Boredom, Hatred and Disgust

1.

True life is elsewhere, but we are in the everyday. But what if the everyday gives onto true life? What if it was there, close to you, all along?

Lately, every morning, there was the O.C. to watch. Now, after what must have been the cliffhanger of one series or another, it’s not being shown. What’s happened to my morning? There’s Friends, of course, but it lacks the forward momentum of the O.C.; besides, I’ve seen it all before.

I want to be carried along by events; I want a plot and storyline, even if it is endlessly frustrating that as soon as a couple gets together they are rent apart. Something must happen: thus the soap opera. Thus the drama of a genre that, with Neighbours, which I watched daily for many years, stretches itself from day to day, one day after another, from now until eternity.

2.

I’ve said it before – too many times, no doubt, but that same eternity, that mathematical sublime must be understood against the eternullity of the everyday. That the latter, as it gives itself to be experienced only by those who have no hope in the everyday – the long-term unemployed, the sick, the early retired, the addicted and the depressed -, is a condition without reprieve.

A kind of reduction occurs for anyone who waits, in those friendless or lonely who are exiled to the streets of those towns in the no-man’s-land of the suburbs – in those whose capacities fail them and they meet thereby the everyday at its level. If you have not experienced it, you will not know it. If you have not been elected, you will not understand.

I despise those who tell me they’ve never been bored. For boredom, as I know it, is everything and discloses everything. Just as hatred, that disgusted, tired-out hatred likewise discloses everything. Just as disgust, turned on yourself, can push every atom from which you are made apart from every other.

Dispersed, thus, you meet the everyday that is also turned inside out, which becomes the black hole that gives unto an infinite attenuation. And when you enter it? Or rather, when the everyday carries you across its event horizon? Time is slowed until there is no time and this ‘there are no events’ happens as the purging of time in time.

What happens? Nothing happens. This ‘nothing happens’ is the black hole of the everyday as its horizon is broken to encompass all that was and will be. Reveals itself – but to whom? Without time, without that reflexivity which would allow an experience to become mine, the self does not survive.

3.

This is where boredom and hatred and disgust carry you. No one is there, but the everyday is given nonetheless. It reveals itself thereafter according to the wound it left. The wound that is that stretched and attenuated ‘no one’, that non-self which knows through itself, in every dispersed atom, that nothing happens and nothing will happen, that this is all there is now and forever.

A knowledge more terrible than that of any tragic hero, who still comes up against a limit against which he is broken. Freedom no longer clashes with necessity; nothing happens because there is no limit. What tension can there be, what drama? There is no one there to fight or struggle. But that ‘no one’ was there from the first, waiting in closed space for the exposure of space and patient in closed time for the exposure of time.

My heart does not lie at the centre of a closed and secure interiority. It is only a fold of the measureless void of the outside. The outside that gives itself to be experienced in the articulation of the heart, in that hinge between the everyday and itself. And that gives itself to be enfolded into an interiority even as it is primary and comes before all closed things.

What is real? What is there? Only that play of forces which are folded and unfolded in various ways. The true drama – and this reaches far beyond human beings – is one of implication and explication, of those prevoluntary openings and closings that are like the respiration of the cosmos. Its freedom.

Then boredom, hatred and disgust are not simply negative, or at least they do not issue simply in negativity. They are the doors that open upon what is real – on that secret streaming witnessed only in attenuation, which is to say, that spreads itself across the open wound you are. You will know it by its effects, by those little boredoms, hatreds and disgusts which unloosen you.

4.

There are no heroes in the everyday. The everyday identity of the superhero is his truth. Peter Parker is Spiderman just as you are no one. Michael Keaton was the best Batman because he looked lost as Bruce Wayne, lost wanderer, heir to a fortune he can only squander and to a life he can only half-live. Just as your secret non-identity is the lost one you also are, passer-between-the-shores who affirms the world as passage.

But how to know the experience of the everyday as beatitude? This may seem the retreat of what is called Buddhism in the work of Zizek and others: an apolitical withdrawal from the world, the renunciation of struggle. But what if beatitude lay in the fact that what reveals itself as the everyday is the usurpation upon which all identity is based – that the form of interiority favoured in our time, that of the worker, driver of the company car, occupier of the house in the suburbs is only imposture and play-acting? What if from boredom, hatred and disgust there arose a great laughter at that imposture and the joyful wisdom that this form of interiorisation is contingent and not necessary?

A laughter, then, which opens upon the dream of a great politics of the outside, of that movement in which each is given to that streaming they have usurped and greets the other as another who knows herself as usurper. A laughter in which the flames of boredom, hatred and disgust have purified themselves of all and any objects. The world is burning in that laughter. You are burning in that laughter.

True life is the everyday.