By the category ‘subject-idiot’ I mean a subject whose desire has been reconfigured so that external ideological imperatives are experienced as autonomous self-realization. The category denotes a subject who withdraws from the common world while mistaking that withdrawal for false freedom.

In order to understand this contemporary phenomenon, we must, once again, address the basic mechanics and attributes of the ideology that constitutes the subject as such. In contrast to traditional ideologies, which were constitutive through prohibition, contemporary ideology functions in a more perfidious way: as a promise of liberation from ideological suppression itself. In other words, contemporary ideology functions as a form of universal liberation. Before liberalism was accelerated to the level of absurdity, self-expression was partially suppressed in the form of external authorities in the form of Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses which defined the scope of the allowed and the disallowed. The relation was clear. It was the Other, or at least the fiction of the Other in the Lacanian sense (the structural position of authority through which the subject’s desire is organized and addressed), who directed how the subject should act in its social and private endeavors. This was the traditional mode of self-establishment: I am who I am in the context of what I believe I am permitted or forbidden to do. The relation between outside and inside was, in this context, clear. The traditional subject stood before the external law and could therefore name it, resist it, or obey it. The modern subject, by contrast, believes he follows nothing but his own true self. This very belief is the blind spot that prevents him from recognizing his form of subjectivity as the product of an ideology of self-liberation.

Psychoanalysis has a name for this reversal, and the name matters. The classical account of the superego, the internalized voice of authority, still assumed that the subject recognized the voice as authority: hence guilt, hence conscience. The modern reversal is more perfidious. The internalized voice is no longer experienced as a voice at all. It is experienced as the subject’s own desire, as authenticity, as self-realization, as liberation. Be what you are! The dynamism of becoming what you already are is not something to be neglected here. Without the dynamism of self-production this imperative would be mere tautology. And this is the core attribute of modernity, the (self)production of the self. Maybe even more importantly, the subject while being actively involved in this process does not feel commanded: he feels free. This is, as we will see later on, a constitutive part of the subject-idiot. The mechanism of reinterpreting demands originating from the realm of the Other as the individual’s supposedly autonomous decisions was brilliantly elaborated in Jean-Léon Beauvois’s Traité de la servitude libérale (Treatise on Liberal Servitude), where he shows how the liberal exercise of power transfers social demands into the individual’s own psychology, internalized and misrecognized as self-image.

Pornography, the catalyst of modernity

Paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, modern ideology established itself as the unconscious, that is the flip side, of the subject’s emancipation in the transition from traditionalism to modernity. Modern ideology emerges as the subject’s expansive drive to liberate its various spheres from the governance of the Other, sexuality above all, though by no means sexuality only. It is no coincidence that pornography is one of the most telling phenomena of this transition. Why? In its modern form, pornography first appears as nothing but self-liberation: it grounds its entire existence and potency in the promise of a pleasure that lies beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The whole dynamic of this so-called self-liberation rests on the premise that the Other is an illegitimate obstacle to the subject’s self-realization. Pornography exploited this formula to the point of exhaustion, until, through the transgression of every imaginable taboo, it tended toward its opposite: the tyranny of mandated pleasure, enclosed within an archetypal image of the subject in which the subject becomes an object to itself. The constitution of the subject through objectification is crucial: in its culmination, the desire of the Other is no longer external to the subject but fully absorbed by him, until it returns as an imperative of his own narcissistic self-awareness.

Crucial to this reversal is pornography’s specific structure of identification. The viewer is integrated into the scene not as a participant but as a structural absence: one who is “in” the scene only insofar as someone else performs the real act in his place. He occupies the scene as an empty position, the site from which enjoyment is watched rather than had. Or at least had as watched. This is already the template for the subject-idiot, the artifact of interest here. Not that the Other disappears, but that it relocates, installed inside the subject and mistaken for the subject’s own will, so that the subject becomes, simultaneously, the authority who commands, the one who obeys, and the emptied position from which he watches himself obey. Here Descartes’ cogito finds its obscene update: I enjoy myself, therefore I am, but only as the one who watches his own projection. What defines the subject-idiot is not merely this act of watching, but the reversal of its direction: desire, once oriented toward the Other, turns inward, so that the subject invests himself, now produced as image, as the very object of his own desire, as moi idéal, the narcissistic image in which the subject invests himself. To be more concrete: Pornography has shaped literal aesthetic norms (body ideals, grooming, staging of the self) more than fashion has. Besides the technology of social networks which promoted narcissism to the highest level pornography contributed heavily to the stereotype of the modern subject-idiot. The subject produced by this logic is precisely what we must call an idiot, not in the colloquial sense of stupidity, but in the original Greek sense of one who has exited the common world.

Idiotes, the subject without common world.

To fully understand the signifying potential of the word ‘idiot,’ we must briefly examine its etymological origins. The category ‘idiot’ comes from the ancient Greek idiōtēs, which combines idios, in the sense of private, personal, one’s own, peculiar, with the agentive suffix -ṓtēs. In its original sense, the term covered a range of related meanings: the plebeian as opposed to the office-holder, the amateur as opposed to the skilled professional, the political abstentionist as opposed to the participating citizen, and, eventually, the uneducated or illiterate. It is this last, most degraded sense that later became the ground for the word’s modern, pejorative usage. The meaning of a word is always grounded in the specific historical context of its usage. Although the word ‘idiot’ denotes a different type of subject today, its historical origin highlights essential shared characteristics. In the context of ancient Athens, the idiōtēs was a citizen who withdrew from public engagement, and in doing so, withdrew from the common moral framework that democratic life depended on. He exited common world of freedom. To properly understand this we must reference Hannah Arendt’s work The Human Condition in which she points out that idiōtēs is the private man, who lives in oikos, the household or realm of necessity of survival which is in direct opposition to polis, the realm of freedom, speech and action. Aristotle added a professional dimension to the basic, restrictive scope of the word “idiot”. He used the word idiōtēs across his oeuvre to depict a person as layman, someone outside the world of expertise. This was probably decisive for the pejorative shift of the word towards latin idiota, which quickly became synonymous with “ignorant, uneducated”. The political diagnosis collapsed into a cognitive insult.

Become What You Are: The Idiot as Modern Ideology’s Masterpiece

The modern idiot is not the classical idiōtēs in the strict sense of cognitive incapacity. He does not merely withdraw from the common world; on the contrary, he celebrates its absence in the most ignorant and arrogant manner possible. Where the ancients saw withdrawal as a deficiency, modern ideology has taught him to experience his private, capricious tendencies as the highest level of personal freedom, self-realization, and emancipation. Yes, the subject-idiot understands something which can exist only in the realm of socio-political coexistence as his personal, individual right. I am what I am and I can do whatever I want. Nobody is here to stop me. Nor will I stop myself. Doing what I want, in other words becoming what I am, is my universal human right. This is the crucial difference: the ancient idiōtēs withdrew from the world entirely. The modern idiot never leaves it. He simply never enters the common one, the one based on the collective framework of human and civil rights. He inhabits a vast space of products and plans, indefinitely available for his self-realization, mistaking this space of consumption for the space of coexistence.

If we reapply Arendt’s distinction between oikos (necessity, private survival) and polis (freedom, speech, action), we could say that the subject-idiot never withdraws from the public; he instead colonizes it with the logic of the oikos. The obsessive public sharing of the most trivial aspects of personal life, the brutal competition of personal branding, the proliferation of pseudo-religious self-optimization movements: these are only a few expressions of household logic colonizing the public sphere. Naturally, this transforms the public landscape itself: a space increasingly defined by hyper-distributed opinion, sensationalized news, the sexualization of everyday life, and the unchecked circulation of every kind of folly. In short, with the rise of the subject-idiot, the public sphere itself becomes idiotic.

Less than being uneducated or ignorant in the strict sense, the subject-idiot is cognitively and emotionally limited in his capacity to comprehend the world as a space of collective interaction among equals, rather than as his personal right or possession. He is just too special to be merely equal. To justify this socially destructive position, he deploys his own microrationality, a cognitive (in)capacity that serves primarily to justify any kind of idiosyncratic tendency. This form of microrationality is highly perfidious, since it provides the fictitious appearance of rationality while justifying various forms of socially irrational behavior. This precise self-depiction helps the subject-idiot justify any kind of act, to the highest degree of perversion. He thinks he is fully right when he is totally wrong.

Nietzsche’s imperative Werde, der du bist, “Become who you are” (The Gay Science, §270), itself borrowed from Pindar’s Pythian Ode II, 73 (genoi’ hoios essi mathōn), echoes, perverted, in the subject-idiot’s flattened “I am what I am.” Where Nietzsche’s imperative demands an endless, agonistic self-overcoming, the subject-idiot’s injunction to enjoy, to simply be oneself, collapses that striving into static self-satisfaction. Not a task, but an alibi. In a similar register, Freud’s therapeutic maxim Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, “Where id was, there ego shall be” (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture 31), finds its own obscene reversal. For the subject-idiot, the formula runs backward: Wo Ich war, soll Es werden: Where I was, there shall It be. The ego does not master the drive; it dissolves into it, and calls the dissolution freedom. The dissolution is not spontaneous; it is commanded. The superego’s injunction to enjoy has made the drive itself a duty, so that surrender to the It is experienced as obedience to nothing but oneself.

The common social reality this produces we face each day. Subject-idiots are everywhere. They run the most important countries. They lead the biggest companies. They cut us off in traffic and call it self-expression. They have taken over the news channels and won’t stop promoting the next diet. What’s more, they have hijacked many a genuine friendship.