The Phallic olympics
What you are about to read can be approached as a truth of the unconscious—not the unconscious as a repository of hidden memories, but as a structured, phallic machine, grinding away beneath the surface of speech, law, and desire. This is a myth of the Symbolic Order and its hysterical offspring, a dream or perhaps a nightmare of the neurotic subject’s relation to the Phallus, that elusive signifier of meaning, completion, and failure.
You may choose to read it as a parable of capitalism’s enjoyment, where subjects are enslaved not by external compulsion, but by their own phantasmatic allegiance to a structure that gives their suffering its sense. Or perhaps you’ll find in it a dramatization of the split between psychosis and neurosis—between those inside the Law, tethered to the Emperor and the Game, and those outside, wandering in the formless desert of jouissance.
It is a portrait of two forms of enjoyment: one ruled by phallic consistency, the other by chaotic excess. A world where the Phallus of the Mother is both desired and reviled, where only the neurotic son secures a woman’s symbolic place. A place where lack is rejected, and fantasy reigns.
Or maybe, this is something else altogether. A satire. A prophecy. A joke. The symptom of a culture that can no longer tell the difference between truth and fiction.
In any case, the work is here now. Enter the stadium. Watch the Games. The reader, let your unconscious do the rest.
There was a huge stadium, the stadium of the universal, which held the Olympics of the Phallus—the Olympics of the particular. It was the biggest event in the world. The particularity of the world lived on earth only for that reason: to compete in the Olympics of the Phallus. The strongest warriors of Earth competed in the Phallic Olympics. It was hard to get in, because only the strongest representatives of the particular were allowed to participate.
The representatives of universality—those who had produced offspring that were neurotic males—gathered in the stadium to support their sons. It was the only place on earth where women truly and honestly got along with each other, because all of them were unified by their "Phalluses"—their offspring. Every female who had produced a male child had, in effect, produced a Phallus, and this included her in the orders of the Emperor as a spectator of the Olympics.
Mothers who had produced female offspring were initially allowed to attend, but after a series of so-called "peaceful" protests by certain representatives of universality, the Emperor completely prohibited entrance to any woman who had birthed either a psychotic male or a female. Only those who had given the world neurotic males were allowed to watch the games.
Every single participant in the games was taken care of by the Emperor. None of them had to worry about food or shelter—the Emperor gave them everything, for as long as they participated in the games of the particular. After their career was over, they were still allowed to watch the games, but financial support was discontinued. The prize was the most important part—the prize was the Phallus itself, which, of course, is an object that can only ever be sought, but never truly acquired.
So, the winners of the games were granted honour, and even more importantly, their mothers—the representatives of universality—were given everything: financial security, food, shelter, and the best medical care possible. The mothers knew that their offspring, the particulars-the the neurotics—would dedicate their lives to the game and become, essentially, slaves of the Emperor. They would have no life apart from the particular aim of being the best in the game. And those women who had birthed these neurotic males were perfectly fine with that. They were proud.
But the others, the ones who had produced females or psychotic males, hated them for it. They called them monsters, inhumane creatures, mothers who had produced life only to fuel the games of the Emperor. Still, deep down, everyone loved the games. Because everyone knew: Phallic Enjoyment was the only true fun on the planet, the only path to excitement, the only way to generate meaning.
The neurotic males—the sons of the mothers who filled the stands—knew they were slaves of phallic enjoyment and of the Emperor. But that was all they knew. That was how they functioned. They had a clear mission, a clear aim, and most of them died in the pursuit of it.
It was the biggest show on earth. The stadium—representative of the Vagina, the organ through which particularity enters the world—was the ultimate symbol of universality containing the particular. It was the site where the games were held.
The stadium was the universe—the very place where the particular plays the games of inflation, where he lives and dies in the name of the Emperor. The Emperor, the very embodiment of the Symbolic Order, gave the neurotic males purpose. They did not waste time dreaming about utopias, or fantasising about the "end of capitalism" or a fully unified world. Such thoughts were shameful in the circles of the game participants.
Homage was paid to all mothers whose offspring competed. The neurotic psychic structure demanded such reverence. The mother, after all, was the representative of the universal. The males competed not only for the Symbolic Phallus—the unreachable—but also because they knew nothing was more complete than making sure their mothers were okay.
And of course, the wives of the participants were included in the same plan as their husbands. They lived alongside the particular participants, received the same privileges, and eventually became the new representatives of universality, having produced particular offspring. The games went on through the ages, generation after generation, bloodline after bloodline, giving purpose to both the particular and the universal.
Books were written about the neurotics who played in the games—their ability to remain perfectly focused on the task, their refusal to need anything outside the particular aim that gave their existence meaning. It was the place of concreteness. A place where the universal, was proud of its offspring because of their pure, particular way of existence and ideological entrapment. A place where everyone had a role.
Meanwhile, the outside world suffered. It tried countless ideological fixes for its suffering, but its real curse was freedom, freedom as non-attachment to the Emperor, freedom as being lost in a world unbound by law. That was their curse. The curse of the neurotics, on the other hand, was their attachment to the Emperor. Both sides were enslaved, enslaved to their own ideology.
The particular was bound to the Phallic Games, and in that bondage found freedom. No peaceful protests existed inside the stadium, neither by participants nor by their mothers. Everything had a function—every act rooted in the endless fantasy of completeness and ultimate power.
Outside the stadium, beings were equally enslaved to their idea of freedom. There were no lines, no gender distinctions, no classes, no fixed functions. They fucked endlessly, took psychedelics, and let emotions run the show. It was chaos.
The participants of the Phallic Olympics were disgusted by the outside world. In their eyes, those beings weren’t even human—they were lost creatures, adrift in a meaningless universe. The particulars, by contrast, had a mission. A particular mission. A mission of suffering until death in pursuit of the unreachable.
The outsiders, however, saw the particulars as insane, psychopaths without feelings or purpose, driven by endless, mechanical competition. A fantasmatic split. Two psychic worlds, seeing each other through the lens of disgust.
The birth of the analyst began when the wives of the neurotic participants started producing daughters. Whole lines of beautiful, symbolically integrated females were born. They knew they could not participate in the Emperor’s Phallic Games, so they made a pact with him. They asked: could they use the symbolic knowledge of the Phallus in the outside world? And the Emperor said yes—because only the Law can heal the world.
So the psychoanalysts, daughters of the athletes and their wives, left the stadium and ventured into the psychotic, chaotic outside world, a world ruled by feelings and victimhood. The more psychotic and more broken a being was, the more power they wielded outside the stadium. The mission of the psychoanalyst was to build a new world, a bridge between the structured phallic universe and the unbound outside.
But the task was immense. The two worlds were so extreme that it was nearly impossible to create an ideology that was both inclusive and universal while also being particular and concrete.
The athletes and the Emperor supported the daughters fully. The psychoanalysts took on a truly feminine mission—not to change "him," but to change the world. They created psychoanalytic institutes all over the globe, each with training facilities where the Emperor’s athletes helped the outsiders understand the game of concreteness and integration.
The athletes and the Emperor remained devoted to their fantasy of completeness, but with the help of their daughters, some form of integration began. Both sides—those of structure and those of chaos—started participating in the movement toward a new world. Beings from the outside recognised the beauty of particularity. And the particular saw, in the universal, something worth preserving.
New friendships were forged. New ways of life emerged. The Phallic Olympics endured—but now, not as the end, but as one pole of a dialectic whose resolution was still to come.