The Unknowable Intention: Desire Is a Demon

Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror: 

1. Pagan horror, such as Wicker Man, The Witch, and Midsommer, are the horror of the World-for-Us because pagan techne is for the instrumentalization of the world. In Pagan religious praxis the spiritual realm is studied to transact with according to the intentions of the practitioner. From the perspective of Demonology, which is how the Christian Church viewed pagan praxis, demons were identified by name to bind them for a transactional intention. However, once summoned, demons often were able to trade their binding for the binding of the summoner. The mythological structure of the Faustian Bargain reveals this reversal in which obtaining the demon’s favor exacts a high price. 
2. The Horror of the unknowable intention of the Other explored in narrative troupes such as the “Slasher” or demonic possession is the horror of the World-In-Itself. The world of the unknowable other withdraws from us as the enigma of Being-In-Itself. This is the same enigma as that of the Being-for-Itself of Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention, but the Other’s intention withdraws from subjective intention in a sinister manner in the Horror genre because the paradox of intentional ambiguity appears as the threat of desire’s inherent unknowability. It is not just unclear what motivates Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers to kill, it is unknowable. This unknowability is the horror of the “in-itself” of desire’s eternal withdrawal from the intention. When this indeterminacy shifts from the external Other to the internalized Other of the voice from within, the question shifts from “What does the Other want from me?” to “What does the Other who speaks as me want?”. This internalization of unintentional desire is ultimately the reason why the desire of the Other is unknowable i.e.: the Other’s desire is also unknowable to himself. Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers also don’t know why they do what they do, even though the narratives of both include various versions of “Origin Stories.” Origin Stories may go some way to suggesting the Slasher’s intentions but offer no final or definitive account of the ambiguous excess of his desire. The demonic possession narrative simply conveys the unknowability of the desire of the Other to the ambiguity of the desire within. The intention of the Other withdraws from the subjective intention in the same way that the subject withdraws from itself as the subjective unconscious, which is why the unconscious is the fount of all horror. 
3. The Cosmic horror of no-intention is most associated with HP Lovecraft. The end of entropy is not the unintentional relations of chaos but the total absence of relations. Cosmic Horror such as Stephen King’s The Mist or Lovecraft’s The Color out of Space present the absence of intention as what cannot be brought into relation with the subjective intention. This is not the unknowability of intention, nor the negation of intention, but the before and beyond of both. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Let's listen to video number twenty. Alrighty. Cool. A mystical motion. Um what's called the super saturated mountains? So saturated that it probably disappointes up to speaking up the song. Basically, we see things as use, which is the origin story of the phenomenological intention. The reason why it's called, they call consciousness and phenomenology the intention, is because you see the world as you intend to see the world. Until something comes along that is unintentional. For Heidegger, it was famously you have a hammer, you pick it up, you go to use it, and it's broken. All of a sudden, it cannot be used for its intended purpose. So now it appears to you not as a tool or a ready-to-hand thing, but as a thing as it is without its use, which when you see being itself rather than being a tool for you. Sorry, Heidegger, for most people buy another camera. But when something is not going according to the you know the way you intend it, that's that's your that's a basic opportunity to make a clearing of your intention. We not only can be in the world and instrumentalize the transactional way, we can also be in the world in such a way as it shouldn't be present to us. Whatever I call something but it is refusing my intention, and then it appears in something to me, but it appears as it is without my intention. It's present to me, but I'm not grabbing it. I'm not grabbing it. Your function as a tool user as using reality for your head. You're making a clearing instead of muddling up that uh intention with your purposes, your intentions, your needs, your wants, your desires, whatever. You are making a clearing for it to be what it is. You're really and you're really getting somewhere there, actually. Because that will knock you straight out of your pre-tention. Demons are sometimes our disguised intentions coming back to us from the unconscious realm. And I think it's indeterminate as to whether their actual like what their exact relationship is to us, because they mirror exactly the bizarre relationship of desire. Our desire is the desire of the other. This is exactly how demons work. You are born with desire, but it's just some it's a clearing. But it doesn't it lacks direction. But you learn how to desire what your desire is for by watching what other people desire and how they desire. That's the first meaning of the Lacadian aphorism. Your desire is desire the other. But the second meaning about that is that you desire to be desired by the other. You watch what they desire so that you can become like the things that they desire in order to be desired by them. Because your life depends on the other's desire when you're young at any rate, uh, and probably does for the rest of your life. You need your mother to remember you and wanna and wanna keep you fed. What has lured my mother's intention, my mother's attention away from me, and how can I get it back? Its relationship to demons is that it is something that is in us. Our desire is in us, but it is something that we learn what to do with by watching what other people do. This is the source of most of our, at least social anxiety, but probably the source of most anxiety, is wondering about how the other sees us. So often our desire feels like our deepest part of ourself, like the thing that I know the best. I don't know anything else, I know what I want. But then we find out, my goodness. I learned how to want everything that I do want from watching what other people want. Now the demon is this slasher for the outside other or any any form for the monsters outside of you. You're trying to figure out what is a desire. Just like you're trying to figure out anything outside of you, what does it desire? But you're realizing, especially with the slasher, that you don't know what chasing 40 swaps. You don't know the microphone swans. And also you also notice something else about the design. It seems totally insatiable. It does not seem to be satiated by one or two moves. It's just easy channel because I kill these guys. For what purpose do they exist? For what purpose do they come to humanizing? Make it somehow for the desires somehow for human. Because people see that they have understandable human motivations. Is that even though they have this even though they seem to be working in the house? And so what's scary about the whole thing is that it has to make the must scary to make the must fight in some place. The mismatch between the endlessness of your inability to satiate themselves to find any satisfaction to their desire, it makes us realize that the desire itself is excessive. There's always going to be this excess left over, and so the terror is in maybe a different spot than we might have assumed. And then once that desire is internalized, which is in the possession narrative, we feel that in ourself. We feel the terror of our own inner yearnings, if you will, are that whatever we find or whatever we imagine to satiate them does not do the trick. And we wind up in this, you know, especially in a demonic possession type movie or scenario. You're wondering, is this something from outside of me coming into me and invading my body and forcing me to do things and want things? Well, what's the difference between that and any other desire that we have? Any other voice that's speaking to us? They've all been internalized in that same way and have that same sort of inability to bring the satisfaction that they promise. We can't know ever about the other. And then what happens, you know, you know, demonologically here, the demon moves from the unknown other to the internal other to the totally unknowability. The unknowability of the other is not just their unknowability, but it also is reflected 100% in my own unknowability to myself. I also cannot determine my desire, so I feel it. I think it's for this one thing, I think I know what I need to fulfill my desire, but then I get that thing maybe, or I don't get that thing, it turns out not to be the thing. I think it's been with us for a very long time in human history. So, um, history religions-wise, many of your texts are, you know, deal with this topic being possessed or needing to have something passed out of us necessarily. Something is in me more than me. Something extra is in me somehow. And I do not know what it wants, and I do not know what to give it, and I do not know what I'm gonna do next because of it. You might even think of it as my lack, my lack of wholeness and completeness, my lack of coherence in myself. There is something that is stopping me from being whole and complete, and it manifests as me doing things that undermine myself or undermine others, and that I don't feel in complete control over. So another way to think about the demon is you know what is it that allows you to do things that seems to be against you. That's what the unconscious is, it's our place to receive ourselves. And the question is like, why do we do that? And that and that's really just why it's different between us and the rest of the animal kingdom, and will always be different between us and uh a computer code. In the history of humans trying to deal with the unconscious and not calling it the unconscious. One of the ways, and I think a very prominent way, not only Western society, but Eastern society as well has kind of interestingly ubiquitous, is the concept. Something like a demon, of course, whenever you do any cross-cultural universal claim, there's gonna be ways in which it's not the same. But loosely defined demon is just this thing that has a clear presence, but it's not clear what it actually wants. And also it's not clear like where it actually is. I would say, not only will they follow themselves across this with themselves, but just looking at the voices that are speaking to you, starting to say Socrates you have a table for people, speaking to him all the time, and he used to feel the underlying what you think. So simple this indeterminability of the sinister. Is that my own voice or is that somebody else's place? We do have totally down to five. We do have a chance of each of these. It closes space five numbers. There are too many people. Those are just things that we have categories of. All that time you're learning not to desire, that you have a desire, it's just things you can fill that desire with. With. So you're watching how other people deal with their desire. And then you're also having an experience simultaneously: is this my desire or is this the desire of the other? Like this is that whole authenticity thing. And then what's really me? And then a lot of times when people are asking that question, they're really asking, what do I desire? We identify by our desires like what we are. And the question is, well, I keep thinking that if I get this or I do this or this is what I'm supposed to do because I'm part of this group, that I'll feel whole and complete, but I can never seem to signify or represent that wholeness and that completeness. What is it? What is behind that failure? There's all kinds of things we try to do to figure out why I feel inherent built-in dissatisfaction and desire that I've uh most people never come to grips with. So there's just like this mismatch between this sense of uh desire and obtaining the thing that I think is gonna fill it, and then it just doesn't, it doesn't work anymore. I just I have find very few, I'm sure there are some, you know, people who are like authentically satisfied. You have nothing to complain about, but I mean I know we say that to ourselves to keep ourselves bucked up, you know. Has that really happened? Are they really have they really figured it out? You can see how closely related the demonic voice is to the voice of, let's say, the consumerism. The demon is telling you the same thing that the advertisement is. That's how they used to experience it as like this other malcontent and certainly interested in our suffering. But it really is just desire and our and our misunderstanding about what it is and what it's for. Because if we think it's four things, we're we're wrong. And you're gonna, you know, or rid yourself of desire entirely by what how whatever means ridding yourself of ego or whatever. I also think that's incorrect. I think again that's just one more way to signify wholeness and completeness, that I have finally got this self-mastery. So much of this is about lack versus mastery. What is this thing in me that makes me compulsively repeat this dissatisfying activity? The demon is the one that tells me that wholeness and completeness is possible by obtaining something or by obtaining some state of affairs. Through meditation, through yogic practice, through aesthetic practice, through self-denial. That's what I'm thinking of as self-mastery. You know, I get this house, I think I get this wife, I get this car. That's also a form of self-mastery, just uh it's just easier, I think, to point out the mistake there. I think the mistake that a lot of people on the spiritual path go down is they're just as violent, they're just as harsh, and frankly, they're just as demon-possessed. So often when you see these gurus go so horrendously wrong and their followers get so far out there, it's because it is actually more of a dangerous path to imagine that you can have the type of spiritual self-mastery in which your desire you eliminate somehow your desire, so it's not calling the shots anymore. Now you have mastered yourself. You've mastered yourself by having no self in that in those in those cases. We imagine that time, at least our consciousness of it, is of continual flow. Is analog. Quantum being, that's what quantum means. It means quantized. Not continuous, in other words. The whole nightmare of quantum is just that, is that it doesn't seem it seems that you know what we experience most basically, you know, the world as a as a flow, as a continuum, uh is not true. That's that's a little bit scary. People just died from seeing her. They were so scared, and their like eyeballs fell out of their head because of it's just they were scared. Like she didn't really even do anything. She's just like out of this like black and white video out of a she had really long dark black hair and dirty ass fingernails and fucking teeth. It's a movie too about the ambiguity of the sun. Because they give her a story and they deliberately show this totally normal. It's so instructionable. She was strange. So fascinating psychologically. I I feel I feel that story in in my in the in the voices, you know. And so like that's that's how I encounter the demonic every day. Is is like who's talking in my head. I can transfer the who's talking in my head thing to voice of the big other of my consumer society, of infredian term terminology, the ego ideal or the ideal ego, and all this kind of stuff. Like these voices, or there's just plain old superego just talking, talking, talking. Like, who is that talking in my head? Is that even me? And like, is that stuff I even want? That constant banter is just pure demon speak to me. So I I experienced it all day long. Um and I don't I don't necessarily always experience it as a horrendous horror show in my head, but you know, it it certainly can be.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu reifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanken. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Weine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Weine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Weine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Weine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke. Ich will eine Maschine sein, Arme zu greifen, Beine zu gehen, kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke.