hang on tight and spit on me
Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enterthemirrorhello. pseudo-intellectualizing SO HARD currently. read 100 pages of pride and prejudice and i'm only slightly fried, so i'm following it up with some good old Lyotard to calm my nerves (ha ha). if you are uninterested in *true* rambling then turn away now. anyways. i talked a little bit already about how i want to do an essay on colonialism & the ultra-left trends since 68. i thought of a good intro hook thing for it which is just me ripping off Ozymandias. "whatever came of May '68? nothing beside remains. round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level pavers stretch far away." too much? i fear everything i have been reading lately curses me to be too much. i was being good and not including anything too arcane, but i started thinking about Freud and Todestrieb, and, well... there's something there with Lyotard. he talks about Todestrieb a lot but i don't know if i'm convinced by it. i think the jouissance he's describing in the famous "hang on tight and spit on me" passage alongside with everything else in A Desire Called Marx is absolutely Eros, and if we're to agree with Lyotard on what Freud means when he says Eros, there's... SOMETHING there! see 27-28 (and help me make sense of it!):
> "But in terms of what the 1920 text says, if Freud introduced the instance of the death drives, it is precisely in order to keep not only such a sign, but libidinal economy in its entirety, in the shelter of the concept and of binarist discrimination. It is not at all a matter of cleaving the instances in two, this is the so-called 'labour' of the concept, it is, on the contrary, a matter of rendering their confusion always possible and menacing, of rendering insoluble the question of knowing whether a particular Gestaltung is an effect of life rather than death, if a particular flood, pulsional unbinding, is suicidal rather than therapeutic from the point of view of the apparatus which endures it, whether, on the contrary, a particular stasis, a particular fixation, a particular crystallization of a stable dispositif is amenable to palliative orthopaedics or mortiferous entropy."
i think that you can connect this, through "hang on tight and spit on me" ...
> "Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they - hang on tight and spit on me enjoyed [ils ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell , they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening."
... to Todestrieb. i know Lyotard literally JUST said libidinal economy is the muddling of both Eros and Thanatos, and that Eros itself may include Todestrieb, but, like... this feels like it's so obviously all Eros!!! i look all the way back to Schopenhauer, who Freud credits as being pretty close to right, and think that this is absolutely what Schopenhauer was talking about when he talks about der Wille zum Leben. i guess if i wrote about this i would need to include the discretionary note that it IS a departure from Lyotard to suggest that this example singularly represents something like the will to live, and that there exists an analogous counter-dispositif. in this case, the counter-dispositif or part of the counter-dispositif could be the Todestrieb, which i would connect to ultra-left and communizer tendencies, specifically those pertaining to the proletarian need for self-abolition. from there you can make the claim that any movement that refuses to accept the validity of the Todestrieb (proletarian self-abolition) is necessarily reinforcing the hegemonic "dispositif"s. this is a *very* strict and very vast dragnet. it necessitates the disavowing of many movements which i'll have to reference as influential *to* the ultra-left, like the ICC. this does away with anyone desiring an insurrection with the *capability* to destroy the state, not one which *will* as a condition of its existence, with any reinforcers of the entropic system of labor itself, with any that seek to maintain capitalist social relations as they are, the modern, erotic, "will to live"... essentially, rejecting any movements who themselves reject the Todestrieb and self-abolition.
okay. bleh. i should jack off crazy style so i think less. goodbye for meow!!! :D
> "But in terms of what the 1920 text says, if Freud introduced the instance of the death drives, it is precisely in order to keep not only such a sign, but libidinal economy in its entirety, in the shelter of the concept and of binarist discrimination. It is not at all a matter of cleaving the instances in two, this is the so-called 'labour' of the concept, it is, on the contrary, a matter of rendering their confusion always possible and menacing, of rendering insoluble the question of knowing whether a particular Gestaltung is an effect of life rather than death, if a particular flood, pulsional unbinding, is suicidal rather than therapeutic from the point of view of the apparatus which endures it, whether, on the contrary, a particular stasis, a particular fixation, a particular crystallization of a stable dispositif is amenable to palliative orthopaedics or mortiferous entropy."
i think that you can connect this, through "hang on tight and spit on me" ...
> "Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they - hang on tight and spit on me enjoyed [ils ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell , they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening."
... to Todestrieb. i know Lyotard literally JUST said libidinal economy is the muddling of both Eros and Thanatos, and that Eros itself may include Todestrieb, but, like... this feels like it's so obviously all Eros!!! i look all the way back to Schopenhauer, who Freud credits as being pretty close to right, and think that this is absolutely what Schopenhauer was talking about when he talks about der Wille zum Leben. i guess if i wrote about this i would need to include the discretionary note that it IS a departure from Lyotard to suggest that this example singularly represents something like the will to live, and that there exists an analogous counter-dispositif. in this case, the counter-dispositif or part of the counter-dispositif could be the Todestrieb, which i would connect to ultra-left and communizer tendencies, specifically those pertaining to the proletarian need for self-abolition. from there you can make the claim that any movement that refuses to accept the validity of the Todestrieb (proletarian self-abolition) is necessarily reinforcing the hegemonic "dispositif"s. this is a *very* strict and very vast dragnet. it necessitates the disavowing of many movements which i'll have to reference as influential *to* the ultra-left, like the ICC. this does away with anyone desiring an insurrection with the *capability* to destroy the state, not one which *will* as a condition of its existence, with any reinforcers of the entropic system of labor itself, with any that seek to maintain capitalist social relations as they are, the modern, erotic, "will to live"... essentially, rejecting any movements who themselves reject the Todestrieb and self-abolition.
okay. bleh. i should jack off crazy style so i think less. goodbye for meow!!! :D
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Date: Wednesday, 14 January 2026 04:42 am (UTC)