I’ve spoken previously of the Cosmonaut Blog’s Acid Communism critique, of it being more acid than communism, but perhaps– Acid Communism as outlined by Mark Fisher is not enough acid, and too much Woodstock. Perhaps we should go even further into acid metaphysics. Further into The Fear.
Ego death is considered something which Lacanian analysis shoots for in that it removes the imaginary identification property of speech, where in speech gets trapped in a narcissistic circuit in order to continually self-define.
“All that’s well and good,” you might be thinking, “but where is the acid?”
The narcissistic loop can not sustain desire and is not truly an entrance into the symbolic order, leaving one to deal with structural psychosis in the times where they are the least psychotic. Structural psychosis as in a removal from the symbolic order, one could call it a lack of empathy in that one does not understand the substantial material which is in front of them.
“Where is the acid Eliot why are you talking theory you wrote acid on the top please stop talking about Lacan.”
you
Ok. Whether one takes a strip (10 hits) of LSD, 10 grams of psilocybin, a mouthful of THC concentrates instead of a drop, or adrenomescaline straight from the morgue (this is a real thing, not just from Fear and Loathing), you are in the realm of something entirely different than a drug experience, you are now on a roller coaster where you sense that psychosis is a real possibility.
Hold onto the symbolic order for dear life, if you must, speak to those around you, but something is missing. Something is different. You’re not there anymore. Comrade isn’t home right now. Words exit your mouth, and it is you who is saying it, but it isn’t your usual register. People are significantly different. The Parallax View is in full effect, there is a change in the object which is truly a change in the subject, someone on a heroic dose.
A heroic dose comes quickly. Too quickly. You know this takes an hour to kick in, so when it kicks in under a few minutes, you can tell something is going to happen. Then slowly, things begin to fall apart. Or rather, your perception of them falls apart. Nothing to fear, you know it can’t kill you.
The key moment is the recognition of a radically different perspective, which is difficult to put into words. The lack here is unfortunate, but what I mean by this is a symbolic other than yours radically becomes at hand, and you are for all intents and purposes, within a different world.
Interrelating may become easier, it may become more difficult, or it may become possible, as your visions and feet tell you that something strange is happening.
You get the sense that you’re still holding on. Suddenly something comes to you, a trite answer isn’t trite.
Highly trite answers: empathy is good. Things can be looked at in many ways, nothing is black and white. But it becomes something else. The old, dull knowledge becomes the new, important knowledge. Empathy is what one calls the experience of love which is what the sexual neurosis supposedly lacks. Authentic empathy is a movement away from the feeling that reality is useless. Black and white thinking without the recognition of Antigone as in Kant’s second critique (aka, you can argue both sides of something) meaning that you can have empathy for everyone, you don’t need to hate anyone, you won’t help yourself by hating them– other such truisms. But suddenly it becomes apparent as necessity dialectically, as the next step.
You don’t find an end answer, but the next step. A heroic dose isn’t a goal, but a means to the unfolding of time. Not who you are as a person, but what is next, and a good Hegelian knows, there will be something after as well.
Acid Communism may not be the end answer to leftism, but it is a powerful Idea for a next step, a horizon of possibility, which is all any moment in time can give us at all, its own self-cancellation, its own knowledge of its temporariness, and its necessity intrinsically combined with its own death in the form of what is next.
Mad Black Freud 