The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here – pure Self – [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. The night of the world hangs out toward us.1
― G.W.F. Hegel

From 3 to 7 am I bedrot

It’s 2:30 in the night. A child’s cries rip through my sleep. When they fall silent, I remain awake. At 3:00, I’m still lying there. 3:30: awake. At 4:00, I give in. Grab my phone and read In my zombie era by Sam Kriss.

What can I say. Sharp and smart. Merciless. A cutting sword—one that strikes. Gleefully dissecting, filleting. Flesh hangs in tatters, revealing the bare bones of a sarcophagal present. At the same time: performative and oscillating. Hyper-ironic. Hyper-reflexive. A double-edged sword: one that knowingly cuts into its own flesh, exposing itself—bare bones. The text is fun—sharp in language, sharp in thought. And yet...

Numb at the Lodge

In my zombie era

Chat, am I washed? Chat, be fr, am I washed? I think I might be washed. I think they might have washed me. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed…

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9 months ago · Sam Kriss

I’ve—finally, after three hours of lying awake—fallen asleep when a foot kicks me awake: the child is vomiting. Up! I scramble, dazed, into the bathroom, rummage through the kitchen for a bowl to place by the bed. Self-pity flickers—snuffed out by gallows humour.

Then I lie there again. Awake. The dark of night has paled, growing remorselessly bright and brighter and you know: it’s lost, the day will be dragged down by the weight of a sleepless night. Down into a swamp of dreamless waking. One will fester, drift through the hours, vegetate in a dull haze.

But now—5:30: my brain is alight. I’m not thinking. Thoughts arrive at once, fully formed. Again and again this experience: at dawn, something inside me switches on—something that, unlike me, thinks.

For despite the sleeplessness: my thoughts don’t spin. In this empty space—not sleeping, not not-sleeping—a voice emerges. One that would otherwise drown in the everyday din, in the mindless loops of thought (doomscrolling as internalized ritual). A voice that, with odd clarity, articulates insights. And I? I lie there and listen to what this voice wants to say to Sam Kriss.

Cultures of Interpassivity. The Zombie as Interpassive Lifeform

Rewind. One step back: Kriss lays out three phases, three responses to the overflow of information. First: the hipster as human sorting algorithm. His task: discover and curate obscure, unknown culture. Then: the nerd. The enthusiastic consumer, no longer curating, just celebrating what the algorithm—now digital, no longer human—serves up. And finally: the zombie. No longer consuming culture, he consumes the sorting algorithm itself. The pure, unmediated flow of information. The content? Irrelevant.

But Kriss is describing something that already existed in earlier cultural configurations. A phenomenon likely as old as humanity itself: interpassivity. Introduced by Robert Pfaller and popularized by Slavoj Žižek. The outsourcing of action. We are acted for. Incense is burned for us in the temple. Someone prays. Someone sings. God's cosmic gaze holds the world together. The prayer wheel: enacts our devotion. Solar-powered? Even better. Canned laughter: laughing for us. All we have to do: sit down, turn on the TV, watch. The sitcom takes care of the rest. The subject is satisfied with symbolic participation. Affectless, epistemically disconnected, we consume. We become the undead. Hollowed out, transparent. Things pass through us without leaving a mark. Streaming.

You find interpassivity in the analog video nerd who records everything on VHS—satisfied just with that. The tapes need not be watched; it's enough that they could be watched. The magnetic strip has already done the seeing. Endless shelves of films. Pure potential—zero activity. The action potential is never reached: one could, if one wanted. But one doesn’t. Forms of cultural being-undead.

To sharpen the point: interpassivity confuses the outsourced action with one's own. It feels like one has done something—when in truth, one has remained utterly passive. Another form of magical thinking. Here, as there: agency is misplaced. We delude ourselves into believing we can do more than we actually can. Illusory control. Illusory relief. In reality: simple passivity.

So what’s new is not interpassivity per se. It’s an anthropological constant. What’s new is the radicalisation Kriss observes. In modern zombie culture, it reaches a new extreme:

But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm*, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.*
— Sam Kriss

And I, child of my time, notice it in myself. Tweets and Reddit posts—barely skimmed—get bookmarked for a future that will never come. And yet it feels like something has been done. I’ve done my part. Fulfilled the demand. The big Other smiles down at me. My read-later app Matter (great app!) exists, in 90% of cases, just for the satisfaction of saving things “for later”. Yes, I confess: sometimes I read—when the night is sleepless. But mostly I’m content that I could read.

But maybe I’m stuck in the old mode of being undead? A yesterday's man. In Kriss’ zombie mode, not even the potential matters anymore. Nothing is hoarded. Nothing saved. No archive. Everything gets wiped away the moment it appears. From delegated consumption to pure algorithmic flow—devoid of any subjective appropriation.

All of this is deeply political. The rise of interpassivity is not just an expression of a particular culture—it’s the result of neoliberal precarization and the capitalist logic of exploitation. We are too exhausted to confront the world. All we have learned is how to consume. We are disempowered subjects. Self-domesticated. Acted upon. We let others act for us—and in doing so, become slaves. Or, in McLuhan’s words: sex organs of the machine world. The world is arranged in such a way that we no longer need to do anything, yet still appear to participate. From the perspective of power: Nothing better than a subject that deludes itself into thinking it is doing something―but in truth remains utterly passive. A subject that alienates itself from the world and its social conditions. Relinquishing its power.

Now I want to be zombie. Thoughtless. Brainrotted. Fr. Don’t think. Be lazy. Save strength. Glide on. Grow hollow. Empty. Empty like the zombies. Sam says: the zombies reach the emptiness behind things. The brainrotted zombies.

From Pure Gliding to the Gliding of Emptiness

Play. What does Sam Kriss's radical critique of culture and media overlook? Where did the surgeon's scalpel slip—severing a main artery?

I doomscroll. I have doomscrolled over this entire island, over gentle green hills and through the grey wreck of cities, down to the infinite sea, and none of it has held my attention for even a moment, because I have no attention to hold. I am brainrotted. Molten black sludge in my cranium. I am locked in on the emptiness behind all phenomenal things. Frfr. Bet.
― Sam Kriss

Of course (?)—irony. When Kriss speaks of zombies who reach the emptiness behind phenomena. Brainless consumers, unable to finish a TikTok, boasting of metaphysical insights. Fr. Funny. But what lies beneath? A deeper knowledge—or a blind spot? The intuition of an inversion? I don’t know. The answer disappears behind a protective wall of irony—fortified with the arrowslits of reflexive consciousness. Every critique: already anticipated (Gutenberg ahh). Well then: This burrow has many entries. Take irony at its word. Make a breach. Fall into the trap. Sometimes the trapper traps himself.

The final feint: the zombies speak again. Of that blissful space where the mind is not—only the infinity of pure white light. Zombie mysticism. Affirmation of the apeiron. Dissolution of the subject into the indeterminate, the boundless, the unformed.

Bitch we have linked up with the surging stream of unpredicated being. Bitch we behold the apeiron from which all brief perishing shapes emerge.
― Zombie Kriss

We may be unformed—but not everything is. The system remains. The structure. Power. Molten black sludge drips from our noses. Our brains, rotting, are channeled through tight, predetermined grooves. What remains of us flows down these channels. A dark, sluggish current. Sublimated into nothingness. Canalization. The zombie knows nothing of this.

Kriss wields an artfully ornate sword. Elegant. Baroque. But which way is up, and which is down? Let’s storm the fortress. If Kriss won't say it straight out, I will: The zombie-like emptiness he describes is the exact opposite of the emptiness behind phenomena—the emptiness that makes up the phenomena. It’s what happens when one cannot bear the void. When one must constantly look away. Stay busy without ever being truly present: just don't look. Close your eyes.

There is a culture that doesn’t flee emptiness, but gazes into its abyss. Threatening with Buddhist blades! Confront the zombie emptiness!

The emptiness of Buddhism is the emptiness of constant flux. Of time that never stands still. Of mutual dependence. Of substancelessness. We try to grasp the world. We seek fixed points to cling to—and only make things worse. Emptiness. Ontological pain: dukkha. And out of emptiness arises an imperative: Live ethically! The world is not fixed. It is malleable. It could be different—it could be better. Our actions change things, for we are part of the world. But of course, we do not live ethically—and that, too, hurts. And because this pain, this suffering that emerges from it all, is almost unbearable, we must avert our gaze. To be a zombie, then, is to be unable to endure the ontological reality of emptiness. To be so incapable of bearing it that one hurls oneself into its inverse: the emptiness of radical interpassivity.

This restlessness—the ceaseless flicking, swiping, onward gliding —is a reaction to the overabundance of information. It generates a paradoxical movement: we flee the flood of meanings by surrendering to it without resistance. The result: we remain in the shimmering vestibule of information. Pure surface. A life like a flat stone: smooth, frictionless. A stone skimming across the surface of water—bouncing, darting, sinking—without ever piercing the glistening surface.

But there’s more behind it: the always-already referred. The gliding of signifiers. Not just an abstract concept or philosophical jargon. But concrete phenomenological reality. We are cultural beings. We do not inhabit the world—we inhabit a cultural space: a world of overlapping meanings. We abstract from things—and from the abstractions. The signifiers shift. Endlessly. And as they shift, they hollow themselves out. Things mean something to us—but that very meaning removes us from reality. The purely phenomenal recedes—the immediately mediated sensory impression. Habitually, we fall into things. Fall through them. We lose ourselves in them before they’ve even truly appeared. Our perception: always-already embedded. In stories, in concepts, in abstraction. We succumb—unaware—to the gravity of meaning.

The light—the “sun,” the “leaf,” the “green”: the moment it touches our eye, our consciousness, it is already language, already narrative. Order of perception.

In the radical interpassivity described by Sam Kriss, we are trapped in the endless referential logic of the algorithm. Mindless swipers are certainly unaware of one thing: phenomenal experience—things as they appear to us. Space, body, world, fellow human beings—all of it has become distant. A disembodied head adrift in the ether. Every medium inserts an additional layer of mediation, sliding invisibly between perception and reality. We glide over the surface of phenomena without ever truly seeing them. It may look like meaninglessness. But in truth, we are entangled so deeply in the semantic-algorithmic thicket that everything blurs. We are carried off, swept away. What arises here is not the emptiness of phenomena, but its perversion: not freedom from meaning, but submersion in its excess. The overabundance of meaning plunges everything into meaninglessness. Too much noise. No signal.

True emptiness is the exact opposite of interpassive emptiness—the thoughtless, passive consumption of algorithmic flows. We even outsource our emptiness. To see the void means to interrupt the endless stream of abstractions, to end the perpetual being-dragged-forward by the next and the next signifier. In its place: the quiet arising and passing away of phenomena themselves. A different kind of flow—one that brings about its opposite: stillness. Stream-entry. Sotāpatti. The flow of emptiness is the zero-point of meaning. The point at which meaning comes to rest—where things mean themselves. Signal without noise.

It's the goal of Buddhist practice: to escape the entanglement of overlapping meanings—to slip free of semantic gravity. Freedom: One has seen through the mechanisms of meaning and broken loose from their pull. Unbound, one observes the ceaseless arising and passing of phenomena. One becomes weightless. Dives in, surfaces. Inhabits both worlds: the emptiness of phenomena and the fullness of meaning. Only those who dwell in both escape the zombie existence.

There’s nothing wrong with losing oneself in meaning. The question is: can we still see the exit? Do we even know it exists—or are we so deeply entangled that we’ve forgotten the outside altogether? In reading, for instance, phenomenal reality fades into the background—and yet we remain in contact with the world. It’s not a loss of world-relation, but a different way of encountering the world. And the exit remains: we can close the book at any moment, set it aside, lift our gaze—and face the world, enriched.

But the pure gliding through the semantic-algorithmic stream severs that contact. A break in the flow. A plunge into a fever dream: colors, patterns, forms that never quite resolve. Fragments of thought. Everything blurs. Groundless ground. Endless fall. Nowhere to hold on.

The real art? To move freely between the poles: direct sensory experience―pure abstraction. Between the sorrowful here and now—and the knowledge of a better world’s possibility.

Night of Transformation

Pause. What remains? A human being who has arranged their life within a world they can only endure by looking away. That is the crux. We have turned ourselves into zombies instead of creating a world we could look at with joy. We rehearse the short-circuit into apocalypse—and thus make it real.

Old wood and the humming of insects. A rotted porch sinking into tall grass. An overturned mauve plastic chair. Above it, a high, clear blue sky—still as the world, and the world as still and clear as it. So it was. So it will have been.

The allure of end times. A zombie apocalypse, dreamt into being. Collapse as liberation. What kind of world is it, where violent annihilation feels like salvation? To draw the sword and cut it all to pieces. To begin again. Clean slate. I too catch myself dreaming this dream: a quiet, still world. Empty. Open.

The flare of potentiality. Everything could be different. In the past, we never reached the threshold of action—we settled for possibility itself. The endless deferral of a better future. Today, we deny even the possibility. Everything is swiped away. What remains is the shallow touch of a fingertip on a screen. Gliding along the surface. The smooth skin of the world. The space beneath—the space where change could happen—remains untouched, even unseen. Pure virtuality, but without the recognition of virtuality: of the possible. It is the total abandonment of the self, the surrender of any future. The refusal to bear openness is what makes us zombies. And the pain hidden in that refusal—we must face it. Behind it: the possibility of a better world.

Buddhism, too, knows the pain of openness: it is the Dark Night of the Soul.2 A time of deep uncertainty. Psychotic breaks. Despair. Depression. Desolation. The familiar world dissolves. Meaning-making narratives lose their grip. Old psychic structures have crumbled; the new ones are not yet stable. What remains is an existential void that permeates everything. One gazes into the abyss—and the abyss gazes back. Nietzsche, without irony.

It is the sight of absolute contingency. Of reality itself. Of the constructedness of self and world. And it is painful: no foothold. Only transitions. Everything is open. And this openness calls to us—not to look away, but to act. To change something. The horror of responsibility. The only way is through. Along the edge of the abyss.

This and only this is nihilism: to have seized one’s own nothingness as prey, as a shelter against emptiness.3
― Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Awakening

The world offers more than enough reasons to be cynical. Nihilistic. The danger is that in our outrage at passivity, we become passive ourselves. We sink into abstraction. Into aestheticised resignation. Into the mythologising of our own collapse. A retreat into cynicism. A different kind of night of the soul—of darkness and hopelessness.

When night is all around—when it keeps growing darker—only one thing helps: to truly look. The exact opposite of radical interpassivity. The not-looking, the endless swiping-away. But to truly look, to perceive phenomena without losing oneself in abstractions, is the most difficult thing of all.

To look does not mean to reject abstraction. Abstractions are part of reality. Sometimes one must step away from phenomenal reality in order to come closer to it. The Buddhist path itself follows this double movement: it calls for both the stillness of mind—pure seeing (Samatha)—and the penetrating insight into the nature of things (Vipassanā). To view suffering merely as a phenomenal appearance, an expression of emptiness, is just another form of looking away. One must perceive the structures behind it. Suffering is not simply there. It is caused. And those causes can be changed—fought.

The Dark Night of the Soul marks a rupture within the order of things. One can lose oneself in it—or grasp it as an opening: a suspension of the symbolic order. An outsideness within the inside. We are torn from interpassive emptiness. Real emptiness becomes visible again—and with it, the possibility of thought and action.

The circle: closes. Mere insight is not enough. It must lead to action. The true opposite of zombie-like passivity is not just clear seeing—but decisive doing.

There are many ways out of the machine order. The Buddhist path is one. There are others. What matters is this: Do we turn away from the world—or do we confront it? Do we dare the open?

What does the zombie really see? The white light of radical openness? Apeiron. Or only the blinding glare of a screen in a dark and lonely night? 6000 Kelvin. I don’t know. I only know this: It remains passive. Undead. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Frfr.

Driven into the Light

Recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness.4
― Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance

Forward. Ten days later: the child is still vomiting. The world has gotten even shittier. Larval existence. Does it really take total exhaustion to break the habitual chains of meaning and worry? Absolute darkness? Collapse? Before we finally move?

What remains? The clarity of dawn. The rare inner stillness of exhausted days. The human capacity for insight—which, paradoxically, often emerges only when the engines of meaning and stimulation—internal and external—grind to a halt. Or: are forced to stop. When everything breaks.

And, spoken from the night, another insight. Interpassivity is not just an anthropological constant, but the structure of our relation to reality itself. Every act of knowing is interpassive. It is delegation. Mediation. Knowing happens elsewhere: in language. In the symbolic. In grammar. In the interface. In the night. We are split, amputated subjects. Every grasp at reality: A grasp that misses.

This gap, too, is the open. The fissure in reality that makes both knowing and acting possible. A gap we can push into. Vanguard of possibility. The difference lies here: do we trust in the possibility of insight, in the possibility of our own agency—or do we give ourselves up? Do we see that one can think against language within language? That even in being spoken, one can find a voice?

For reality itself is interpassive—caught in mediation. A logic of referral. The endless gliding. Elusive. Difficult to think. And yet: we are part of it. Part of its mediation. Its passivity includes us—as agents. We are its emissaries. The baton passes to us. The light comes.

TL;DR

Constant presence, without ever truly being present.
Today, algorithms are our prayer wheels.
Not empty—but hollowed out.
We bring about the end because we cannot face the present.
One can drown in the void—or rest upon it.
Into the open!

⧉ Fields

Aesthetics, Buddhism, Buddhist Ethics, Buddhist Philosophy, Critical Theory, Cultural Critique, Epistemology, Ethics, Language, Media Theory, Perception, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Postmodernism, Semiotics

⋉ Minds

Zombie, Sam Kriss, Robert Pfaller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben

⫸ Movements | Traditions

Capitalism, Contemporary Buddhism, Neoliberalism, Platform Capitalism

⧊ Concepts

Affordance, Alienation, Contingency, Critique of Ideology, Dark Night of the Soul, Emptiness, Epistemic Practice, False Consciousness, Governmentality, Interpassivity, Irony, Lack, Onto-Epistemic Ethics, Ontology, Ontology of Suffering, The Open, Night of the World, Nihilism, Potentiality, Power, Radical Imagination, Radical Politics, Reflexion, Resistance, Resistance of Reality, Samatha, Self Domestication, Signifier and Signified, Social Change, Stream Entry, Structural Violence, Subjectivity, Suffering, Temporality, Vipassana, World-to-Come

Spring breeze
The boatman
Chews on his little pipe
― Bashō

Roland Barthes quotes this haiku by Matsuo Bashō during a lecture in which he traces the noema—the essence—of the text by way of photography.1 In doing so, he encounters a fundamental question: How can language, much like photography, produce such an immediate reality effect? He finds an initial answer in the noema of photography, which he transposes onto the text: in the that-has-been—the feeling, no, the certainty: it must have been so. Language is capable of what also characterizes photography: making a scene become real.

That photography conveys truthfulness—makes an image appear real—is immediately evident. It is an imprint, an index, a physical trace of a past reality. It promises us: What you see here once existed. When we look at an old childhood photograph of ourselves, it can pierces us like an arrow: This moment once happened. That is us as a child in our parents’ arms—gone, but real. The puncture of reality strikes us with a feeling of ontological certainty. Photography thus serves as a mediator of an appearance of being.

But how does language achieve such a reality effect? How does Bashō manage, with just a handful of words, to evoke a scene—a picture of reality that calls to us as real—a scene whose urgency is only amplified by its sparseness?

Despite the absolute contingency of the scene, Bashō describes: “a sort of transcendence arises—that is to say that all of spring, all the nostalgia for the moment as if it stood out, which will never return, is contained within this 'that-has-been'“.2 It is the “sensation that language vanishes in favor of a certainty of reality.”3

Language withdraws, hides itself, and disappears, so that only what is said remains, naked.4

It is not the attempt to describe reality completely that makes it visible, but quite the opposite: only the individuation of a moment, the description of a tiny detail, renders language transparent. In a single stroke, reality emerges in all its fullness.

According to Roberto Calasso, Franz Kafka too understood this.

Kafka sensed that by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and in its pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Then all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named — an inn, a file, an office, a room — would fill with unprecedented energy.5

But how does pure literality generate such a sense of proximity to reality? Why is it precisely this pruning of language to a small, contingent detail that produces the effect of the real—or rather: effect of reality?6

Perhaps the answer lies in the imbalance between signifier and signified that Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out:

a fundamental situation perseveres which arises out of the human condition: namely, that man has from the start had at his disposition a signifier-totality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less unknown for being given.7

Words always say less than theoretically could be said. No matter how many words we use, we never fully reach reality. This imbalance—a finite field of signifiers facing an infinitely complex world of signifieds—can be described as a relation of potentiality: the potential of language arises from the epistemological asymmetry between the infinity of meanings and the finitude of available signs. Only because language always says less than it could, does it function as an infinite field of possible utterances.

It is therefore precisely this failure—the not-enough of language—that allows it to transcend itself. Only the impossibility of naming everything opens language to reality.

Sniffed
by the kitten
a snail
― Saimaro

The reality effect of language thus reveals itself as that moment when the potentiality of language becomes palpable—when the lack of language short-circuits with the abundance of reality. Not because it says everything, but because it says less than it could. Precisely where language names the least—where its potential for further naming is greatest—this potential shines through the few words. Language, in its potentiality, points beyond itself: toward reality.

No other sound
Than the downpour
On a summer evening
― Issa

⧉ Fields

Philosophy, Language, Philosophy of Language, Writing, Haiku, Literature, Literary Theory, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Photography, Perception, Poetics, Photo Theory, Buddhist Philosophy

⋉ Minds

Roland Barthes, Matsuo Bashō, Franz Kafka, Roberto Calasso, Claude Lévi-Strauss

⧊ Concepts

Reality Effect, That-has-been, Noema, Contingency, Transcendence, Potentiality, Signifier and Signified, Lack, Emptiness, Nomination