-wing impulse as a true structural echo of the foundations of Christianity in the moral superego reflex of “universal religion”^[24]). He is not a “woke” Gnostic, however, because he does not privilege sensibility—to Yarvin’s mind, this is the very definition of the left, with its structural preference for anarchy, disorder, chaos (here we are reminded of Dugin’s ontological principle of Chaos—his “authoritarianism” relies precisely on this metaphysical assumption, just as Land’s relies on his assumption of the ontological principle of the “outside”), etc., a set of issues delineated previously in this text as the phenomenon of “wokeness”. The more an immediate gnosis of sensibility is privileged, the more law-making violence simply multiplies unabated, which Yarvin understands well; he is able to identify the superficially puzzling Nietzschean structure of the woke left as founded fundamentally in a will to power, because the more anarchy there is, the more power there is to go around to more people (these are the people engaged in the cultural “pact” of leftism). Never mind that this power can only be maintained through a compulsive idolatrous reduction of thought to identitarian immediacy and commodity fetishism, it gives the people what they want!

Ultimately, for this reason, Nietzsche’s thought is merely situated at the anti-democratic limit of democracy itself, because democracy structurally is simply the vulgar “vitalist” principle of abstractly reducing truth to the immediate felt sense of life, the affective will, and differentiating this sense from anything felt to alienate it from itself (what Lacan would call the perverse disavowal of symbolic castration). However, as Carl Schmitt also understood,^[25] it is this very democratic principle which of itself culminates in the fascistic principle of absolute, extra-legal sovereignty, as soon as the “general will” decides that it requires a daddy—a real-life instantiation of the Freudian primal father, as the true apotheosis of perverse disavowal—to restore order over the cancerously metastasized proliferation of law-making violences. This is why Yarvin, despite himself, is still ultimately a democrat—the “totalitarian” principle of absolute sovereignty, which he endorses in a qualified reactionary form, is fundamentally itself the essence of liberal democracy in crisis. Hence, Yarvin conceives of reactionaries as “misfits” who don’t actually want power—in a sense, the sovereign the reactionaries want is really just the ultimate leftist, a minimal distillation of the principle of chaos, who as a consequence achieves maximal order, the fundamentally right-wing reactionary principle in Yarvin’s model. In a perversely cloying little thought experiment, Yarvin imagines this ultimate-leftist primal father (a model for how he actually does want the sovereign to behave) as an alien named Fnargl who possesses magical powers.^[26] Fnargl, therefore, unites in himself both “woke” and communist varieties of Gnosticism, because his sovereignty is in the service of his own immediacy, but the collective principle underlying the justification of his sovereignty is derived from the understanding (literally the scapegoat of reactionaries—the “woke communist”—reversed into the purest idol). Speculative reason, obviously, never truly enters into the picture.

In The Magic of Symmetric Sovereignty, Yarvin elaborates the tale of Fnargl as the ideal model of what he calls “symmetric sovereignty”.^[27] It’s “symmetric”, according to Yarvin, because, in his words: “I define sovereignty as an independently secured, or in other words primary, property right. This is in contrast to a dependently secured, or secondary, property right. The symmetric theory of sovereignty proposes that the same principle applies to both—the extent of the property right is defined by the actual powers secured.”^[28]

Rights defined by the actual powers secured—truly the apotheosis of the Nietzschean-leftist will to power! Fnargl thus plays the role of the Schmittian fascistic sovereign exception for the 21st century. Schmitt, as previously established in the section “Divine Violence—By or Against God?—at the Limit of Dialectics”, conceives of the sovereign as at once absolutely law-making and an absolute exception to the law itself, excluded from its limiting (or, as Lacan would say, castrating) structure. How does Moldbug end up here? Well, if you read his Gentle Introduction, you realize that he falls into the exact same dualistic trap that Kant, Husserl, and other philosophers bearing the abstract spirit of Gnosticism do, specifically in his theory of truth.^[29] Moldbug conceives of truth literally as pure abstraction: some things are absolutely untrue, and other things are absolutely true. It’s this dualistic perspective that is at the core of any reactionary thought-pattern; scratch a reactionary, and you’ll find a dualist. Unfortunately for them, the Gnostic separation such reactionaries imagine separates truth and lies is purely a projection of their own insecure, antinomic libidinal fantasy (rather, true concreteness can only follow from absolute identity). Here, Jacques Lacan provides the key.

The Antinomies of Sexuation at the Threshold of the Egirl Apocalypse

In fact, we already snuck in the Lacanian formula that we’ll be applying here in the previous section, referring to the antinomic identity of liberal democracy on the one hand and the fascist state of exception on the other. Here we have the coincidence of two contradictory logical propositions, one defining an absolute inclusion and the other defining an absolute exception: “all are submitted to the market economy” on the one hand, and “there is one that is not submitted to the market economy: the extra-legal sovereign” on the other. This is the structure of Lacan’s antinomy of phallic sexuation, the logical form that provides underlying structural coordinates for the limits of male sexual fantasy.^[30] It should be no surprise that politics and law, as we currently understand them, are by their nature structurally phallic—the “phallus” in Lacan’s theory is itself not directly the organ of the penis but the “signifier of desire”, the essential symbol of power as what underlies political and legal order. Thankfully, we are not all men, although this curious fact—the fact of the structural reality of sexual difference—does seem to slip people’s minds from time to time (or, rather, there is quite a lot invested in deliberately forgetting it, in the Nietzschean manner). The question, then, is whether the particular political predicament we face in this historical moment—the compulsive cultural tendency to reduce social issues to political issues, leading to the social space taking on an increasingly fascistic character, as the fascist state of exception is inherently the immanent limit to politics itself—can be meaningfully addressed by taking seriously the question of a dialectics of sexual difference. We believe that it can be. To do this, we must develop an understanding of the feminine antinomy of sexual difference, or, in other words, the nature of “girl logic”.

Consider, for a moment, that this antinomy was itself proposed and theorized initially by a man (Jacques Lacan). Obviously, it is only abstractly opposed to the phallic antinomy, in a kind of meta-antinomic dialectic still fundamentally defined by reference to the dominance of the phallic function over the libidinal space itself. The formal logic of “submission” Lacan employs is specifically a matter of submission to the phallus; the properly phallic submission occurs through the antinomy of absolute inclusion and absolute exception, roughly a symptomatic meta-fetish that in its vulgar fetishistic reduction becomes the anti-Christian logical dualism of idolatry and scapegoating (which, in Gnosticism, become an antinomic dialectic). However, there is a non-phallic form of submission to the phallus, which Lacan describes as feminine. In this sense, the feminine is more dialectical than the phallic itself because of its capacity to pass through the phallic space non-phallically; the feminine stands for the Other that prevents reduction to the Same, for the historical continuation and transformation that resists the phallic logic of eternal return. From a purely abstract phallic perspective, which reactively resists its own dialectical articulation with feminine jouissance, this feminine principle can only appear as Chaos; however, in a minimal antinomic dialectic, it may also appear as Sophia (the Gnostic variant of speculative reason, perhaps?)—further confirmed by Haz Al-Din’s recognition in Marxism is Not Woke that these concepts of Dugin’s can be approached with Lacan’s concept of the feminine not-all. But what is the feminine not-all?

This concept of the “not-all” (or “non-all”, in some renderings, including Al-Din’s; the French term is pas-tout) is derived from Lacan’s logical antinomy of feminine sexuation.^[31] The poles of this antinomy are as follows: there is no x that is not submitted to the phallic function, and “not-all” x are submitted to the phallic function. One would not be wrong to read this as a peculiarly “apophatic” formula, relying on a sort of stacked structure of negations distinct from the directly affirmative nature of the phallic pole; Lacan’s privileged examples of feminine jouissance are typically female Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Ávila and Hadewijch, although he also held that some male mystics were capable of documenting it in similar terms, such as John of the Cross. This peculiarly apophatic logic of negation should be distinguished from the purely phallic logic of negation that is de facto at work in the typical constructions of formal logic; ultimately, phallic logic relies on the articulation of abstract negation as a form of internal differentiation in scope between the privilege of exception and the fate of submission, a logic of inclusion or exclusion according to a presupposed absoluteness of the predicate.

Julia Kristeva’s concept of negativity as distinct from negation can assist us in deciphering the apophatic character of feminine logical negation in Lacan’s formula; for Kristeva, negativity does not rely on a prior affirmation, but is in a certain sense itself absolute as negative.^[32] It can be conceived, then, as the pure Other, a logic of futurity or fertility, which is not reducible to the Same of what has come before, but which nevertheless cannot be abstractly opposed to that Same as if it were to found its own new order of the Same (as in the political Gnosticism of a figure like Walter Benjamin). We were never without the Other simply because we were also within the Same, because the Same is not exclusive of the Other, nor is the Other exclusive of the Same; they are simply different things. They only appear as equally the Same thing when the Same itself is fetishistically absolutized to the exclusion of the Other; this is the basic symptomatic premise of all forms of idolatry and scapegoating, which helps explain why these thought-patterns are also quite commonly misogynistic, when they don’t find their principle in the abstract hysterical negation of misogyny (a comparison to the vulgar Madonna/whore opposition may even be in order, where the Madonna is made the idol as the whore is made the scapegoat). This “difference” in which both terms, Same and Other, bypass each other is described by Lacan as the “sexual non-relation”; rather than being some kind of disastrous tragedy, the existence of this dialectical non-relation is precisely the key to working through our worst cultural symptoms and libidinal pathologies, those which have manifested in the modern age in a political order we could call fasco-liberalism (phallic antinomic identity of absolute market inclusion and absolute sovereign exception, or the antinomic identity of libertarianism and authoritarianism, as well as of “left” and “right”).

The sexual non-relation indicates that the phallic antinomy is not itself the absolute limit, but only an idolatrous reduction of absolute possibility to a single sexual pole. This goes hand-in-hand with the illusion that sovereign power, the logic of political force, is the only kind of power or at least the only important or most important form of power—simply because it is such a visible form of expressing subjective control. This is quite simply objectively false—it is literally the essence of a reduction of the objective to the subjective. We could see this also as a matter of distinguishing between possessing power and being power, just as Lacan distinguishes between possessing the phallus (a property of the phallic pole) and being the phallus (a property of the feminine pole), insofar as the phallus is conceived in his discourse as the signifier of desire. Power, then, has heretofore been wrongly interpreted only as something people can possess; the point, however, is also to sustain the capacity to embody it without merely possessing it, and this feminine capacity is crucial to recognize if humanity is to have a future at all. The foreclosure of the logic of the feminine is also a foreclosure of the opening of power to the future, not just its consolidation under visible terms which may be controlled through total submission to the “phallic eye”, whether this occurs through economic capital or through political sovereignty. “The future is female”, not in any empirical sense whatsoever, but in a metaphysical sense; the future has always been female. This “mysterious” principle of futurity must be conceived not simply as a fetishistic exception to reason, but as the most deeply rational core of the dialectic itself, precisely because of its constitutive resistance to the logic of control.

While the preceding discourse could easily be mistaken for a form of feminism, this is not so. This argument is best conceived as “post-feminist”. The historical political movement going by the name “feminism” typically has involved an appeal to phallic power itself to sanction the feminine from within its own logic of control, but our standpoint of dialectical meta-Christianity instead demands the opposite: that the phallic logic of control recognizes the need for its forms of subjective appropriation to be sanctioned by the objective absolute, the divine dialectic of the self-falsification of all partiality which constitutively cannot fail, because it is the inherent principle of creation itself. This appears, from within the phallic universe, as a sort of “not-all”, but within the feminine universe, it is much closer to a fully concrete, even “materialist” rendition of Hegel’s concept of speculative identity (which could also be conceived by way of the concepts of Sophia in Orthodox Christian sophiology or Shekhinah in Jewish Kabbalah, the specifically Gnostic form of these concepts of divine gnosis failing to exhaust their power). But why, then, did Hegel consistently situate women on the side of comparative abstraction, leaving the historical realization of the truly concrete up to men?

This is because the historical dialectic of feminism has led to a drastic social reversal since Hegel’s time, whereby the lives of women in developed countries have themselves objectively transformed from a higher degree of abstraction—submission to phallic control—to an almost catastrophic degree of concreteness, which has notably been crucial to facilitating the “woke” explosion of cultural Gnosticism regarding the discovery of the incommensurability between law and justice (and its abstract negation calling for “symmetric sovereignty”, i.e., a perfect magical daddy arriving from proverbial outer space to save us from the consequences of wokeness). Our name for this development is: “the egirl apocalypse”.

The Commencement of the Hegelian Egirl Apocalypse

“Apocalypse” comes from a Greek word, apokálupsis, literally meaning “uncovering”. That which is hidden is “calyptic”; but upon its revealing or uncovering, we have entered into an apocalyptic state, a state of transformative revelation. A complete, immediate identity is apocalyptic in the negative, colloquial sense; it is purely destructive of that which may maintain, among other things, the metabolic closure required to sustain life. A mediated, temporally open identity, however, is apocalyptic in the true sense; that which has been hidden, through the abstract force of immediate differentiation, from the effectivity of any concretely mediating logos, comes to be revealed to it in time. It is in the latter, true sense that we are entering into an “egirl apocalypse”. But what is an “egirl”? Why make such a vulgar memetic trope into a world-historical, epoch-making concept?

The figure of the “egirl” stands, in this discourse, for the forced choice of a certain absolute concreteness presented to women in the post-feminist age. In prior ages, human society broadly relied on a dialectic between feminine concreteness and phallic abstraction, where phallic abstraction stood for the principle of order through control, with feminine concreteness only harnessed as part of a socially structured means of achieving an effective dialectic of phallic control. Any structurally feminine gnosis of the divine could figure only as an esoteric or religious principle in the spiritual attainment of the many-sided wisdom required for this harnessing, a wisdom that was recognized and understood as fundamental to human life on earth. However, idolatry and scapegoating proved continually to be serious social problems; eventually, the modern age took shape, out of the sources of Judaism and Christianity, as a consequence of the paradoxical struggle to overcome idolatry and scapegoating, correctly recognized as evil self-defeating faux-moral principles, in an abstract manner by means of idolatry and scapegoating themselves. Thus, secular capitalist modernity arrives, in a sense, as an Ouroboros consuming itself in a compact Gnostic loop, attempting to overcome, by way of abstract negation, principles which are themselves only the consequences of the fetishistic core of that very same abstract negation, and which require a truly concrete dialectical negativity to work through meaningfully. True science has emerged through this desperate Ouroboric process, but its full sublation in ethical life, Sittlichkeit, is still yet to come; however, through the dialectic of the egirl apocalypse, a new stage—which we will call meta-law—may yet be reached.

In a sense, feminism itself is the abstract revenge of this principle of concreteness; it is the “liberation” of women from abstract phallic control, a new great opening of the destinies of individual women to the phallic illusion of “free choice”, which emerged out of the ethic of the Protestant Reformation, as an effort to connect to an immediate gnosis beyond that sanctioned by the more traditionally repressive values of the Catholic Church hierarchy, struggling to accomplish the earthly work of divine mediation after the spiritually disastrous East-West Schism. Early Protestantism in many ways emerged as a kind of “proto-woke” movement, a proliferation of law-making violences, which in its effort at achieving a new freedom ended up introducing even more radical forms of repression, in particular the repression of women, laying the groundwork for the political paradoxes of secular modernity and their great march towards the figure of the scapegoat-idol, a perverse Gnostic reversal of the saving figure of Christ. Women, to a large degree, ultimately emerged as the fundamental modern figure of the scapegoat-idol, particularly through the specter of the “witch”—“witches” were persecuted as a scapegoat with a profound Gnostic fervor in the post-Reformation period of early modernity, and later on reclaimed by the feminist movement as a new principle of self-idolization reactively justifying a retreat into feminine immediacy.

If feminism is a return of the repressed “witches” of Protestant modernity, then the post-feminist period witnesses a discovery of the emptiness of this scapegoat-idol trope, taken to its limit in the logic of “wokeness”. With the rise of the Internet, the egirl emerges at the limit of this trend—perhaps the truest icon of post-feminism. The egirl is a novel creature of the Internet age, impossible to imagine without the effects of feminism, and yet equally impossible to reconcile with the standard values of feminism itself. The egirl emerges at the limit of the self-falsification of morality as such; the egirl is the absolute surrender of phallic control in the figure of a chaotic femininity. This chaotic feminity nevertheless orients dialectically in an intrinsically unsatisfying hysterical return to that same principle of phallic control, now utterly debased before the alienating logic of its own sexual antinomy, exposing, in full apocalyptic fashion, the absolute concreteness of the sexual non-relation. The egirl concretely embodies the unique tragedy of sexuality: not the failure to care for what is common, but the discovery that, truly, there is nothing common there at all. What is common can only be discerned through an exercise of gnosis, and the rediscovery of the principle of speculative identity. This effort marks the rise of the novel figure of the Hegelian egirl.

From the perspective of the egirl herself, she wanders forth into an abyss, a world where she must produce her own principle of order without reference to the traditionalist social logic through which her feminine jouissance would be harnessed by way of an organized principle of phallic control. The egirl must therefore discover order without control, she must generate for herself a principle of order through a gnosis of her own absolute concreteness, from what appears to the phallic eye as nothing but chaos (if she is “woke”, she will capitulate, in an anti-social hysteria, to this very phallic eye, by pretending at a direct embodiment for it of this abstract principle of chaos—in the process depriving herself of any fulfillment of her own spiritual need for order). It is this principle of order without control which, perhaps, leads the way to a sublation of the existing logic of law as mere abstract principle, overcoming the incommensurability of law and justice so noted by the rise of “wokeness”—a truly “post-woke” position.

A Short Preliminary Discourse on the Principles of Meta-Law

Meta-law would not be the mere replacement of law by code, as in the abstract “code is law” mantra we hear from the new computational fanatics of the Internet age; meta-law is the speculative structural principle immanent to both political law and computational code indicated by their difference itself. Meta-law cannot be reduced to any structure discerned and commanded so as to be embodied fetishistically in a piece of writing, but is rather the structure under the aegis of the cultural work of that abstract structure’s social sublation itself; meta-law is not commerce, it is not the economic calculations undergirding the logic of capital, but it is rather the living structure of the libidinal store which capital converts into number. Meta-law is not a technical abstraction like “the blockchain”, it is the rational spirit of the men and women for whom such technical abstractions organize and manage the limits of their living reproduction. Meta-law is not second nature, but is rather the absolute mediation with what is truly divine in the human spirit through which second nature ceases to remain caught in abstract exteriority from itself. Meta-law is, if anything, the structural tracks in the sand of our empirical world left by the speculative object-cause of philosophy itself—Sophia.

Perhaps the first palpable instantiation of meta-law will occur by way of a shift in how commerce is conducted. Capital, as it stands, certainly bears both phallic and feminine aspects, but has been reduced in its administration almost entirely to the abstract phallic principle of control by the class with legally recognized ownership of private property, the bourgeoisie (and also keep in mind the function of the fantasmatic figure of the extra-legal sovereign in managing the political nature of that control). The Marxist principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat still remains at the furthest moral limit of the practical management of capital, rather than indicating in any sense its sublation by way of its already-existing but hidden dialectical underside—meta-law. If the state really is ever to “wither”, as Engels put it, it can only be through this principle.^[33] Therefore, this meta-legal element, already immanent to commerce as it is currently conducted, must be brought out fully through the social transformation, which has already begun, that we are calling the egirl apocalypse. What remains is only the conversion of this pre-existing meta-legal substance into actualized meta-legal subjectivity—the commencement of the full Hegelian stage of the egirl apocalypse.