What if the night of your soul didn’t split you from yourself, others, and the world but, on the contrary, most intimately got you in touch with it?

This is the question which Julie Reshe asks at the start of her Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (pg 7). It queries a cultural tendency, so pervasive as to be nearly unnoticeable, to equate reality with our “sense of the realness of life” and to invest ourselves in what animated it for us: “a word, a concept, a diagnosis, a book, a song, a hug, unfinished plans, and responsibilities; your mom will worry, it’s time to put your daughter to bed” (pg 6). Instead she suggests we might be closer to reality in those periods when we are lost in the abyss of the real, painful and debilitating though the affective unravelling this entails inevitably is:

The whole dimension of words and meaning crumbled and dissolved into a speechless nothing. You cannot describe with words what is happening to you, and why describe it? It cannot be broken down into symptoms and comprehended into diagnoses; it’s too much to put into words. You might still be longing to narrow this whole frightening eternity into something, anything—a word, definition, explanation, interpretation, diagnosis, just to say something that would explain or meaningfully describe the unspeakable. But it is no longer possible to say anything because there is nothing to say; there is no one left to say it, and neither is there anyone to say it to. Not only talking but even thinking seems absurd. You got stuck in a black hole of emptiness, falling into an abyss of darkness, deeper and deeper, losing words, meanings, people, and yourself along the way. You are not even dying from inner pain anymore; you are not disappearing in the torment that you would prefer death to; you died a long time ago. You never existed.

Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead. Pg 5-6

In those periods she suggests we make contact with “the black matter that constitutes the heart of existence” (pg 7). This is reality we spend the sunny days evading, suppressing or explaining away. The associated states are ones we allow into language only to talk about their overcoming, prefiguring the coming transition in how we pathologise our internal states.