Due to the fascination I've noticed with Elliot Rodger on this forum I've decided to post the best analysis I've ever read about him anywhere online from a person going by the name of "Timothy Lachin".
Unfortunately Tim's home website is down and perhaps for good so I will post the text of his entire article here along with a link to an archive of his Elliot post incase anyone wants to read it in it's original formatting style which may be a bit easier on the eyes than our incel board's text.
So here it is for you all to read, discuss and save (if you wish) for your own purposes.
archive.is
Elliot Rodger: Amoeba, Misogynist, or Wizard?
As a citizen of the 21st century, which is to say a
slave to the Internet, I have now read enough articles about Elliot
Rodger to come to the conclusion that no one in the United States
understands anything about anything. Every article I have read gets everything wrong.
The facts: on May 23rd, 2014, Elliot Rodger went on a
killing spree in Santa Barbara, stabbing and shooting six people to
death before committing suicide. In the weeks leading up to his rampage,
he posted a number of videos on YouTube in which he expresses his rage
towards the popular kids in general, and popular girls in
particular, for rejecting him. He returns again and again to the fact
that he is still a virgin, a fact which he blames on the cruelty of the
women who have rejected him all his life.
Where to start? The first thing we need to do is dismiss any attempt
to understand Rodger’s actions by referring to ideological non-concepts
such as virulent misogyny or entitlement. The second thing
we need to do is dismiss any attempt to understand his actions by
referring to the sterile concepts of cognitive-behavioral psychology
(“He suffered from antisocial personality disorder”). If we want to have
any hope of understanding why Elliot Rodger killed all those people,
the first thing we need to do is establish a distinction between structure and discourse. What do I mean?
The attempts to understand the Rodger shooting generally fall into
one of two categories. Either “mental illness” (structure) or “virulent
misogyny” (discourse) is invoked as an “explanation” for his actions. In
both cases, “analysis” consists in sticking a label on Rodger and
passing this tautology off as an explanation. This is as far as public
thought goes in the United States these days.
If we want to understand Elliot Rodger, we need to analyze the place where structure and discourse (do not) meet.
Anyone who watches the Elliot Rodger videos and believes that he did
it for the reasons he states is a dupe. Anyone with an ear for the truth
ought to be able to hear that when Elliot Rodger uses words like blond, beautiful, alpha male, happiness, women,
etc. he is using them as a series of neologisms. In other words, for
Rodger, these signifiers mean something radically different than they do
for everyone else.
Rodger is, clearly, obviously, visibly, psychotic. I work in a
psychiatric hospital. One of my most important responsibilities as a
clinician is recognizing psychosis in its larval form. Of course,
Rodger’s psychosis is far from larval in the videos he uploaded to the
internet. In any case, American psychiatry has become so etiolated
thanks to cognitive-behavioral pseudoscience and the enormous piece of
propaganda that is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (the would-be Bible of mental health disorders assembled and
published by the American Psychiatric Association) that no one knows any
longer what psychosis even is. By multiplying ad infinitum the
various spurious “disorders” of the brain, the DSM destroys any
possibility of establishing diagnostic criteria that both cut reality at
the joints and respect the singularity of each patient. In the best
cases, these false “disorders” are the simple result of bad science, bad
ethics, and the ambient bad epistemology that characterize hypermodern
America. In the worst cases, they are invented by drug companies and
pushed by APA shills to make that money.
What is psychosis? Speaking broadly, it is a disturbance on the level
of the symbolic register. The psychotic is cut off from his body and
cut off from the rest of humanity because language does not function
“properly” for him. Language is not a tool for communication and never
has been. When is the last time anyone communicated with anyone else?
Language for humans is more like sunlight for plants. Without language,
our bodies and minds do not know how to regulate themselves. The parade
of variously crippled and ill psychotics I see every day at the clinic
testifies to the debilitating consequences of being incompletely
inserted into what Lacan calls a discourse, which might be described as
the story we tell ourselves about what is real and what is not, what
constitutes truth and what does not.
One of the clearest symptoms of psychosis is the use of neologisms –
words that mean something mysterious and incommunicable to the psychotic
subject. Usually these neologisms look like everyday words, which is
why we are lost without some reference to structure. One only needs to
hear Elliot Rodger repeat the word blond a few times to realize
that this signifier means a lot more to him than it does to your average
frustrated virgin. American psychiatry does not have the balls even to
try to understand the obvious connection between language troubles and
psychosis. As usual, cause and consequence are inverted, and language
troubles are dismissed as meaningless “word salad” rather than
recognized as the very cause of psychosis.
A number of the various commentators and armchair psychologists who
have analyzed the Rodger case have drawn attention to his narcissism.
This is as close as anyone has come to recognizing the true nature of
Rodger’s psychosis. Psychotic narcissism is of an entirely different
nature than non-psychotic narcissism. Elliot Rodger is not a young man
with an outsized ego. Elliot Rodger is a formless, shapeless amoeba
riven by aggressive and sexual drives who is desperately holding onto a
partial mirror image in order to avoid total psychic collapse. What we
ordinarily refer to as “narcissism” involves a detour through the gaze
of the Other. When Brad Pitt admires himself in the mirror, he is seeing
himself through the eyes of the readers of People Magazine. In other
words, he has internalized this gaze and identifies himself by it. He is
integrated into a collective discourse.
When Elliot Rodger tilts his head at the same weird stereotyped angle
again and again to show off what he believes to be his best profile, he
is not seeing himself through the lens of the Other’s beauty ideals as a
non-psychotic would. He is trying, desperately, to make this Other
exist, to insert himself into society as such by disappearing into this
one fixed “photograph” of himself. He has confused two registers, the
register of symbolic belonging and the register of imaginary belonging.
Symbolically, linguistically, he cannot make a “detour through
the Other”, one that would format his mind and body and allow him to
join the community of alpha males and blonde babes he vituperates
against. In the absence of such a symbolic identification, he can only
attempt to repair this hole in his psyche by “covering” it with an
identification on the level of the imaginary, which is to say the level
of the image. The stereotyped, stilted way he speaks, poses, shifts his
head, puts on and takes off his sunglasses, etc. shows that Rodger is
attempting to imitate an “alpha male” from the outside in rather than
from the inside out. The very domain of interiority is unavailable to
him. This is the reason why he killed those people, not because
he was a virgin. Rodger’s psychosis was in place long before he ever
dreamed of holding hands with a beautiful blonde sorority girl.
So, on the level of structure, Rodger is psychotic. This means
that the detour through the Other, through the discourse, the ethics,
and the epistemology promulgated by official society, is foreclosed to
him. The ability to make this detour and see oneself from the outside is
the line separating neurosis from psychosis. This essentially
uncomplicated notion of structure, which is so crucial to the
understanding of psychic suffering of both the neurotic and psychotic
variety, is nowhere to be found in the thousand-plus pages of the DSM-V,
which substitutes an infinite multiplication of spurious disorders for a
properly dialectical understanding of subjectivity.
Rodger is a psychotic who latched onto one of the many circulating discourses available
on the Internet in an attempt to metabolize the (literally) unspeakable
suffering that wracked him on the level of mind and body. This
suffering was unspeakable for the simple reason that only the
Other is capable of giving us those words with which we can effectuate a
synthesis of mind, body and discourse. Here is the true origin of
Rodger’s murderous hatred for the alpha males and females he ended up
killing. They are the winners who stand in for the official Other as
such, that Other to which Rodger has no access. It is worth repeating
here: in its last essence, this Other is nothing but language as such,
speech as such, intersubjectivity as such (which always passes through
language of some sort). Unable to recognize the true, ethereal, symbolic
nature of this Other, Rodger could only approach it via the imaginary
register, which is to say the register of appearances. Hence the blond hair.
This particular trait is shorthand, in the circulating American
imaginary of mastery – which is of course a screen for the discourse of
capitalism – for winning, for making it, for being an insider. When
Rodger first learns, at the age of nine, that he is not cool, he
responds by dying his hair blond. Restated in more analytic terms, when
faced with the enigma of the Other, with his own inability to assume a
place in the Other, Rodger responds by mobilizing the signifier blond,
which represents, in the imaginary, the Other’s desire. The rigid,
mechanical character of this response to the enigma of the Other’s
desire is already a clinical indication that Rodger is operating within a
psychotic structure.
What, then, are the origins of Rodger’s psychosis? They are to be
found where one might expect them to be found – in his early childhood,
in his relationship with his parents, in his earliest dealings with the
Other he came to reject and refuse, perhaps for a good reason. It is
precisely Rodger’s own refusal and rejection of this Other that he
misrecognizes as the blond Other’s refusal and sexual rejection of him.
Why sexual? Because it is on the level of sexuality that we experience
our deepest sense of identity, of being, of humanity.
I have no idea why Rodger became psychotic, but I do know that it had
nothing to do with any of the reasons he cited in his videos, and which
he gleaned, like a crow making a nest of clothes hangers, from the
despairing, masochistic discourse he found on websites such as
PUAHate.com and Wizardchan.org.
This brings me to the second point I would like to discuss, namely
the discourse itself. Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree not because
of the discourse of “normalfag” or “Chad” hatred he found on the
internet; he went on a killing spree precisely because he could not fully enter this discourse. It is the failure of
PUAHate and Wizardchan (as well as every other discourse) to furnish
Rodger with an identity, with a body, that led him to pass to the act.
If Rodger frequented such websites and attempted to ape their
discourses, it is because only such melancholy discourses – on the
border of neurosis and psychosis – were capable of reflecting back to
him some shred of his own inner experience.
When an anonymous user on Wizardchan claims that he hates Chads and
normalfags (wizardchan slang for sexually active, socially integrated
men) and blames them for his troubles, we should not automatically see a
future Elliot Rodger. On the contrary, we should see a troubled person
who is using the shared discourse of melancholy as a step on the ladder away from melancholy itself,
which is a refusal of discourse in the face of loss. Such discourses
play a valuable therapeutic role for the very troubled people that post
there. There is no way for such people to approach intersubjectivity
without starting from the bottom, which is where these wizards find
themselves. Most of them will pull themselves out of the swamp of
melancholy suffering/enjoyment sooner or later. It is no one’s business
but their own. Some of them will stay there. Some of them will kill
themselves, but none will do so because of anything they read there.
Or will they? My encounter with Wizardchan was an uncanny experience
for me, in the Freudian sense of the term, which is to say
simultaneously familiar and alien. It was uncanny for me because I used to be a wizard. What does it mean to be a wizard? A wizard is a male virgin who has passed the age at which a normalfag or Chad would
have already become sexually active. The term “wizard” comes from a
Japanese internet meme stating that a man who remains a virgin at the
age of thirty develops magical powers. Most of the “wizards” who post on
Wizardchan would therefore describe themselves as apprentice wizards.
As I scrolled through page after page of what we might call the
Wizard’s Code, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. Had I
written all of this down when I was a twenty-year old “kissless virgin”
and “incel” (involuntary celibate)? Had these people eavesdropped on my
conversations with my wizard best friend and then transcribed them? For
better or for worse, my wizarding days took place in the prehistoric era
before the modern internet existed. For all I knew, my best friend and I
were the only two wizards on the face of the Earth.
I recognized it all: the hatred of hedonism and hedonists, the
nostalgia for childhood, the hard melancholy, the conviction that a
“normal person” had experienced more life before the age of twenty than I
ever would in a lifetime, the attempts to justify my hatred and
feelings of worthlessness by appealing to evolutionary science and
eugenics, the belief in my own hidden, unrecognized inner beauty (masked
under a gleeful, smirking “objective” appraisal of myself as ugly,
pathetic, and deserving only of death), the desire to receive welfare
and live in a state of total passivity.
In one thread, an anonymous poster announces to the other wizards
that he is going to kill himself using the helium roasting bag
technique, but wants advice on how to have a great last day on Earth. He
adds that what makes him happiest in life are small things like adding
spices to frozen pizza. The responses vary between tepid attempts to
talk the original poster out of it and approbation of his choice, which
after all is fully rational given the agreed-upon premises, nothing but
the QED verifying the watertight inevitability of the Wizard’s
Discourse. Chad has everything; I have nothing; I am nothing; life is suffering; death is the only escape.
A few days after the original post, another poster confirms that the
original poster really did go through with it – they were friends on
Facebook. Immediately following this post, another apprentice wizard
mocks the original poster (who has just killed himself)
for being on Facebook in the first place – a concession to normie ethics
deserving only of mockery. Make no mistake: the original poster
probably would have posted a similar comment about himself had he not
been dead. This is the face of solidarity among wizards. I know, because
I could have written any one of the comments during my own hard
wizarding days.
My best friend with whom I shared a rudimentary Wizard’s Code was an
even harder wizard than I was. In fact, he was as hard of a wizard as it
is possible to be. How hard was he? He killed himself at the age of
twenty-four by attaching a tube from a tank of helium to a roasting bag
that he tied over his head. He was, of course, a virgin. He subscribed,
down the line, to every single one of the beliefs constitutive of the
Wizard’s Discourse.
My own intimate familiarity with the fruits of the Wizard’s Discourse
gives me, I believe, a certain authority here. Now, let it be stated
that I am no longer an apprentice wizard, and for that reason I expect
nothing but contempt from any wizards who might happen upon this text. I
do not care here to elaborate on the conditions under which I
forcefully, and painfully, extracted myself from the Wizard’s Discourse
that I sensed, with more and more urgency as I got older, was
suffocating me; suffice it to say that I extracted myself from it, and
it was not easy. The suicide of my best friend made it easier.
The Wizard’s Code is, like all positive discourses, a form of
ideology, which is to say a secular theodicy. It is a discourse of last
resort, one that abuts death. It can either be used as a ladder leading
up, away from melancholy, or down, to suicide. Like so many
fundamentally adolescent discourses, it is a place of passage. My best
friend and I met at the crossroads of our own Wizard’s Discourse. I
exited through the top, towards life, towards desire; he exited through
the bottom.
Would my best friend still be alive if he had not encountered the
Wizard’s Discourse in a larval form on the internet in 2002? I
discovered, after he died, that he had actively participated in a
suicide message board that closely resembled Wizardchan in the last
months of his life. Did his encounter with an institutionalized form of
the discourse that he and I had played with together push him to kill
himself in a paradoxical attempt to rejoin this discourse by fulfilling
its symbolic demands? After years of reflection, I have come to the
conclusion that if it hadn’t been the Wizard’s Discourse, it would have
been some other suicidal or murderous discourse.
The function creates the organ, as the saying goes. The Wizard’s
Discourse exists because the Wizard’s Discourse has to exist. It has to
exist because there is not enough room in Chad’s Discourse for everyone.
This is a direct result of consumer capitalism, which hides its
ruthlessness and brutality under the pseudo-evolutionary ideology of the
free market. Chad’s Discourse is the discourse of capitalistic
exploitation and for this reason the wizards are right to refuse it,
right to hate it. It is the discourse of domination and slavery. The
wizards are also right to refuse the interpretations blasted at them
from sites like Jezebel.com, which ran a story mentioning Wizardchan.
The hysterical cunts at Jezebel essentially accuse the wizards of being
misogynistic and racist; the true message behind these attacks, of
course, is you are a bunch of castrated pussies and for this reason we find you despicable.
In any case, anyone who takes the Wizard’s Discourse at face value is a
fool. Unfortunately, we are a country of fools, one growing
increasingly susceptible to ideology in its most positivistic and
idiotic form, and the various peddlers of the two most prominent forms
of discursive idiocy going (hysteria and capitalistic ideology, which
are complicit with each other) can spread their lies virtually
unchallenged. In any case their public is not much better than they are.
The wizards are right to repudiate Chad and Chad’s secret ally
Jezebel. Yet it is precisely here that we must be most careful. On the
level of discourse, everything the wizards claim is true.
However, as I have tried to illustrate, there is a fundamental
discontinuity between discourse and structure. This is most visible in
psychosis, in which an external discourse is desperately invoked in an
attempt to suture deep psychic wounds. There were a number of such
discourses available to Elliot Rodger. He could have just as easily
turned to the Terrorist’s Discourse, the Neo-Nazi’s Discourse, the Hard
Yoga Discourse, or any other of the discourses of last resort for those
who cannot or will not enter Chad’s Discourse.
The discontinuity of discourse and structure is most visible in
psychosis, but is equally present in every structure. In other words,there are no Wizards and there are no Chads.
There are only subjects who attempt, in vain, to enter these
discourses. But there is no way fully to leave one’s being behind in a
discourse. There is always a leftover, always a stain of subjectivity,
of existential homelessness, always a remainder of abjection. Elliot
Rodger did not want to kill Chads as such. His true goal was the liquidation of discourse as such, the liquidation of the place of the Other.
Where the wizards get everything wrong is in their belief that they
have no subjective consistency outside of Chad’s Discourse. In this
sense, the Wizard’s Discourse is nothing but the flipside of Chad’s
Discourse. It is a confirmation of Chad’s Discourse. The unbearable truth that both Wizards and Chads are fleeing is that discourse as such can never fully name me, can never fully evacuate the suffering inherent to Being.
It is precisely this containing function of discourse that was
unavailable to Elliot Rodger as a result of his psychotic structure.
What is the solution? The solution lies in the realization that no
discourse is absolute. We must learn to love our homelessness, our
abjection. Reading Samuel Beckett did more than anything else to pull me
out of the sickly embrace of the Wizard’s Discourse. This path is what
Lacan refers to as the Analyst’s Discourse. The Analyst’s Discourse is
the path of knowledge, which is also the path of desire. It is not an
easy road and there are no guarantees, but it is better than either the
Chad’s or the Wizard’s discourse. Before finishing this article, let me
state it clearly here: between Chad’s Discourse and the Wizard’s
Discourse, I choose the Wizard’s Discourse. Chad’s Discourse can produce
nothing but domination and exploitation, whereas the Wizard’s
Discourse, although morbid and destructive, at least functions as a
stepping stone leading away from the enjoyment of suffering and towards
something resembling freedom.
Unfortunately Tim's home website is down and perhaps for good so I will post the text of his entire article here along with a link to an archive of his Elliot post incase anyone wants to read it in it's original formatting style which may be a bit easier on the eyes than our incel board's text.
So here it is for you all to read, discuss and save (if you wish) for your own purposes.
Elliot Rodger: Amoeba, Misogynist, or Wizard? | Timothy Lachin
archived 21 Oct 2014 14:59:19 UTC
As a citizen of the 21st century, which is to say a
slave to the Internet, I have now read enough articles about Elliot
Rodger to come to the conclusion that no one in the United States
understands anything about anything. Every article I have read gets everything wrong.
The facts: on May 23rd, 2014, Elliot Rodger went on a
killing spree in Santa Barbara, stabbing and shooting six people to
death before committing suicide. In the weeks leading up to his rampage,
he posted a number of videos on YouTube in which he expresses his rage
towards the popular kids in general, and popular girls in
particular, for rejecting him. He returns again and again to the fact
that he is still a virgin, a fact which he blames on the cruelty of the
women who have rejected him all his life.
Where to start? The first thing we need to do is dismiss any attempt
to understand Rodger’s actions by referring to ideological non-concepts
such as virulent misogyny or entitlement. The second thing
we need to do is dismiss any attempt to understand his actions by
referring to the sterile concepts of cognitive-behavioral psychology
(“He suffered from antisocial personality disorder”). If we want to have
any hope of understanding why Elliot Rodger killed all those people,
the first thing we need to do is establish a distinction between structure and discourse. What do I mean?
The attempts to understand the Rodger shooting generally fall into
one of two categories. Either “mental illness” (structure) or “virulent
misogyny” (discourse) is invoked as an “explanation” for his actions. In
both cases, “analysis” consists in sticking a label on Rodger and
passing this tautology off as an explanation. This is as far as public
thought goes in the United States these days.
If we want to understand Elliot Rodger, we need to analyze the place where structure and discourse (do not) meet.
Anyone who watches the Elliot Rodger videos and believes that he did
it for the reasons he states is a dupe. Anyone with an ear for the truth
ought to be able to hear that when Elliot Rodger uses words like blond, beautiful, alpha male, happiness, women,
etc. he is using them as a series of neologisms. In other words, for
Rodger, these signifiers mean something radically different than they do
for everyone else.
Rodger is, clearly, obviously, visibly, psychotic. I work in a
psychiatric hospital. One of my most important responsibilities as a
clinician is recognizing psychosis in its larval form. Of course,
Rodger’s psychosis is far from larval in the videos he uploaded to the
internet. In any case, American psychiatry has become so etiolated
thanks to cognitive-behavioral pseudoscience and the enormous piece of
propaganda that is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (the would-be Bible of mental health disorders assembled and
published by the American Psychiatric Association) that no one knows any
longer what psychosis even is. By multiplying ad infinitum the
various spurious “disorders” of the brain, the DSM destroys any
possibility of establishing diagnostic criteria that both cut reality at
the joints and respect the singularity of each patient. In the best
cases, these false “disorders” are the simple result of bad science, bad
ethics, and the ambient bad epistemology that characterize hypermodern
America. In the worst cases, they are invented by drug companies and
pushed by APA shills to make that money.
What is psychosis? Speaking broadly, it is a disturbance on the level
of the symbolic register. The psychotic is cut off from his body and
cut off from the rest of humanity because language does not function
“properly” for him. Language is not a tool for communication and never
has been. When is the last time anyone communicated with anyone else?
Language for humans is more like sunlight for plants. Without language,
our bodies and minds do not know how to regulate themselves. The parade
of variously crippled and ill psychotics I see every day at the clinic
testifies to the debilitating consequences of being incompletely
inserted into what Lacan calls a discourse, which might be described as
the story we tell ourselves about what is real and what is not, what
constitutes truth and what does not.
One of the clearest symptoms of psychosis is the use of neologisms –
words that mean something mysterious and incommunicable to the psychotic
subject. Usually these neologisms look like everyday words, which is
why we are lost without some reference to structure. One only needs to
hear Elliot Rodger repeat the word blond a few times to realize
that this signifier means a lot more to him than it does to your average
frustrated virgin. American psychiatry does not have the balls even to
try to understand the obvious connection between language troubles and
psychosis. As usual, cause and consequence are inverted, and language
troubles are dismissed as meaningless “word salad” rather than
recognized as the very cause of psychosis.
A number of the various commentators and armchair psychologists who
have analyzed the Rodger case have drawn attention to his narcissism.
This is as close as anyone has come to recognizing the true nature of
Rodger’s psychosis. Psychotic narcissism is of an entirely different
nature than non-psychotic narcissism. Elliot Rodger is not a young man
with an outsized ego. Elliot Rodger is a formless, shapeless amoeba
riven by aggressive and sexual drives who is desperately holding onto a
partial mirror image in order to avoid total psychic collapse. What we
ordinarily refer to as “narcissism” involves a detour through the gaze
of the Other. When Brad Pitt admires himself in the mirror, he is seeing
himself through the eyes of the readers of People Magazine. In other
words, he has internalized this gaze and identifies himself by it. He is
integrated into a collective discourse.
When Elliot Rodger tilts his head at the same weird stereotyped angle
again and again to show off what he believes to be his best profile, he
is not seeing himself through the lens of the Other’s beauty ideals as a
non-psychotic would. He is trying, desperately, to make this Other
exist, to insert himself into society as such by disappearing into this
one fixed “photograph” of himself. He has confused two registers, the
register of symbolic belonging and the register of imaginary belonging.
Symbolically, linguistically, he cannot make a “detour through
the Other”, one that would format his mind and body and allow him to
join the community of alpha males and blonde babes he vituperates
against. In the absence of such a symbolic identification, he can only
attempt to repair this hole in his psyche by “covering” it with an
identification on the level of the imaginary, which is to say the level
of the image. The stereotyped, stilted way he speaks, poses, shifts his
head, puts on and takes off his sunglasses, etc. shows that Rodger is
attempting to imitate an “alpha male” from the outside in rather than
from the inside out. The very domain of interiority is unavailable to
him. This is the reason why he killed those people, not because
he was a virgin. Rodger’s psychosis was in place long before he ever
dreamed of holding hands with a beautiful blonde sorority girl.
So, on the level of structure, Rodger is psychotic. This means
that the detour through the Other, through the discourse, the ethics,
and the epistemology promulgated by official society, is foreclosed to
him. The ability to make this detour and see oneself from the outside is
the line separating neurosis from psychosis. This essentially
uncomplicated notion of structure, which is so crucial to the
understanding of psychic suffering of both the neurotic and psychotic
variety, is nowhere to be found in the thousand-plus pages of the DSM-V,
which substitutes an infinite multiplication of spurious disorders for a
properly dialectical understanding of subjectivity.
Rodger is a psychotic who latched onto one of the many circulating discourses available
on the Internet in an attempt to metabolize the (literally) unspeakable
suffering that wracked him on the level of mind and body. This
suffering was unspeakable for the simple reason that only the
Other is capable of giving us those words with which we can effectuate a
synthesis of mind, body and discourse. Here is the true origin of
Rodger’s murderous hatred for the alpha males and females he ended up
killing. They are the winners who stand in for the official Other as
such, that Other to which Rodger has no access. It is worth repeating
here: in its last essence, this Other is nothing but language as such,
speech as such, intersubjectivity as such (which always passes through
language of some sort). Unable to recognize the true, ethereal, symbolic
nature of this Other, Rodger could only approach it via the imaginary
register, which is to say the register of appearances. Hence the blond hair.
This particular trait is shorthand, in the circulating American
imaginary of mastery – which is of course a screen for the discourse of
capitalism – for winning, for making it, for being an insider. When
Rodger first learns, at the age of nine, that he is not cool, he
responds by dying his hair blond. Restated in more analytic terms, when
faced with the enigma of the Other, with his own inability to assume a
place in the Other, Rodger responds by mobilizing the signifier blond,
which represents, in the imaginary, the Other’s desire. The rigid,
mechanical character of this response to the enigma of the Other’s
desire is already a clinical indication that Rodger is operating within a
psychotic structure.
What, then, are the origins of Rodger’s psychosis? They are to be
found where one might expect them to be found – in his early childhood,
in his relationship with his parents, in his earliest dealings with the
Other he came to reject and refuse, perhaps for a good reason. It is
precisely Rodger’s own refusal and rejection of this Other that he
misrecognizes as the blond Other’s refusal and sexual rejection of him.
Why sexual? Because it is on the level of sexuality that we experience
our deepest sense of identity, of being, of humanity.
I have no idea why Rodger became psychotic, but I do know that it had
nothing to do with any of the reasons he cited in his videos, and which
he gleaned, like a crow making a nest of clothes hangers, from the
despairing, masochistic discourse he found on websites such as
PUAHate.com and Wizardchan.org.
This brings me to the second point I would like to discuss, namely
the discourse itself. Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree not because
of the discourse of “normalfag” or “Chad” hatred he found on the
internet; he went on a killing spree precisely because he could not fully enter this discourse. It is the failure of
PUAHate and Wizardchan (as well as every other discourse) to furnish
Rodger with an identity, with a body, that led him to pass to the act.
If Rodger frequented such websites and attempted to ape their
discourses, it is because only such melancholy discourses – on the
border of neurosis and psychosis – were capable of reflecting back to
him some shred of his own inner experience.
When an anonymous user on Wizardchan claims that he hates Chads and
normalfags (wizardchan slang for sexually active, socially integrated
men) and blames them for his troubles, we should not automatically see a
future Elliot Rodger. On the contrary, we should see a troubled person
who is using the shared discourse of melancholy as a step on the ladder away from melancholy itself,
which is a refusal of discourse in the face of loss. Such discourses
play a valuable therapeutic role for the very troubled people that post
there. There is no way for such people to approach intersubjectivity
without starting from the bottom, which is where these wizards find
themselves. Most of them will pull themselves out of the swamp of
melancholy suffering/enjoyment sooner or later. It is no one’s business
but their own. Some of them will stay there. Some of them will kill
themselves, but none will do so because of anything they read there.
Or will they? My encounter with Wizardchan was an uncanny experience
for me, in the Freudian sense of the term, which is to say
simultaneously familiar and alien. It was uncanny for me because I used to be a wizard. What does it mean to be a wizard? A wizard is a male virgin who has passed the age at which a normalfag or Chad would
have already become sexually active. The term “wizard” comes from a
Japanese internet meme stating that a man who remains a virgin at the
age of thirty develops magical powers. Most of the “wizards” who post on
Wizardchan would therefore describe themselves as apprentice wizards.
As I scrolled through page after page of what we might call the
Wizard’s Code, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. Had I
written all of this down when I was a twenty-year old “kissless virgin”
and “incel” (involuntary celibate)? Had these people eavesdropped on my
conversations with my wizard best friend and then transcribed them? For
better or for worse, my wizarding days took place in the prehistoric era
before the modern internet existed. For all I knew, my best friend and I
were the only two wizards on the face of the Earth.
I recognized it all: the hatred of hedonism and hedonists, the
nostalgia for childhood, the hard melancholy, the conviction that a
“normal person” had experienced more life before the age of twenty than I
ever would in a lifetime, the attempts to justify my hatred and
feelings of worthlessness by appealing to evolutionary science and
eugenics, the belief in my own hidden, unrecognized inner beauty (masked
under a gleeful, smirking “objective” appraisal of myself as ugly,
pathetic, and deserving only of death), the desire to receive welfare
and live in a state of total passivity.
In one thread, an anonymous poster announces to the other wizards
that he is going to kill himself using the helium roasting bag
technique, but wants advice on how to have a great last day on Earth. He
adds that what makes him happiest in life are small things like adding
spices to frozen pizza. The responses vary between tepid attempts to
talk the original poster out of it and approbation of his choice, which
after all is fully rational given the agreed-upon premises, nothing but
the QED verifying the watertight inevitability of the Wizard’s
Discourse. Chad has everything; I have nothing; I am nothing; life is suffering; death is the only escape.
A few days after the original post, another poster confirms that the
original poster really did go through with it – they were friends on
Facebook. Immediately following this post, another apprentice wizard
mocks the original poster (who has just killed himself)
for being on Facebook in the first place – a concession to normie ethics
deserving only of mockery. Make no mistake: the original poster
probably would have posted a similar comment about himself had he not
been dead. This is the face of solidarity among wizards. I know, because
I could have written any one of the comments during my own hard
wizarding days.
My best friend with whom I shared a rudimentary Wizard’s Code was an
even harder wizard than I was. In fact, he was as hard of a wizard as it
is possible to be. How hard was he? He killed himself at the age of
twenty-four by attaching a tube from a tank of helium to a roasting bag
that he tied over his head. He was, of course, a virgin. He subscribed,
down the line, to every single one of the beliefs constitutive of the
Wizard’s Discourse.
My own intimate familiarity with the fruits of the Wizard’s Discourse
gives me, I believe, a certain authority here. Now, let it be stated
that I am no longer an apprentice wizard, and for that reason I expect
nothing but contempt from any wizards who might happen upon this text. I
do not care here to elaborate on the conditions under which I
forcefully, and painfully, extracted myself from the Wizard’s Discourse
that I sensed, with more and more urgency as I got older, was
suffocating me; suffice it to say that I extracted myself from it, and
it was not easy. The suicide of my best friend made it easier.
The Wizard’s Code is, like all positive discourses, a form of
ideology, which is to say a secular theodicy. It is a discourse of last
resort, one that abuts death. It can either be used as a ladder leading
up, away from melancholy, or down, to suicide. Like so many
fundamentally adolescent discourses, it is a place of passage. My best
friend and I met at the crossroads of our own Wizard’s Discourse. I
exited through the top, towards life, towards desire; he exited through
the bottom.
Would my best friend still be alive if he had not encountered the
Wizard’s Discourse in a larval form on the internet in 2002? I
discovered, after he died, that he had actively participated in a
suicide message board that closely resembled Wizardchan in the last
months of his life. Did his encounter with an institutionalized form of
the discourse that he and I had played with together push him to kill
himself in a paradoxical attempt to rejoin this discourse by fulfilling
its symbolic demands? After years of reflection, I have come to the
conclusion that if it hadn’t been the Wizard’s Discourse, it would have
been some other suicidal or murderous discourse.
The function creates the organ, as the saying goes. The Wizard’s
Discourse exists because the Wizard’s Discourse has to exist. It has to
exist because there is not enough room in Chad’s Discourse for everyone.
This is a direct result of consumer capitalism, which hides its
ruthlessness and brutality under the pseudo-evolutionary ideology of the
free market. Chad’s Discourse is the discourse of capitalistic
exploitation and for this reason the wizards are right to refuse it,
right to hate it. It is the discourse of domination and slavery. The
wizards are also right to refuse the interpretations blasted at them
from sites like Jezebel.com, which ran a story mentioning Wizardchan.
The hysterical cunts at Jezebel essentially accuse the wizards of being
misogynistic and racist; the true message behind these attacks, of
course, is you are a bunch of castrated pussies and for this reason we find you despicable.
In any case, anyone who takes the Wizard’s Discourse at face value is a
fool. Unfortunately, we are a country of fools, one growing
increasingly susceptible to ideology in its most positivistic and
idiotic form, and the various peddlers of the two most prominent forms
of discursive idiocy going (hysteria and capitalistic ideology, which
are complicit with each other) can spread their lies virtually
unchallenged. In any case their public is not much better than they are.
The wizards are right to repudiate Chad and Chad’s secret ally
Jezebel. Yet it is precisely here that we must be most careful. On the
level of discourse, everything the wizards claim is true.
However, as I have tried to illustrate, there is a fundamental
discontinuity between discourse and structure. This is most visible in
psychosis, in which an external discourse is desperately invoked in an
attempt to suture deep psychic wounds. There were a number of such
discourses available to Elliot Rodger. He could have just as easily
turned to the Terrorist’s Discourse, the Neo-Nazi’s Discourse, the Hard
Yoga Discourse, or any other of the discourses of last resort for those
who cannot or will not enter Chad’s Discourse.
The discontinuity of discourse and structure is most visible in
psychosis, but is equally present in every structure. In other words,there are no Wizards and there are no Chads.
There are only subjects who attempt, in vain, to enter these
discourses. But there is no way fully to leave one’s being behind in a
discourse. There is always a leftover, always a stain of subjectivity,
of existential homelessness, always a remainder of abjection. Elliot
Rodger did not want to kill Chads as such. His true goal was the liquidation of discourse as such, the liquidation of the place of the Other.
Where the wizards get everything wrong is in their belief that they
have no subjective consistency outside of Chad’s Discourse. In this
sense, the Wizard’s Discourse is nothing but the flipside of Chad’s
Discourse. It is a confirmation of Chad’s Discourse. The unbearable truth that both Wizards and Chads are fleeing is that discourse as such can never fully name me, can never fully evacuate the suffering inherent to Being.
It is precisely this containing function of discourse that was
unavailable to Elliot Rodger as a result of his psychotic structure.
What is the solution? The solution lies in the realization that no
discourse is absolute. We must learn to love our homelessness, our
abjection. Reading Samuel Beckett did more than anything else to pull me
out of the sickly embrace of the Wizard’s Discourse. This path is what
Lacan refers to as the Analyst’s Discourse. The Analyst’s Discourse is
the path of knowledge, which is also the path of desire. It is not an
easy road and there are no guarantees, but it is better than either the
Chad’s or the Wizard’s discourse. Before finishing this article, let me
state it clearly here: between Chad’s Discourse and the Wizard’s
Discourse, I choose the Wizard’s Discourse. Chad’s Discourse can produce
nothing but domination and exploitation, whereas the Wizard’s
Discourse, although morbid and destructive, at least functions as a
stepping stone leading away from the enjoyment of suffering and towards
something resembling freedom.
