Cynical men bottle time for its predictive value in the form of the reactionary who, once activated, gratifies the violent impulse for instantaneity. Cynical time so produced, placed there by institutions of patriarchy, ensure against war’s final end. Cynical subjects so created enter domestic space to give in their turn SUDs and ACEs and NOWS as their byproducts.

It would be inaccurate to assume there is pleasure to be had in this planned cruelty insofar as cynical men confess through their indirect actions an anhedonic spot that will not out. Yet if it’s said this state of affairs only expresses the inevitability of death that weaker men are unable to stomach due to some watered-down naïve optimism, such a defense seems to need the construct separating life from death to be more real than it is.

What I am talking about, and what I haven’t been able to unsee, is a certain contradiction in the Eros-Thanatos binary. Jan Baker describes a traditional understanding of this binary as it applies to her argument: “We have a desire for and love of life, yet we have weapons of mass destruction and we are currently in the era of the sixth great mass extinction of species: we seem to demonstrate a death wish towards our species” (“What have we done to Mother Earth? Psychodynamic thinking applied to our current world crisis,” in Psychodynamic Practice, 2013).

This unfolding of events does seem to fit the familiar Eros-Thanatos binary, but what’s notable to me about the binary itself is a lack of reciprocity, try as one might to remedy this with some gaudily decked-out philanthropic conceit. In this fixed formulation, Eros, the desire for love, has been placed in the service of Thanatos. The ‘kiss of death’ and the ‘blonde bombshell’ are two familiar tropes derived from it. From both we see the same paucity of affect giving passionate anger. Yet we are not blind to the fact that the life-extinguishing force of Thanatos makes it such that the life-instinct cannot bear its burden.

However, what else is evident in the common usage is an equivocation of Eros as ‘life’ in one instance and as ‘love’ in another. This sliding of meaning appears to stem from Freud: “‘The aim of Eros (the life instinct) [sic] is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus – in short, to bind together’” (Baker). The distinction allows for a greater clarity, that not life (in that instance, certainly) but (perhaps) love may be said to survive the death instinct. Eros in the second sense, untethered from Thanatos, can then be multiply purposed and directed owing to an increased elasticity or capaciousness. It can be aligned with an act of memory whose origin is said to be in the soul. So called “active” memory is this capacity to hold, absent any residue of impression. One is fully present to all that is.

At least, that is the claim. The trouble is that cynical men appear to drink from the same well. Theirs is a bizarre amalgamation of Pater’s claim (taken cynically), “We can pretend to have no personal interest in what could have had no direct consciousness” with Marianne Moore’s ‘He “Digesteth Harde Yron”’ (1941) which they evidently take as permission to reap the fruits of another’s suffering, sowed by them. “Who is ‘they’?” ‘They’ are those whose cynical self-interest betrays them in the eleventh hour, once they find themselves unable to account out loud for their petty villainies which, until now, were borne in silence, confused at one time as testaments to a warrior sensibility or that of a strong leader.

The vital question, with respect to cynical men and their peculiar invention of a masculine womb giving birth to cynical time, is not whether the reactionary opposes opposition but how he expresses it. The question allows for an analysis of how power sustains itself through the accumulation of negative affect and its explosive release. Adrian Switzer’s schizo-analysis of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas traces this exercise of power “in the repressive practices of institutions, governments, academies, etc” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Switzer argues the main character Kohlhaas is not to be read as “a kind of human atrocity” even though “the viciousness of his subsequent campaign is wildly out of proportion to the crimes committed against him.” Rather, according to Switzer, these are the expressions of “the intra-textual network comprising the text as a whole.” Switzer’s analysis is additionally useful in that it brings into relief the distinction between “real” or “non-figurative” revolutionary acts and the kind of violent reactions that we often mistake for justice. The violent reactionary with his tangled mess of nervous agitation seems to issue from a way of knowing elsewhere dismissed by Jacques Lacan as the “affective smoochy-woochy.” Here it refers to a hardly stain-free mode of cognition whose sole affect, carried out by de-subjectified ‘Moi,’ marks the site of the unrepresentable made to speak within a narrowly circumscribed ‘regime of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari in Switzer, 2010).