This paper tests a structural isomorphism between two models of subject formation that have never been brought into systematic contact: the psychoanalytic-semiotic apparatus (Lacan, Barthes, Metz) and Islamic esoteric thought (Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, Ismaili hermeneutics). Both traditions, read not as historical discourses but as descriptions of how subjectivity is produced through the event of signification, articulate the same ontological schema: a structure in which the concealed actively generates the conditions of its own manifestation, producing the perceiving subject as consequence rather than origin. The hadith qudsī — "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known" — posits desire as preceding the desiring subject, inverting the Cartesian cogito: not "I think, therefore I am," but "I desired to be known, and therefore I created the knower."

The convergence is formalized through cinematic operations — dissolve, cut, freeze-frame, framing, and depth of field — used not as metaphors but as analytical instruments grounded in filmmaking practice. The paper identifies a three-layered "program" (perceptual automatism, linguistic grid, cultural code) that stabilizes the subject within regimes of visibility, and introduces "de-programming" as the moment when this program fails: when punctum (Barthes) or the encounter with the Real (Lacan) briefly exposes the political architecture of the gaze. Drawing on Mulla Sadra's distinction between knowledge-as-representation and knowledge-as-presence, de-programming names a controlled alternation between interpretive flow and involuntary arrest — a minimal but structurally precise form of resistance to the narratives within which subjects are constituted. The convergence across traditions separated by a millennium is presented as a reproducible analytical result, not an analogy or a case of influence.

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.

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?