For Jacques Lacan, the 'sinthome'—a meaningless psychic reinforcement shaped in contingent relation to one's idiosyncratic experience of enjoyment [jouissance]—can, in certain instances, be identified with in a way that allows an Artist to sidestep the Name-of-the-Father (a castrating invitation into language) on behalf of a self-naming capacity. Such identification is reserved for the most radical creators (such as James Joyce) who are able to externalize and manipulate the sinthome's non-signifying jouissant materiality—what Lacan terms 'lalangue' (abstract, excessive, homophonic, and non-representable pre-linguistic substrate)—in the production of art that is alienating in its meaninglessness and infamous in its indigestibility. In doing so, sinthomatic art allows the Artist to break with the usual mechanics of the signifier (with its racialized, colonial, and patriarchal baggage) and to instate themselves as the progenitor of their own symbolic universe (hence the era of 'Joyceans' following from the publication of ‘Finnegans Wake').

This paper will comment on the possibility of engaging in creative play with 'lalangue' in a way that refuses the urge to liberal-individual self-nomination. Should radical, sinthomatic artistic practice—as antagonism against existing linguistic/representational systems—necessitate only the Artist's liberation (beyond symbolic rule), while everyone else is left to discover their own idiosyncratic means of coping with oppression and loss? Or is it possible to theorize a creative praxis of 'lalangue' that could—in inspiring not hyper-individual experiences of infamy but collective encounters with shared precarity within a phallogocentric order—dethrone once and for all the often violent enforcement of boundaries between signification and its others?

Policing has always put safety first. What marks today’s “dark times” is that, despite this enduring orientation, a growing sense of unsafety is felt within the police—and this perception increasingly spills over into society, shaping public expectations, legitimacy discourses, and everyday encounters with authority.

This paper develops a systems-theoretical account of this paradoxical dynamic: the Officer-Safety Paradox. Drawing on form theory and the concept of operational closure, “officer safety” is analyzed as a reflexive operation that seeks to guarantee the continuation of policing by securing the conditions of its own possibility. Within the distinction safe/unsafe, every attempt to produce safety necessarily reproduces the difference that makes safety meaningful—thus continuously generating new observations of danger.

From this perspective, danger is not an external threat but an internal semantic function that stabilizes the form of policing under conditions of uncertainty. The well-known “danger narrative” of contemporary policing (Eisenberg, 2023; Sierra-Arévalo, 2024; Staller et al., 2023) appears not as deviation or pathology but as the operative expression of this structural paradox.

Theorizing does not aim to eliminate paradox but to make it visible without collapsing operations. A “paradox-first” mode of theorizing transforms danger into insight: it turns the impossibility of complete safety into a condition for reflexivity. In doing so, it reframes officer safety—not as the prevention of danger, but as an invitation to observe how systems reproduce their own conditions of insecurity.

Eisenberg, A. K. (2023). Policing the Danger Narrative. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 113(3), 473–540.

Sierra-Arévalo, M. (2024). The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing. Columbia University Press.

Staller, M. S., Koerner, S., & Zaiser, B. (2023). Danger, Fighting, and Badassness: A Social Systems Perspective on Narratives and Codes in Police Conflict Management. In M. S. Staller, S. Koerner, & B. Zaiser (Eds.), Police Conflict Management, Volume I, Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century (pp. 35–59). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41096-3_3

There exists a post-woke world where physical contact is becoming the exception and digital intimacy our only posthuman recourse. This paper will constitute a return to Freud for the 21st

century contrasting it with Lacan’s return in the 20th. Assisted by Baudrillard’s use of the hyperreal to understand simulation, this paper will contrast modern nudism with the OnlyFans online platform to discuss where the erotic still persists, and whilst one can be seen as liberation simulated with repression of desire, OnlyFans is the obscene simulated where the new erotic lives.

OnlyFans is a platform for age-verified commodified selves; a predetermined fetishized intimacy discussing nakedness as taboo but a Vegan-dependent interactive fiction of the flesh. This paper will propose that a return to intimacy is not gained through a simulated nudism but rather through an increased fetishization of the digital erotic. A closeness of para-social acceptance.

A lifecycle of intimacy, is followed by boredom, break up or death, fetishized objects then shall form dark nostalgia, searched and coveted objects as evidence of a past, coveted ashes, bookmarked books, or unfinished crosswords – the everlasting echo-fetish.

A discussion of Freud’s Totem and Taboo will be templated in the elucidation of the contrasting taboo of nakedness on the beach, with the totemic meal of online erotic indulgence which will become our new original sin, a return in more ways than one.