Profanation as Survival

There is a particular kind of retroactive embarrassment that comes from discovering a concept fits you. For nine months I had been reacting — writing, archiving, refusing to apologize, refusing to stop being theoretical in places where theory was treated as aggression — and then one evening, mid-conversation with an AI, the word profanation surfaced and I recognized the shape of what I had done. I had not been reading Agamben. I had been venting. The concept arrived sideways, in chat, the way a lot of things have arrived for me this year. This essay is the small act of admitting that.

I want to be honest about what this is and is not. It is not a case statement — the case lives elsewhere, on the site where I have archived it, and anyone who needs the facts can go there. It is not a plea — I have stopped expecting the communities involved to behave differently, and I am not writing this in their direction. It is not even an argument I particularly want to win. It is a record of the moment I noticed that what I had been doing instinctively to stay alive had a philosophical description older than me, and that noticing it made it easier to keep doing.

What profanation is

In ordinary speech "profanation" means blasphemy — the violation of something sacred, usually to shock. That is not what the word means in the tradition I am reading. Bataille describes the sacred as whatever a society removes from ordinary use and puts behind a boundary: the forbidden object, the ritual object, the thing you cannot touch. The profane, by contrast, is what stays in circulation, what you can handle, play with, put to use. Profanation, for him, is not the destruction of the sacred but its return — the gesture by which a thing crosses back from the untouchable zone into common hands.

Agamben tightens this. To profane, he says, is to give back to common use what has been taken out of common use. Capitalism is very good at extracting; it sacralizes objects into commodities and experiences into brands. Profanation undoes the extraction. It does not destroy the object; it restores it to play. Žižek, as usual, adds the twist: true profanation is not the exterior denial of the sacred ("it isn't real") but the exposure of what is already obscene inside it ("it is real, and this is what it actually contains").

Three different emphases, one family resemblance. Profanation is not iconoclasm. It is reclamation of use.

I did not know any of this when I started behaving this way. I only noticed, afterwards, that every move I had made during the worst months fit the pattern.

What I did, in this vocabulary

I kept writing theory in a fandom space where theory was coded as elitism and elitism was coded as attack. I kept writing explicit fiction on the same domain where I posted Lacan. I refused the partition that says academic work must be disembodied and fannish work must be unintellectual. I did not do this because I had a thesis about it. I did it because I could not separate those parts of myself into different rooms, and the only honest surface was one where they touched.

Read afterwards: Agamben. I had returned something to common use. Academic theory, removed from ordinary circulation and fenced inside universities, peer review, and affective neutrality, was back in my hands, next to my desire, where it had always actually lived.

I also refused to play the perfect victim. I was angry. I used profanity. I called specific people specific things. I theorized while furious. This violated the script under which a person in my position is supposed to appear: meek, tearful, grateful for attention, willing to relinquish agency as the price of recognition. I refused that transaction.

Read afterwards: Sara Ahmed's Complaint! describes institutions in which the person who complains about harm becomes, in the institutional imagination, the harm — because complaining itself violates the norm of compliant suffering. Refusing that norm is not a failure of victimhood; it is the condition under which victimhood becomes thinkable at all. My anger was not a loss of analytic composure. It was, in Lorde's phrase, "loaded with information": it registered the shape of the injustice precisely, and surrendering it would have meant surrendering the data.

Read afterwards: Žižek. What scandalised people was not that theory had arrived in fandom — it was always there, in every meta post, every character analysis, every shipping argument. What scandalised was that someone had stopped pretending it wasn't. The obscene kernel of fandom's self-presentation is the disavowed theoretical ambition, the intelligence that must pass as innocence in order to remain welcome. I exposed that kernel by simply naming my own work for what it was.

None of this is a boast. I am describing things I stumbled into. The point of the retroactive theory is not to make me look prescient but to make the moves transmissible — if someone else is cornered the same way, the pattern is now available to them without having to improvise it alone.

The trap I was profaning my way out of

The reason the behaviour described above was necessary is that I had been placed inside a structure that had no honest exit. I call it the reversed-burden trap (internally, half-jokingly, "YGP Syndrome"). Its shape is this:

You must prove innocence — the burden is reversed. Evidence you provide doesn't count: it is dismissed as AI-generated, manipulated, self-serving. Continuing to provide evidence is re-classified as harassment. Ceasing to provide evidence is read as admission of guilt. There is no move inside the frame that exits the frame.

This is what I mean by structural impossibility. It is not interpersonal misunderstanding, which can be resolved by clarification. It is a Kafka loop — the charge is unclear, the judge is absent, and every act of defence becomes further evidence.

Inside this loop, the standard advice — "try dialogue," "assume good faith," "seek common ground" — is not neutral. It is itself a further trap, and it has three parts. First, entering dialogue implies symmetry, which falsely models the situation as two people with legitimate perspectives when the actual structure is persecution on one side and defence on the other. Second, dialogue demands evidence, but evidence in this frame is either rejected or weaponised — every artifact you produce becomes new surface to attack. Third, dialogue is infinitely extensible: the accuser can generate new charges forever, and your time and energy are finite. You lose by exhaustion before you lose by argument.

My refusal of dialogue was not emotional collapse. It was tactical clarity. "This does not ask for understanding" was the most precise sentence I wrote that year.

And this is where the connection closes. Profanation is what becomes available when dialogue is foreclosed. If I cannot speak inside the community's frame without being eaten by it, I can step sideways — into theory, into archive, into an explicitly autobiographical register that the frame has no grammar for. The persecution assumed I would either apologise or break. Profanation was the third option: keep writing, keep existing, keep building a surface that their rules could not reach because it had already redefined the terms.

The word for what they wanted was social murder — Engels's term from 1845, revived in our century by Dorling, and exact for this case. Digital persecution kills socially without leaving a body. Accounts, interlocutors, standing are removed one by one until the person no longer exists in the public sphere they used to inhabit. What profanation resists is not the deletion itself — I lost most of my accounts, and that loss was real — but the erasure of the record of deletion. The archive I built is not a comeback. It is a headstone I carved myself, with the name spelled correctly.

What this writing is for

I said at the start that this is not a case statement or a plea. It is also not a recipe. I do not think other people should copy what I did. The specific combination of instincts I had — stubborn, theoretical, unapologetic about desire, allergic to apology under coercion — is mine, and someone else's survival will look different.

What I do want to leave behind is the vocabulary. Profanation as a name for what you do when you refuse to let any authority, norm, or sacred strip you of the freedom to use your own experience. Reversed-burden trap as a name for the shape of the impossibility you might be inside. Social murder as a name for what was being done to you that no one was willing to call by its weight. Having names for these things does not undo them. But it does — I can confirm from the inside — make them smaller.

This is a record, not a manifesto. I wrote it so that the year has a shape, and so that the shape belongs to me.

A note on method

The theoretical apparatus here was assembled after the fact, partly in dialogue with an AI interlocutor at a point when human dialogue had been withdrawn. That condition — forced interlocution with a machine because humans had refused the role — is itself part of what this essay is about, and I mark it here rather than hiding it in an endnote.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort. Zone Books, 2007.

Ahmed, Sara. Complaint! Duke University Press, 2021.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. City Lights Books, 1986.

Dorling, Danny. Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists. 2nd ed. Policy Press, 2015.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845. Penguin, 1987.

Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of Anger." Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. Verso, 1999.