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4 days ago
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‘Modernity’ is not a time but a habit of self-congratulation with the illusion of having come after everything: after God, after Reason, after Man, after tradition, after history, after meaning, and after truth. We came to believe, or rather let our soothsayers delude us into believing, that we are the ultimate liberation by way of being the post- of the post- of the post- of all posts; the Sabbath of history. It is the conceit that we are the self-aware end of things, the terminal reflection of a journey now fully illuminated, not by reason, science, or critique, for these were also mythos to transcend—but by being the first to finally and utterly enjoy the bliss of believing we have transcended belief. The truth is, the very label ‘modernity’ is a trap, and the assumption of the label, the belief that it exists, is itself the core of our ailments.
And as believers in disbelief, we no longer desire. We consume.
Desire has collapsed. But unlike the ruins of dead civilizations or the craters of failed empires, this collapse is not visible in form or structure. It is not marked by decay, by silence, or by mourning—but by infinite fluorescence, saturation, and noise. Our world is not post-tragic. It is post-sublime. It has not lost meaning through absence. It has annihilated meaning through its availability.
The post-sublime condition is not a phase in history, and certainly not the crowning achievement of it. It is what remains after life has been replaced by feed. After the sacred has been replaced by spectacle. After the moral imagination has been replaced by the infinite scroll of human stimuli devoid of symbolic order. It is what occurs when the vertical axis of existence—the covenantal line of ascent that once joined heaven and earth, signifier and significance, eros and Logos—has been severed by the flattening of all things into images for consumption.
We no longer desire as humans once did. Desire—once the structured yearning of the soul towards what is distant—has been disarticulated into immediate compulsions. We have no patience for cooking. We want it all raw. Where once desire required restraint, sublimation, ritual, and distance, now it demands nothing. It is not mediated. It is not shaped. It is not deferred. It is stimulated, spent, and restimulated—pornographically, mechanically, without mystery and memory.
This is the empire of pornographic reason. When I mean pornographic here is not exclusively the sexual but a mode of existence and a way of approach towards anything and everything, be it sex, food, knowledge, music, work, politics, family, friendship, aesthetics, etc. Its essence is not obscenity, but exposure; not licentiousness, but immediacy. Pornographic reason does not signify the prevalence of the erotic—it marks the abolition of it. It is not a matter of sexual excess. It is the cultural regime in which all things—bodies, truths, images, rituals, even horrors—are stripped of depth and rendered consumable, creating an empire of the surface. Pornographic reason is the logic by which the sacred becomes content, justice becomes performance, and suffering becomes fuel for spectacle. It is the order in which nothing is veiled, and therefore nothing is revealed. Everything is permitted to be shown, and therefore nothing is allowed to mean anything. It is the rational regime in which the world has lost its capacity for concealment, for silence, for symbolic resistance. Every form is rendered explicit. Every ritual becomes aesthetic. Every utterance becomes content. We no longer inhabit a symbolic order; we inhabit a representational overflow.
In this regime, desire does not disappear—it metastasizes. No longer sublimated, no longer drawn upward by the gravity of the infinite, desire is now caught in a horizontal recursion of stimulus and gratification. The infinite is replaced by the insatiable. We do not want. We refresh. We do not long. We scroll. Every object is available, and therefore empty. Every experience is repeatable, and therefore null. Every image is explicit, and therefore unseen.
This is not merely a transformation of culture or taste. It is a transformation of ontology. The world is no longer lived, it is rendered. Rendered into images, into formats, into consumable fragments of itself. We are not alienated from reality; we are interfaced with it, incessantly, compulsively, pornographically. This is not alienation. This is the algorithmic total presence of everything, everywhere, all the time. And it is killing our soul.
In other words, pornographic reason is not simply the cultural overflow of explicit content, nor merely a corruption of the erotic by mechanical excess. It is a form of cognition, a mode of perceiving and interpreting the world in which truth and visibility have collapsed into one another. It takes as its axiom that what is real is what is immediately present to perception, and that what is hidden, delayed, or veiled is unreal, repressive, or dishonest. In this regime, the act of un-veiling is treated as revelation, and the exposed object as truth. What cannot be made present cannot be trusted. What resists transparency is condemned as false.
But this is not how reality was understood for most of our history. In premodern thought—both philosophical and theological—the relationship between appearance and truth was never direct. It was structured by distance, analogy, and mediation. Appearance was not the enemy of truth, but neither was it its measure. To appear was to hint, to veil, to manifest partially what could never be exhausted. Truth was not what showed itself most fully to the senses, but what withdrew behind the visible, what demanded contemplation, ascent, and submission.
In the epistemologies of the Abrahamic traditions, truth is not something simply present to the senses. It discloses itself only through form—ritual, prophecy, speech, law—and always under conditions of concealment. The veil, across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, is not a barrier to be overcome but a structure that protects the possibility of knowing at all. At the heart of every religious theophany lies a paradox: the more real the divine presence, the more unbearable it becomes to the human. The very act of God’s self-disclosure requires concealment. Revelation is never naked. It is structured by veils, clouds, fire, signs—by the refusal of immediacy. And it is precisely this refusal that preserves meaning. Reality was not just structured hierarchically, but veiled by design. The divine is hidden not because it is far, but because it is too near, too real, too overwhelming to be encountered directly. “You cannot see My face, for man shall not see Me and live,” says God to Moses. In the Qur’anic grammar: “It is not for a human being that God should speak to him except by mediation, or from behind a veil”. The veil is not the sign of God’s absence; it is the condition of His presence. The invisible is not that which lacks reality, but that which exceeds our capacity to receive it without mediation.
In Christian thought, this structure is refracted through the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ is not the abolition of veils but their fulfillment. In Him, the divine condescends to form, to mediation, to flesh. The veils of the Temple, the parables, the Eucharist, all remain. Even in the most radical intimacy of divine-human relation, form remains essential. “No man has seen God at any time,” John insists; what is made visible is the Logos, not the divine essence itself. As Dionysius the Areopagite wrote, “The more someone ascends, the more he recognizes the unapproachable nature of the divine.”
This structure is not merely theological. It expresses a larger epistemic principle: that the real is not identical with the visible. Knowledge is not the raw exposure of things but the slow, interpretive relation to something that exceeds the knower. To know, in this older grammar, is to approach, not to seize. The veil protects what is meaningful from being reduced to what is available. And this humble reverence is not passive—it is productive. It forms the imagination, trains perception, and structures desire. It teaches the soul that reality is not consumable. That the most important truths come not by immediacy but by mediation.
Pornographic reason inverts this structure. It does not recognize concealment as meaningful. It treats the unseen as irrelevant, and the opaque as unjust. What cannot be rendered, captured, or disclosed is experienced as a failure of politics, of technology, of the self. In this view, to withhold is to lie. Transparency becomes a moral demand.
This shift marks a deeper epistemological change. Truth is no longer what is approached through form, but what is fully disclosed in appearance. The gesture of revelation—partial, mediated, delayed—is replaced by a different logic: rendering. What is rendered is not revealed. It is generated, visualized, and flattened. It is optimized for perception, not for contemplation.
Information replaces knowledge. Searchability replaces interpretation. Access replaces patience. The old disciplines of knowing—study, memory, repetition—are recoded as inefficiencies. Knowledge becomes functional, transferable, and above all, immediate. There is no longer any reason to wait.
But something is lost in this transformation. When truth becomes indistinguishable from visibility, it loses depth. Without distance, there is no orientation. When all is exposed, nothing can be approached. Pornographic reason abolishes not only the veil, but the very concept of a thing being worth veiling. Its effects are not only cognitive but moral: it reshapes how we relate to others, how we understand institutions, how we experience thought itself.
To live without veils is not to see more clearly. It is to lose the structure that made seeing meaningful in the first place.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the modern obsession with information. Information is not knowledge. It is the stripped-down simulacrum of it. Information is what remains when truth is no longer sacred but searchable. It does not demand ritual. It demands access. It does not ask for transformation. It asks for a reaction. In a world ruled by information, truth is what circulates, not what endures. To know is not to ascend but to scroll. This is not a neutral shift. It marks an inversion. What was once revealed through form is now demanded as content. And what cannot be rendered in content is deemed unreal. The logic of the veil is thereby reversed: what is hidden is now false, what is immediate is true, what is dramatized is valuable, and what resists dramatization is forgotten.
And when transcendence is abolished, when the sacramental structure of experience is degraded into content, when the erotic has no symbolic delay, and when the sacred has no prohibition, the human turns monstrous—not through depravity, but through boredom. Pornographic reason is not ecstatic. It is anesthetic. It does not liberate. It dulls. To be post-sublime is not to live without God. It is to live in a world where nothing is allowed to be withheld. A world without the veil or ascent. A world in which there are no longer any secrets, only simulations. And where truth, once venerated for its inaccessibility, is now indistinguishable from whatever passes before the eye.
Politics is the most obvious arena of this collapse, but to call this a political crisis is to miss the point entirely. Our obsession with politics is itself a symptom of pornographic desire—a way of injecting stimulation into a reality whose structures of meaning have eroded. Politics is no longer part of life; it is performance. No longer orientation; it is excitation. It is the pornographic theater of a society that has replaced salvation with signaling, community with consensus, and moral order with algorithmic affect.
But this essay is not about politics. For me, politics is usually just the bait with which I catch my fish that I want to teach to swim in cleaner waters. Politics is how the post-sublime self performs its derangement while pretending it still believes in something, be it justice or right. What follows is a deeper discussion of the pornographic sensibility. A mapping of how our Faustian wager—to become gods through, if not knowledge and mastery, then feeling as the all of the all—delivered us not omniscience but saturation. Not divinity, but compulsion. We have torn through the veil, only to discover that the other side is not heaven, but infinite repetition.
This is not an analysis. It is an exorcism.
Before we speak of the collapse of desire, we must first be clear about what desire is. Not the consumerist craving or transient appetite that passes for it in contemporary usage, but desire in its deeper, constitutive sense: the structured movement of the self toward a good that transcends immediate satisfaction. To desire is not simply to want. It is to reach, to project oneself toward what is not yet possessed, and in doing so, to be shaped by that reaching.
This is why, in every serious anthropology, whether philosophical, psychoanalytic, or religious, desire is not treated as a mere psychological impulse, but as the very engine of formation. What a person desires, and how he desires it, determines not only the arc of his inner life but the structure of the world he is capable of inhabiting.
But desire, left to itself, is anarchic. It does not arrive already ordered. It must be shaped, oriented, and sometimes denied. To order desire is to become human. This was a fundamental insight of classical moral philosophy. In Aristotelianism, the ethical life is a matter of learning to desire rightly, that is, to bring one’s appetites into conformity with reason and virtue. In Christian theology, this takes the form of sanctification: the reorientation of the will toward the divine. In Islam, it is the work of tazkiyah, the purification of the soul’s desires through submission to God’s will.
But in modern thought, perhaps the most honest treatment of this structure comes from within the very psychoanalytic tradition so often invoked to undermine it. Philip Rieff, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, argued that all cultures rest upon a delicate architecture of repressions and permissions. Every culture is a moral system, whether or not it admits to being one, and every moral system educates its members through a grammar of what desires are to be acted upon, what are to be redirected, and what must be repressed altogether. Culture, in Rieff’s terms, is the inherited instruction in how to suffer desire: not merely how to manage it tactically, but how to interpret and respond to it as a matter of form, meaning, and value.
Rieff is not moralizing. He is describing a psychic structure. Personality, he argues, is not something one discovers but something one builds, through a patterned learning of what to do with one's own impulses, a learning that is largely acquired by unwitting inheritance. It is this internalization of symbolic limits—of sacred interdictions, boundaries roles, forms, and aspirations—that makes the stable self possible. “The dialectic of controls and releases,” he writes, “is the basis of cultural order.” Without this dialectic, one does not arrive at freedom. One arrives at collapse.
To sublimate desire is not to deny it but to elevate it—to reconfigure it through symbolic, ethical, or aesthetic mediation so that it becomes something more than the mere satisfaction of impulse. Sublimation transforms erotic energy into artistic creation, religious devotion, and political responsibility. It is the condition of civilization itself. The great works of culture—music, poetry, law, liturgy—are not expressions of repressed desire in the vulgar Freudian sense. They are products of sublimated desire, of longing disciplined and refined through form.
In short, desire is the very core, the material, from which identity and culture are formed. To structure desire is to become human.
Identity, then, the meeting place of personality and culture, is an order of desires which includes hierarchy, prejudice, preference, boundary, limit, etc., that one acquires and internalizes unconsciously from one’s own culture. It has to be unwitting and unconscious, for otherwise it would not work. “If you tell people how to sublimate, they won’t be able to sublimate,” Reiff noted. Culture structures the personality, and the aggregate of personalities in a given culture gives it its own structure. The dialectical movement makes it all dynamic. A disordered structure of desire is a personality disorder. An overproduction of personality disorders, personalities with anarchic desires, ultimately, when it reaches a tipping point, creates a disordered culture which is no longer able to structure personality, or worse, actively produces personality disorders as its ideal. (Culture of Narcissism? Culture of rage? Culture of victimhood?) Thus, to structure desire, to force it into a matrix of boundaries and releases, is ultimately the world-making mechanism of humans.
This is not repression in the caricatured sense of neurotic suppression. It is the construction of an interior architecture through which desire becomes intelligible. Rieff called this a "vertical order": a hierarchy of values in which higher goods constrain and transform lower ones. The postmodern rejection of repression—what he called the “therapeutic” turn—does not liberate desire. It dismantles the very structure that made meaningful desire possible. (It is exactly the purpose of all radical ideologies from Marxism to Critical Theory to Jihadism to annihilate that repressive matrix of limits and boundaries, whether on sexual or aggressive instincts, in order to release the vital energies of man for their revolutionary potential. Projects of utter decivilization and destruction of all good.)
Desire without form becomes either compulsion or boredom. And in both cases, it ceases to be desire in the full sense. For desire to remain human, it must be bound to something higher than itself. It must move upward. It must learn to wait, to suffer, to aspire. This is what sublimity once provided: not a satisfaction, but a horizon. A sense that what we long for most cannot be possessed, but only approached—and that in the act of approaching, we become something more than we were.
To sublimate is to ascend. And without sublimation, there is only consumption.
If sublimated desire is the foundation of human culture, then the collapse of that sublimation marks not moral decline alone, but an anthropological rupture. It is not that we become immoral; it is that we become incoherent psychically, culturally, symbolically. What was once organized by form becomes reactive. What once built identity through delayed gratification and symbolic elevation now dissolves into a restless search for intensity. The collapse of sublimation does not liberate desire. It disfigures it.
This unraveling is not an event but a process, a historical degeneration of the structures that once educated the soul. Its earliest signs appear with the decline of sacred interdiction. In the classical and religious imagination, limits were not optional constraints but constitutive forms: they defined the kind of creature man was. The sacred said: you may go no further. And that boundary did not stifle desire, it made it possible. To be held back from the object of longing was not merely frustrating. It was formative. It gave desire a shape, a tension, a telos. The presence of the forbidden marked the presence of the meaningful.
With the modern critique of sacred authority, beginning in the late Renaissance and accelerating through the Enlightenment, these interdictions began to be seen not as foundations but as obstructions. What Freud called the repressive hypothesis became an article of faith: that human suffering is largely the result of artificial restraints on otherwise healthy impulses. The goal of psychological liberation, and eventually of social order, became the removal of these repressions. But what Rieff understood, and what Freud himself half-feared, was that without repression- not punitive denial, but symbolic containment -there is no culture. There is only impulse without memory.
This shift gave birth to what Rieff called the therapeutic culture: a society no longer oriented by higher goods, but by emotional self-regulation, comfort, and release. In such a culture, the personality is not something inherited or formed through moral tradition, but something managed through feedback, diagnosis, and affective reinforcement. The inner life is not trained—it is tracked. The goal is not elevation, but equilibrium. And desire, no longer oriented by form, becomes the object of endless optimization.
What follows is predictable. When desire is no longer allowed to suffer symbolic resistance, it turns compulsive. The loss of the sacred is followed not by new clarity but by new addictions. What cannot be delayed cannot become beautiful. What cannot be lifted cannot become meaningful. And so the culture begins to short-circuit its own erotic grammar: every image must satisfy immediately, every interaction must gratify, every form must collapse into function. The vertical disappears. Only the flat remains.
Pornographic reason enters here, not simply as the explicit or obscene, but as the structural condition in which desire is no longer mediated by form but processed by systems. It is the regime in which all limits appear arbitrary, all veils oppressive, and all rituals unnecessary. Desire, stripped of sublimation, becomes indistinguishable from distraction. It is not that people want more. It is that they no longer know what it means to want something worthy of wanting.
This is not decadence in the familiar sense. It is a more fundamental breakdown, a crisis not of morality but of pre-moral desire itself. The soul does not collapse into sin. It collapses into disfigurement that can not even enjoy its sin.
Faust is not a metaphor for modernity. He is its inner form. In Goethe’s drama, we do not encounter a man corrupted by temptation, but one already emptied by knowledge. The tragedy does not begin with Mephistopheles. It begins in the study. Faust is a man who has learned everything and understood nothing, who has mastered the disciplines and lost the world. His despair is not ignorance—it is clarity without contact, vision without participation, information without presence.
The tragedy begins in the silence that follows Reason’s victory. Faust, the great scholar, has mastered all the disciplines: law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. And yet he despairs. He knows everything yet understands nothing and reaches nothing. His knowledge cannot save, cannot uplift, cannot orient. The world has become a system of names without referents, signs without meaning, books without revelation. He is surrounded by truths that do not heal, concepts that have no life, and ideas that have no soul. Reason has dethroned God, but cannot crown itself. It has clarified the world, only to drain it of significance.
It is this despair that makes him susceptible to the pact with the devil. But the pact is not the cause of his ruin. It is only its expression. Faust does not sell his soul for pleasure, power, or wealth. He sells it for motion. It is at this point, after the Enlightenment has exhausted its promise, that Faust turns to the devil Mephistopheles. Not because he is seduced by evil, but because he is devoured by restlessness. What he seeks is not sin, but sensation. Not insight, but intensity. He demands to be delivered from contemplation, from limit. He no longer seeks to behold the truth, but to move through experiences without resistance. His demand is not to know, but to be stimulated. He no longer wants to understand the world—he wants to feel it for gefühl ist alles. This is the birth not of the rational subject, but of the pornographic one: the subject for whom experience has lost symbolic structure and becomes valuable only in proportion to its stimulation.
Mephistopheles offers Faust not knowledge, but motion; limitless, relentless, unceasing. The pact is not with darkness, but with speed, offering no substance but feed. Faust will no longer ask “what is true?” but “what is next?” He will no longer seek to contemplate the infinite, but to consume its simulation. The terms are clear: he may have everything, except stillness. To stop, to rest, to say “this is enough”—this would be to lose the wager. Henceforth, desire itself becomes the only telos, the purpose and the end of itself. All forms, all objects, all people are now indexed to the question of consumption: do they intensify the current?
Faust is not just the Enlightenment man; he is the post-repressive, post-sublimating, restless man. His tragedy is the loss of telos of his desire: he no longer desires what is beyond. He desires desire itself
This is not the Enlightenment’s triumph. It is its devastating failure. It is the moment when Reason, having displaced the sacred, is unable to sustain its own structure—and so begins to devour itself, transforming into infinite stimulation, motion without measure, libido without limit. It is precisely this late-Faustian condition that defines the pornographic regime of desire: no longer oriented by the good, the true, or the beautiful, but by the immediate, the explicit, the stimulating, and the consumable.
In this light, Faust is not the originator of pornographic reason, but its original symptom. His crisis is not merely personal—it is ontological. He is the one in whom the symbolic dies, and in whose footsteps we now walk, equipped with the tools of Reason but animated by the pathologies of compulsion. We are his heirs, not because we made the same pact, but because we inherited its terms: the condition in which striving becomes infinite because nothing remains worth attaining.
Faust’s damnation, then, is not that he broke a moral law. It is that he surrendered the architecture of meaning itself, and discovered—too late—that the desire he unchained could never again be domesticated. What began as a pursuit of knowledge ends in the pornographic condition: a culture of perpetual excitation, infinite scrolling, and the desperate hallucination of fulfillment in the very machinery that guarantees its impossibility.
But, we are not Faust. We are what becomes of Faust when even his damnation has become boring. We are what remains when the very drama of the soul’s corruption is flattened into content. Faust made a pact with the Devil; we subscribe to his newsletter because we have no patience even for him. We are the end of the Faustian journey in which our desire was disfigured and with it our identity and culture. As a matter of fact, it leaves us identity-less, knowing to be nothing but identity-seeking and high-seeking men and women.
In Goethe’s telling, Faust is still a tragic figure. Not because he is innocent, but because his fall preserves the shape of something worth falling from. He still longs. He still feels. When he sees Gretchen, he is undone by her innocence, drawn to her beauty, moved by the trembling proximity of something fragile and good. His desire, though deflected and distorted by Mephistopheles, is still structured by eros. He allows himself the agony of approach: the glances, the pauses, the ache of delay. (It is indeed love, actual love, that redeems both after their death in Goethe’s telling.) There is a garden. There is conversation. There is the unbearable heat of anticipation. Even in his descent, Faust still dwells within a symbolic world—a world in which beauty wounds before it is possessed, and in which possession is not immediate but mediated.
We, by contrast, can no longer afford beauty. It takes too long. We no longer approach; we demand. We no longer ache; we click. Where Faust’s damnation required a pact and a process, ours requires only a habit of attention. The very machinery of our perception has changed. Desire is no longer structured by the tension of distance or the possibility of denial. It is not something that draws us into relation—it is something we consume to end the discomfort of time.
The truth is, Faust was a post-Christian man. That is, his personality, his inner structure of desire, was still formed by a pious past. Goethe encodes this in Faust’s yearning for the Mass, for the sacred forms he could no longer believe in but could not forget. He had rejected Christianity, but Christianity had not yet left him. His desire still bore the imprint of a symbolic order. He was drawn to Gretchen not for her availability or slutiness, but for her innocence; an innocence modeled, however faintly, on that of the Holy Virgin. He seduced her, ruined her, abandoned her. But it was not vulgar lust that drove him. It was the unreachable beauty of something he no longer believed he could possess (The Enlightenment’s shattered promise). And since he despaired of grasping its mystery, he resolved to devour its vitality instead.
We, by contrast, are several generations removed. Our desires were not formed by Faust’s pious parents. They were not formed by Faust himself. They were not formed at all. And so we would be bored to death by Gretchen the innocent virgin. Only Gretchen, the experienced harlot, will hold our attention—and even then, only briefly. Our capacity for longing has collapsed. We require novelty, not beauty; stimulation, not form. We do not suffer the loss of the sacred. We want to consume and reconsume its residue without delay, like a parasite that devours what it touches.
We do not want Gretchen. We want her naked and lust-ful image, now. Not the tremor in the hand, not the poetry of her smile, not the unbearable sweetness of restraint, but the immediate domination of the spectacle. The moment we feel desire, it must be extinguished—not through fulfillment, but through the explosion that catapults us to the next. The click that will reveal the next thing on which to click. The logic is no longer erotic; it is algorithmic. The desire of the now is already obsolete by the time it is registered. The next meal begins as the present bite is chewed. We binge without hunger, scroll without interest, consume without presence. We have replaced eros not with satisfaction, but with frantic succession, a blur of a sequence of representation that is too fast, that we no longer care about any of their details as long as they are of the right genre.
