It is against this world that has become entirely operational that the denial and disavowal of reality develop. If the world is to be taken as a whole, it must be rejected as a whole, the way the body rejects a foreign element. There is no other solution. Thanks to a form of instinct, of vital reaction we are able to rise up against this immersion in a perfected world, in the “Kingdom of Heaven” where real life is sacrificed to the hyper realization of all these possibilities, to its maximal performance, the same way the human species is sacrificed to its genetic perfection. Our negative abreaction results from our hypersensitivity to the ideal life conditions that are offered to us.

This perfect reality, to which we are sacrificing every illusion, is, of course, a phantom reality. It belongs to another world. If both reality and truth were to be subject to a lie detector, they would confess that they do not believe in this perfect reality. Reality has vanished, and yet we are suffering as if it still existed. We are like Ahab in Moby-Dick: “If I feel the pain in my leg, although it no longer exists, who can assure me that you will not suffer from the torments of hell even after your death?”

There is nothing metaphorical in this sacrifice. It is more of a surgical operation, which provides oneself some kind of self-enjoyment: “Humanity that, long ago, with Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become its own object of contemplation. Its alienation from oneself is such that it is now experiencing its own destruction as a first-rate aesthetic sensation” (Benjamin). Self-destruction is indeed one of all the options offered to us. It is an exceptional option for it poses a challenge to all the other ones.

Focusing on a perfectly integrated reality is bound to entail many forms of exclusion, of eccentric or parallel worlds – not only marginal or peripheral ones as they exist in traditional societies, but worlds that find themselves clearly dissociated at the very core of this total integration.