"I've become quite adept at fending off the loneliness that used to rob me of my feet in my early twenties. The recipe is work, casual sex and overpriced cocktails." Carley Fortune, "Five Summers with You"

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"It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." Sally Kempton

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"It's easy to kill someone with the slash of a sword. It is hard to be impossible for others to cut down." Yagyu Munenori

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"The renunciation of ecstasy is a betrayal of our true possibilities." R.D. Laing

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When slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833, the Crown saw fit to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners in its territory. The compensation was based on a concept of legality that has not disappeared from our understanding to this day. According to Hegel, the "existence of free will" exceeds legal law. It encompasses all degrees of freedom. Consequently, a person outside the law, as a merely willing subject, is "not entitled". His claims are contained in utopian phrases. One of the infamies of the world is that white societies can take the position of systematic disenfranchisement without appearing offensively racist.

The Story of Larissa Besnard and Julius-Aurelie Vane

Julius-Aurelie Vane appeared to his age as an adventurer of the mind. His family name carried a discreetly aristocratic resonance. Julius' ancestors had rendered patriotic services to France; he was the grandson of a man who had participated, under Napoleon III, in the reconstruction of the capital — a confidant of Haussmann himself.

Yet Julius merely performed the role of a man leaping across cliffs above an abyss. When he lectured in the smoke-filled salons of the 1930s on the "economy of excess," his mind remained safely moored in the harbor of abstraction. Julius never fell. He watched others fall and typed the sound of their impact into his typewriter.

The machine was a Continental Standard from 1930 — a cast-iron office model, unshakable, manufactured in Saxony for the eternity of Prussian bureaucracy. Vane handled the two-color ribbon selector like a scalpel: black for the academic body of the text, red for the intimate protocol.

He despised ready-made offerings. Mass culture in all its forms repelled him. His philosophy of excess demanded a haute couture proposition, and Larissa Besnard provided it.

Money played no role in Larissa's world. She was an apparition. Imagine any encounter in Julius' office. Larissa wore an ash-gray silk dress by Patou like a shroud casually thrown over the body while passing by. She moved with the negligent elegance of someone raised in a grand townhouse in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Nothing in her posture betrayed the permanent state of emergency from which she suffered so theatrically. She sat down, smoothed her skirt, and placed her gloves upon the edge of the desk.

Larissa did not ask Julius for proof of affection. She dismantled his attitude with the weapons of courtly society. She lured the priest out of her effortlessly distinguished, married lover by steering the conversation toward confession. It belonged to the ordinary escapades of her life. She — abused by a priest in her youth — continued to attend confession regularly.

"You write about the sacred, Julius," she said while taking a cigarette from a silver case. "But you are afraid of the blood on the altar."

Yes — but in what tone does she say it? What hierarchy does she simultaneously expose and conceal? That is the essential point. Julius could have sex whenever he wished: with his wife, with a prostitute, with an admirer. But none of that helped him. He required complication, and Larissa understood this. She served him by constructing situations of exquisite difficulty. She had other lovers; the men differed radically from one another.

This was not a matter of a banal erotic pattern but of the sociosexual sensibility of a class and the mode of an immensely sophisticated mutual exploitation.

Julius' problem was not a lack of sexual availability. As the celebrated "adventurer of the mind" and offspring of a bourgeois dynasty, he could, if necessary, simply sleep with his wife. What he needed was a woman who mirrored his cowardice back to him and humiliated him with it. Larissa understood this. She spoke in a tone of bored, casual cruelty.

She did not challenge Julius. She merely observed something critically, the way one might point out a structural weakness in a philosophical treatise. Julius understood the implicit proposition. If he approached Larissa sexually, he was copulating with his own class. The fabric of money, distinction, ennui, and despair supplied him with a singular fuel.

For appearances' sake he defended himself. His voice possessed the educated, faintly didactic cadence of Sorbonne lecture halls. At times it could exert a narcotic effect. Larissa crossed her legs and regarded him with pitiless distance. She despised his academic evasions; she knew that the glittering superstructure merely concealed a man terrified of risk.

"A comfortable position," she replied softly. "You sit here like a confessor with his hand in his trousers inside the booth, Julius. You collect the sins of others, you catalogue the fever, but you always remain safely on the correct side of events. You want me to dissolve myself so that your ribbon fades from the violence of your typing. But what about your own desire? Or did you leave that behind at the seminar, among the little demoiselles? Believe me — they can hardly wait to compromise you."

We observe the two during their erotic prelude. With other lovers Larissa behaved entirely differently. Yet Julius occupied the throne because he was a prince of intellect who could effortlessly afford an outrageously expensive lunch. He healed her with his class certainties, while she animated him sexually. It was a functional symbiosis. Neither the left-radical activist Belmonte in Brussels nor the Comintern dissident Mirnow in Reims could offer Larissa what Julius possessed: the unshakable certainty of the haute bourgeoisie and the aura of a sovereign intellect who invoked the abyss but afterward would naturally take her to an obscenely costly luncheon at Lapérouse.

Julius offered Larissa, through his sociocultural untouchability, an iron exoskeleton. In return she supplied him with those meticulously tailored scenarios that rendered him sexually capable at all. She served his impotence; he served her instability.

Julius belonged to those failed novices who, at the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice near the Sorbonne, had realized they lacked a vocation. For the length of a cigarette Larissa played with the motif of the voyeuristic confessor. In doing so she touched the concealed center of a neurosis. She invited Julius to discard the armor of the archivist and reveal himself as what he already was in his fantasies — a clerical sovereign.

Even as a child Julius had never participated in dangerous games. When neighborhood boys climbed treetops and staged dares by the riverbank, Julius remained at the edge. He did not run away; he observed. He watched the trembling knees, the bodies striking the ground, the blood on scraped skin. He registered it all, counted the seconds before the scream, and mentally recorded the dynamics of the fall.

"You are a born bookkeeper," his father once remarked, half mockingly, half contemptuously.

The son remained unmoved. What was wrong with staying on the safe side? Why expose one's own body to the vulgar pain of impact when one could consume the thrill of catastrophe entirely unharmed from the spectator's position? This childhood disposition became the blueprint for all his later thought. The little boy who documented the dares of others became a celebrated philosopher. Julius learned to camouflage his stale nature. He juggled concepts like ecstasy and expenditure, yet remained the calculating administrator who never truly left the vault of theory.

Larissa embodied his opposite. She sought the abyss because her body froze under conditions of normality. She was an invaluable gift. Julius punished Larissa for her courage. It aroused him that she surrendered herself to a coward because he seemed to possess a solution for her.

It was a systematic chastisement disguised as initiation into the cult of a secret society. Here a genealogical line opens — from the libertine secret orders of the eighteenth century to Julius' Parisian circle. Thomas De Quincey functions as a hinge figure connecting the decadent undercurrents of the English Enlightenment with the modern aesthetics of excess nourishing Julius' entire existence.

In On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey invents the fiction of a "Murder Club" — a society of cultivated gentlemen who discuss murders as though they were artworks, approaching crime with the same aesthetic seriousness normally reserved for painting or music. Within this murderous irony lies the principle of Julius' life: horror no longer appears as a moral problem but as an object of pure contemplation. It is the direct inheritance of the Hellfire Club, whose aristocratic libertines gathered for nocturnal rituals in the caves of West Wycombe, where sexual excess, anticlericalism, and blasphemy merged under the motto Do what thou wilt into a cult of controlled disinhibition.

Julius considered himself heir to those gentlemen.

Larissa's courage was a permanent insult to his own timidity. Since he was incapable of following her into the flames, he reversed the situation. He used his means to make her pay for her fearlessness. It excited him immensely that this woman, burning so brightly, devoted herself to him with such intensity.

The coldness with which Julius administered Larissa's center of desire resulted from a profoundly neurotic experience. It became his most precious possession within the bunker of a calculated existence. In his fantasies Julius was a priest. He was fascinated by the notion of sacred immunity.

Larissa showed him she was wearing no underwear.

"Imagine you are a boy who is forbidden to do as he wishes," she said softly. "What do you do then? Do that now — and tell me what you are doing."

Messages from the Afterlife

His female figures were direct distillations of Larissa's unvarnished being. Julius translated her temperament into his aesthetics in order to charge his books with an authenticity he himself could never have endured. At best one might say that they instrumentalized each other mutually. He used her body as fuel for his philosophy; she used his intellect and his willingness to play the priest in order to replace avoided therapy with a spectacle of transgression.

In autobiographical fragments the relationship appears as an extreme attachment structured around mutual overload. After her death Julius editorially framed Larissa and contributed decisively to her posthumous mythologization. Between embodied experience and theoretical processing there remained a visible asymmetry. The figure of Larissa circulated within a male-dominated intellectual field.

"The sovereign subject recognizes itself only in the moment of its most radical exposure. The excess of the Other becomes the mirror of one's own sacred impotence. Where the profane man sees merely the destruction of flesh, the eye of the initiate perceives total expenditure — dépense — escaping every bourgeois economy."

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The neurotic game unfolded its effect. She had shown him what he could never become. However much he imagined himself the tamer of her aberrations, she knew better. For Julius, eroticism amounted to little more than the smuggling of exceptional experiences into an otherwise protected life.