Henry Abbott

Why do you love me? I don’t know. What about me do you love?

Nothing really. The “x” quality that drives my attraction isn’t particularly yours. It’s actually more in you than you. And it is only through the “x” that I can desire, for it frames everything I see and touch. Your wrinkles, pimples, bad breath and humanity are repulsive, but the “x” makes it bearable because I don’t like you—I like the idea of you; it’s a fantasy. Absence appears to sustain my love, but the “x” is not nothing; it’s Nothing. The cigarette makes this clear.

Each cigarette takes about 11 minutes off a person’s life. The cigarette itself—smoking—is not naturally pleasurable. And nicotine has psychoactive properties, but in relation to smoking (and in contrast to patches or lozenges), it stands as a special case. It highlights the relationship between desire and Nothing.

Nicotine and social rituals are the initial allure: It will make me calmer; it will make me fit in. The cigarette is only a medium for the object of desire, the “x”—such is the case for everything: “Join the Orient, you’ll find a nice community and fulfilling work (happiness).” Then transference happens, and “All along it was journalism that I needed to be happy!”; “All along it was smoking that I needed to be happy!” The pleasure associated with smoking transfers from the nicotine or social dimension and into the cigarette itself whereby smoking is what now creates and gives pleasure.

But this statement is complicated in two ways:

A) Whereas journalism—any activity—has immediate use-value, smoking does not—beyond the initial appeals mentioned.

B) Smoking is actively killing you.

The commodity—the cigarette—has entered a state where it satisfies no substantive need but only satisfies an urge that it itself created. Where the “x” framed my fantasies, smoking the cigarette, is now the fantasy. It is a fictive need, functioning on an emotional surplus of pure pleasure. Thus it is the perfect commodity: Give me more, buy me more.

And the physical cigarette is not the object of desire; it’s an obstacle. Smoking negates it to bring us pleasure. In that sense, smoking is uniquely destructive. Not destructive in the way drinking water or eating is since in these two a consumer is co-opting the object to build their body. Rather destructive in that the object is being destroyed and it is also destroying the individual’s body.

So far I’ve used “pleasure” to denote what the smoker experiences. This is a misnomer. What the smoker is actually experiencing is morbid enjoyment. However, pleasure and the latter are not separate. The aforementioned “x” quality underlies all fantasy. Then Nothing underlies all pleasure. But in pleasure, Nothing is not at the forefront. It is only when destruction is explicit that pleasure transforms into enjoyment. And enjoyment is compulsive.

“Novelty is always the condition of [pleasure],” says Freud.

And I say that enjoyment does not care for novelty for it relies on the obsessive reenactment of that which gives enjoyment. SMOKE MORE is met only by non-linguistic—bodily—responses like pain and visible decay.

Anti-smoking labels try to recreate these non-linguistic responses by showing tarred lungs, rotting teeth and dying cancer patients. This is, like TV static, a site of contradiction. So tension builds between fantasy and reality when the smoker realizes that real bodily limbs cannot sustain the fantasy. If the resolution biases fantasy, the body becomes an obstacle of enjoyment, an other that constitutes the lack of the subject—my lungs aren’t letting me be happy. But if reality dominates, the production of the fantasy is somehow short-circuited.

The fantasy doesn’t change. Rather the instability of Nothingness or pleasure in enjoyment—that is more visible in the cigarette—fluctuates or arranges itself to torture the subject into climax and out of its production of fantasy. Seeing the tarred lungs is such an intense experience that it overwhelms the smoker’s ability to experience (subjectivity). And what leaks over is felt rather than thought i.e. it is non-subjective, non-linguistic and immediate.

Like TV static, anti-smoking images, when do they work, short-circuit the production of fantasy. And what is felt is irresolution. To think of the feeling would be to subjectify it and relate it to fantasy, which sterilizes it.

Interestingly, my argument splits into two: Be excessive, indulge into smoking because the contradictions of its enjoyment may at one point save you; or face the fundamental otherness—otherness of the body—by embracing your body and feeling one with it.

Shoutout to Chase Anderson ’25 for pointing out the relationship between Nothing and smoking months earlier and helping me develop these ideas.