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 This Essay Does Not Claim

• "The reversed-burden trap has no exit." (It has at least three: apology that concedes the charge, departure from the community, and escalation to platform or legal channels. Two of them work for some people. What I claim is that none of them left both my standing and my account of events intact, and that I was unwilling to pay the other prices. That is a claim about cost, not about structure — and it means the phrase structural impossibility is stronger than what I can defend.)

• "Profanation caused my survival." (n = 1, and the case is selected by its outcome: this essay exists because the record survived. Someone who made the same moves and lost the archive as well would not have written it, and I would not have heard about them. From a sample of one survivor no causal claim is available. The strongest form left is that profanation was compatible with surviving in this case.)

• "Anyone else in this position should do this, or would find that it works." (I have no success rate, no comparison case, and no access to the people for whom it failed. What is offered is a vocabulary for recognising a situation, not a strategy with a known outcome. The earlier claim that the moves are transmissible is withdrawn; only the words are.)

• "This is what Bataille, Agamben, and Žižek mean by profanation." (The apparatus was assembled after the fact, in conversation, from summaries rather than from the primary texts. The three of them do not agree — Bataille's transgression confirms the boundary rather than dissolving it, and Agamben argues that some separations have been rendered unprofanable, which I do not address. The concept is used here as a description of my behaviour, not as an exegesis, and almost nothing in the rest of this essay depends on the exegesis being right — the exception is the single place where the definition is applied directly to my own behaviour.)

• "The people who stopped talking to me refused the role, and the people who kept their theoretical ambition quiet were pretending." (I have no access to their reasons. By my own description of the norm — intelligence welcome only if unannounced — they were subject to the same enforcement I was, and without the second domain I happened to have. Their exits may have been less available than mine, not more.)

• "'Social murder' applies literally, and the archive is an act of profanation." (Engels's term names deaths produced by conditions imposed on a class; nobody died here, and the extension to removal from a public sphere is mine and metaphorical. And a monument is precisely what cannot be returned to common use: whatever the archive is, it is not the thing this essay is named after.)

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. The sacred/profane distinction Bataille works with is Durkheim's (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912), inherited through Mauss and Caillois. In Bataille's version the sacred is whatever a society withdraws 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. Bataille is useful here for the boundary, not for the direction: transgression in his account confirms the boundary rather than dissolving it, and the movement he tracks runs from the profane world of work toward sacred violence. The reversal I need — a movement back into common hands — is Agamben's, not his.

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. But Agamben also argues — and this is the part I do not address in the rest of this essay — that contemporary capitalism may have produced forms of separation that are unprofanable: museum-ified, consumed, rendered into spectacle in a way that leaves nothing to reclaim. Whether the separation I was facing was of that kind is a question I cannot answer here. Žižek adds a different emphasis: profanation in his account 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. What I take from them is narrower than any of them intend: profanation is not iconoclasm. It is reclamation of use — Agamben's version, not Bataille's or Žižek's.

A note on these three paragraphs before they do any work: the accounts above were assembled in conversation and from summaries, not from working through the primary texts, and the reader should discount them accordingly. Where I write "Agamben says," read "Agamben is reported to say." I have kept them because they name something accurately enough to be useful to me, not because I can vouch for them as exegesis. Almost nothing in the rest of this essay depends on the exegesis being right — the exception is the one place where I apply Agamben's definition to my own behaviour directly, and if the definition is wrong that application goes with it — the description of what I did stands or falls on its own.

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. Ahmed's setting is the institution with a formal complaint procedure — HR, NDAs, universities; mine had none, which removes some of her mechanisms and leaves the norm intact. 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 from "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism," "loaded with information and energy": it registered the shape of the injustice precisely, and surrendering it would have meant surrendering the data.

What I violated was a rule of presentation that everyone in that space was subject to, including the people who enforced it: intelligence was welcome only if it did not announce itself. I should be careful about what follows from this. I had somewhere else to go — another domain, an archive, a register the community had no grammar for. Most of them did not. That someone kept their theoretical ambition unannounced is not evidence that they were pretending. I do not know their reasons — I only know that I had somewhere else to go and most of them, as far as I could see, did not. Naming my own work for what it was cost me the community. It was available to me because I had already decided I could lose it.

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 vocabulary available — if someone else is cornered the same way, the words are 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 every exit I could see came at a cost I was unwilling to pay. 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: the possibility that a document could have been generated by AI was treated as a finding that it had been fabricated — not a standard any document can meet. Discounting unlabelled machine-written text is a defensible rule and I am not complaining about the rule; what happened was the next step. Continuing to provide evidence is re-classified as harassment. Ceasing to provide evidence is read as admission of guilt.

One premise I should state, because the trap depends on it: I wanted to keep standing in that particular public. Someone who does not want that has an exit I did not have — they can simply leave, and the verdict of a room you have left costs less — in my case it would still have cost me the record. I did not want to leave, and I did not want to concede what had not happened, and those two refusals closed the directions that were open to others. Every direction was closed for someone who wanted to keep both his position and his account of events. That is a claim about cost, not about structure.

I call this structural because it was stable, impersonal, and produced the same result no matter who I addressed — not because there was an institution behind it. There was none: no rule, no procedure, no body that could be appealed to or held to its own stated standards. The move I make elsewhere — showing that what looks cultural is actually institutional — is not available here, and I am not making it. What I am describing is a norm regime with no address. 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 an explicitly autobiographical register that the frame has no grammar for. The persecution assumed I would either apologise or break. There were other options — departure, platform escalation, legal channels — but profanation was the one I was willing to pay for: keep writing, keep existing, keep building a surface that their rules could not reach because it had already redefined the terms.

Engels's social murder (1845) names deaths produced by the conditions a class is placed in; it has been applied to contemporary austerity by Dorling among others. Nobody died here. I am borrowing the term rather than applying it, and what the borrowing gives me is a name for removal by increments — a process with no single act you can point to. The borrowing is mine, it is a metaphor, and a reader who refuses it has not thereby taken anyone's side. Accounts, interlocutors, standing are removed one by one until the person no longer exists in the public sphere they used to inhabit. Profanation did not prevent the deletion. I should be exact about what it did do: it kept the deletion from being the last word about it. I lost most of my accounts, and that loss was real. The archive I built is not a comeback. It is closer to a headstone I carved myself, with the name spelled correctly — and I notice that this is the opposite of what profanation is supposed to do. A monument is exactly what cannot be returned to common use. If the concept describes the nine months, it does not describe the archive: what I built at the end was a separated thing, fenced, for looking at. I do not know whether that means the strategy ended, or only that it ended in the one place where I wanted something to stay untouched.

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 the gesture of returning to common use what has been fenced off — not a declaration of subjective freedom, but the de-activation of a separation. Reversed-burden trap as a name for the shape of the closed loop you might be inside. Social murder as a borrowed metaphor for removal by increments. 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 how this was written

The operation here is retroactive re-description, and its weakness should be stated: a vocabulary applied after the fact can almost always be made to fit. I cannot rule out that a different vocabulary would have fitted equally well. What I can say is that this one changed what I did next, which is a claim about its effect on me and not about its accuracy.

The theoretical apparatus was assembled after the fact, partly in dialogue with an AI interlocutor at a point when I had no human interlocutor available. I do not know whether the people who stopped talking to me chose to or ran out of room, and I should not write as though I do. What I want to mark is the part I did not notice while writing: the trap described above includes the step where the possibility that a document could have been AI-generated was treated as a finding that it had been fabricated — and the apparatus of this essay comes from exactly that source. The technology that was used to discredit my evidence is the technology that gave me the concepts. I have not resolved that, disclosure does not resolve it, and it is the reason this essay ends with a note rather than a conclusion.

References

These texts informed the vocabulary above but were consulted through summaries and conversation, not through sustained reading. The list is a record of sources, not a claim to have processed the originals.

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.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912. Trans. Karen E. Fields. Free Press, 1995.

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

Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 1997.