Recently I've been revisiting the cinema of cuckoldry. You know, those films where a roving Lothario colludes with a married woman to cuck-n-kill her husband before getting whacked himself. There's Double Indemnity (1944), of course, and The Postman Always Rings Twice (both 1946 and 1981 versions). There's the peerless Body Heat (1981), where the woman wins in the end. There's Framed (1947), albeit with the essential coordinates slightly tweaked. Something about the mid '40s and the early '80s synched well with the logic of the cuck.
Forty years on, we're well into another cuck wave. I'm not thinking cinema so much as subjectivity and perhaps even society as a whole. Who are today's cucks exactly? I will refrain from the typical alt-right potshots: soy libs are cucks; wife guys are cucks; watching mainstream media is cucked; et cetera. (Spelling out etc. is extremely cucked, btw.)
Still, it helps to be specific. Those people who go jogging while making hands-free phone calls with a Bluetooth earpiece, those people are cucks. The cucks are the 100k follower Twitter accounts. The cucks are the Opinion writers in the Washington Post. The cucks are the military personnel who voted for Trump (three times). But, interestingly, Trump is also a first-class cuck, perhaps for different reasons. A proper cuck would be Kanye saying flattering things about Adolf Hitler. More cucked is Elon striking a Nazi pose several months later. And even more cucked are those downstream from Elon, his followers and enablers. The cybercucks bought Cybertrucks. We could go on and on through this pitiful roster. In fact, did you know that Charles Fourier once wrote a treatise defining 72 different types of cuckold?
Instead of a list of examples, let's focus on the cuck itself and define it precisely. A cuck is one who is deceived in love and impotent in hate. I've cucked this quote from that great cuck-lover John le Carré, who once used that phrase--"deceived in love and impotent in hate"--to describe George Smiley, the skilled spy and consummate cuck from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other novels. Formerly I assumed spies were the most heroic and triumphant cuckoos, but now I suspect that they are paradigmatic cuckolds, endlessly enveloping faints within faints, planning impotent counter-tactics, barely eking out marginal victories over spans of months or years, forever swallowing their revenge served cold. After all, spies are always away from the nest. There's even a hierarchy of cuckoldry within spycraft, cucks higher and lower on the cucking order; for instance, Timothy Dalton is the most cucked James Bond (everyone knows this).
Cucks are deceived in love and impotent in hate. And digital culture is somehow a perfect landscape for this sort of subjectivity. Honey pots and catfishing. The helplessness of social media furor. AI in particular is a mating call for cucks; oh boy do cucks flock to AI. Is it your kink to get upstaged by Big Daddy Mainframe? Do you long to delegate your thoughts and feelings to an external device? Do you toil to bring AGI into existence today, so that it will be merciful toward you in the future? Roko's Basilisk is an epic entry in the chronicle of cuckoldry.
Although the cuck doesn't exactly want to be dommed by AI. The cuck wants to delegate, to give over. Make it less, less, less...for me. I wish to remain present, but only if I've been maximally outsourced to superegos and ids elsewhere. The cuck is superlatively zen, having suspended himself too much to ever truly simp for anything else. The cuck is bad at love and bad at hate. Also bad at pain, bad at despair, bad at hope, bad at bliss, bad at winning and bad at losing. The attraction of AI, for the cuck, is that AI can simulate all those stimulations on his behalf.
And, yet, the cuck is not a sexual fantasy, at least not in the strict sense. This is very important. Don't assume that being a cuckold has anything do with being a bottom, a masochist, or a sissy. A cuck could be a bottom, or a cuck could be a top. The cuck is not passive, at least not only. Cucks are not incels either; cucks fuck, but they get fucked just as frequently. Cuck is a subject position not a sexual position. The cuck is a specific subject position that combines deception in love and impotence in hate.
The axes of attraction and repulsion are misaligned in the cuck, twisted and diverted toward alternate ends. In this sense, cucks are garden-variety neurotics. Indeed, psychoanalysis has a lot to say about cucks. I will briefly mention two key moments, one from Freud and one from Lacan.
A story is often recounted about the so-called three blows to human narcissism, first Copernicus, then Darwin, followed by Freud. Indeed Freud told this story himself in 1916. If Copernicus demonstrated that we terrestrial beings are not at the center of the universe, Freud wrote, and if Darwin showed that this homo sapiens is merely the result of evolutionary processes, then psychoanalysis will have also de-centered humanity at the level of its own psyche. "[T]he ego," Freud insisted, "is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind" (Freud, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis," The Standard Edition, vol. 16, 285). The ego is not master in its own house. The subject is a cuckold. He is deceived in love and impotent in hate, or if not exactly deceived and impotent, then certainly kicked out of the nest by other forces that animate his own libidinal economy. Some other master has moved in, and he's here to stay.
Lacan parroted this cuckoo language in his own work, agreeing with Freud that "man isn't master in his own house" (Lacan, Seminar II, 307). Yet Lacan went much further in developing his own Cuck Theory. In Lacan's Seminar XIX, the cuck is defined precisely using mathematical language; the first formula of sexuation is the cuck formula. Written as ∃x.~Φx, we can gloss the formula as: there exists someone (a man) without phallic castration. Or in Lacan's own words: "there exists an x determined by having said no to the phallic function" (Lacan, Seminar XIX, 178). This someone, this x, is nominated the "primal Father" by Lacan (ibid., 91). But we can bestow another name, Big Cuckoo, the bird who slips its eggs into another's nest, thereby making a cuckold of the other.
The first formula of sexuation helps to describe the particular sexual alignment dubbed "male." But I suspect it captures the very essence of that alignment, according to Lacan, because the second of two male formulas, ∀x.Φx, (like the third formula, ~∃x.~Φx) is simply a confirmation of the reality of castration, which is the case for all subjects within Lacanian psychoanalysis. So it's the first formula of sexuation that captures the true essence of the male sexual alignment. This is important; both cuckoo and cuckold are coded male, at least for Lacan, contravening the conventional gender assignment of cuckoo (F) and cuckold (M). And thus, for once, this is a story about sex that doesn't immediately blame the woman. A cuckold is a male who is cuckolded by another male, the primal Father.
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I have no culminating lesson to offer, alas...except to say that it all sucks, this preponderance of cucks. The rise in general cuckitude should be steadfastly resisted. Let us no longer be deceived in love and impotent in hate. We need fewer cuckoos and fewer cuckolds. And yet we need Cuck Theory. Someone should write it; I surely will not.
Or perhaps this is the wrong interpretation of the cuck, if not also the wrong interpretation of psychoanalysis, not so much cucked (derogatory) as ethical (laudatory). For these two moments from Freud and Lacan could just as easily represent a kind of ethical subjectivity forged from one's own humility toward the other. Not master in my own house--yes, indeed, because no ethical subject should ever aspire to mastery. Or, for Lacan, all subjects are castrated--yes, indeed, because that best represents the essential finitude of bare human existence. I recall how Jameson would sometimes characterize Lacan as "a Sartrean"; it always confused me, until I began thinking of Lacan's theory of castration as a derivative of existentialism.
That's my best take. Cucks suck. But if cucks are here to stay, if contemporary culture will, at least for now, be deceived in love and impotent in hate, then the best spin is to consider the cuck as a kind of ethical actor, as someone who suspends his own libidinal economy precisely to facilitate the libidinal economies of others.