Total Self-Displacement

Total Self-Displacement is the culminating state imagined in the lover's planned work of performance art, a condition in which an American business success—a man for whom the lover has no feelings whatsoever, let alone dislike—is dropped precipitously into material and psychic dereliction. The term names a radical form of identity annihilation: the victim is stripped of every social, legal, and personal marker that constitutes his existence, becoming a 'deportee from himself.' This state is not merely a loss of status or wealth but a total erasure of the self as recognized by others, leaving the victim ranting and railing in a mad state of complete self-displacement.

The Design of the Displacement

The lover conceives of Total Self-Displacement as the culminating scene of his performance art, a carefully orchestrated sequence of denials and confiscations. The victim will come to a door he thinks is his own and not be recognized by his wife, who will deny that she knows him. A duplicate of himself will ask the police to take him away and charge him with stalking. Security guards will prevent him from entering his office. Hotels will not accept his credit cards. Old friends will back away from him in fear. Lawyers will not take his calls. His passport will be confiscated as a forgery. Each step is designed to sever a different thread binding the man to his identity, until nothing remains but a disoriented figure who only imperfectly understands that something has been done to him.

The Aesthetic and Moral Stakes

The lover insists that this cannot be a story about details, that it cannot depend on a realistic presentation of thoughtfully worked out details to prop up its credibility. All of that can be passed over lightly in montage. The movie should operate in the abstract realm where practical matters give way to uncanny resonances with everyday truth. This aesthetic principle reflects the lover's belief that evil, as it is most often committed, comes of the given life, taking not only its motivation but its form from the structure of existing circumstances. It is not usually a thing of such high-concept deviance requiring extensive planning to perform—yet Total Self-Displacement is precisely such a high-concept deviance, a paradox the lover acknowledges only obliquely.

The Uncertainty of Control

The lover's fantasy of Total Self-Displacement is shadowed by a delicious suspense: the measure of his control over the woman he loves, calculable to the extent to which she can be trusted. If residual feelings of affection in the form of pity or terror operate in her, perhaps to the point of revealing the truth to him, she could bring down the whole beautiful work of art to a crashing conclusion, even at risk of criminal indictment to herself. The lover imagines two possible outcomes: the victim may go crazy, or he may attempt to kill the lover and end up in some hospital for the criminally insane. Both outcomes are sources of pleasure for the lover, who savors the suspense of not knowing which will occur.

The Failure of the Remedy

The lover admits, with a kind of self-knowledge he claims to have suspected from the beginning, that having brought about this crime of usurpation, he will discover that even this cannot stave off his profound, chronic lassitude. Total Self-Displacement is thus revealed as a desperate remedy for an inner emptiness that no external act of destruction can fill. The state he inflicts on his victim mirrors the state he already inhabits: a profound, chronic lassitude that can now be alleviated, if only momentarily, by the spectacle of another's total annihilation. The fantasy of Total Self-Displacement is therefore not a solution but a symptom, a performance of control that betrays the lover's own displacement from himself.