Immediacy’s insistence on pure presence structurally parallels sadism’s flattening of others

Evidence

Circulating self-image also commissions the imaging of the other. A narcissist’s auto-affection circumscribes the other, in a diminishment intimately connected to sadism (an instinct to master, a gratification in harm). The sadist flattens the other, engineering infliction to proscribe response. Barthes helps articulate the overpresence and overexposure in self-branding with sadism: in “the Sadean world,” he writes, “the function of discourse … is to conceive the inconceivable, that is, to leave nothing outside words and to allow the world no ineffables.” Everything is enjoined to presence; nothing evades. Immediacy’s auto-emanations and perpetual fluidity paradoxically calcify in this way in the stone of sadism, in its inexorable control and invocatory cruelty. Without the symbolic to intervene as a certain defusing of the real, the outsize imaginary conduces to sadistic mores courting real eruptions. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Links to her meditation chapter claims and her broader defense of symbolic mediation; connects to the reader’s own argument that mediation is politically necessary.