They lie in the middle of the room, tracing its contours. Mostly women, they’ve ended up here on purpose. In a spate of recent novels, these protagonists shut out the world to truly see it. But they’re different from classic mystics, who often traffic in radical optimism. Anxiously rejecting their forebears, they know that their practices are both productive and doomed. I see them as transforming their isolation into a kind of ecstatic pessimism.
       At first I’d suggested a harsh reading of this recent fiction. Entrapped quasi-mystical protagonists, I wrote with my hot little fingers, abound in recent novels such Róisín Lanigan’s I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There (2025), Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (2024), and Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (published in trans. 2022). Simon Critchley’s recent On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy (2024) embodies the stakes of these novels, answering the question of whether ecstatic withdrawal can ever escape capitalist society with a resounding yes. “All shall be well,” proclaims anchorite mystic Julian of Norwich, one of several radically optimistic female Christian mystics. But such optimism misses the mark, repackaging a classically neoliberal privatization of pain as hope.
       But as I read on, I realized that none of my novels contain hopeful withdrawals. Their protagonists’ meditations on structural domination rather leads to a profound pessimism. And they sit in this impasse and ecstatically revel in it. There’s an interesting parallel to the classical problems of critical theory here, namely the issue of finding political hope in negative dialectics that yield no clear solution. As I was to discover through my own unforeseen acts of solitary contemplation of my anus, this is challenging indeed. I eventually saw these novels and my body in conversation, both performing a form of mystical materialism. In this negative dialectics of entrapment, isolation yields both revelation and its threshold.

^{Paths to Isolation}

For my protagonists, isolation is at first an attempt to deal with societal burdens bearing down. Yet this mission quickly crumbles as despair pushes up against elation.

      In I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There, protagonist Áine and her boyfriend Elliot find an apartment in London. The walls soon close in as Áine suffers from a mysterious illness within the haunted flat and Elliot refuses to believe in ghosts. The acknowledgement and defeat of these spirits would mean breaking out of a system of capitalist extraction, but Áine is not able to convince Elliot of an alternative way of life. Their relationship implodes, their own spirits broken. The novel ends with Áine renting a tiny studio, a place to finally efface her desires for change: “if there was an itch, she didn’t scratch it.”^[1] The new, “womblike” apartment is the site of a rebirth from which she never departs.

      Such pessimistic entrapment challenges Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism, in which he argues that early modern monastic mystical experiences reemerge in loosely transcendental secular modern encounters. This mysticism is a practice of pushing outside the boundaries of the self in religious practice, music, poetry, prose, sex, and intoxication. Our post-COVID moment is a particularly good chance to reflect on how this intersects with the shared experience of often-ascetic and sometimes mystical isolation encountered during pandemic lockdowns. If we embrace mystical ecstasy, Critchley argues, perhaps “we will find something else, some kind of joy, some kind of liberation and elevation, a sense that, despite everything, all shall be well.”^[2] Perhaps we will find relief from the misery of contemporary life in which we suffer relentlessly yet believe in nothing.

      One can practically hear the collective sigh from Critchley’s philosophy colleagues, exemplified by his conversation with James Butler on London Review Bookshop’s podcast.^[3] “Isn’t all of this just escapism from real problems like suffering?” Butler asks at one point.

      “In a way it is, yeah,” mumbles Critchley. His mumble is justified in the sense that philosophy is often downright hostile to the realms of religion and mysticism. In my research on his colleague, philosopher Gillian Rose, responses to her end-of-life conversion to Anglican Christianity treat this as the ultimate betrayal of her Marxist roots. It is precisely this sense of optimistic affirmation that is at issue, underlining philosophy as skeptical and pessimistic and mysticism as uncritical, optimistic, and ultimately naïve. Martin Jay exemplifies this in his withering 1997 obituary for Rose, writing “So in the end, it turns out that Gillian Rose, who for so many years presented herself as an advocate of negative dialectics and ‘revolutionary practice’…was really harboring a theologically-inspired urge to be a yea-sayer, someone who could look at all the ugliness and horror of life and still see reconciliation.”^[4]

      Critchley himself echoes this binary, positioning optimistic mysticism against skeptical philosophy (excluding Nietzsche and Bataille) rather than imagining any kind of dialectical engagement. But while his mystics traffic in calm affirmation, my protagonists are neither strictly rigorous rationalists nor yea-sayers. They are bored, anxious, hopeless, seeking not enlightenment but entrapment as revelation.

Anal Enclosures

This summer I turned inward to see whether ecstatic pessimism was possible beyond the page. My body became a site of speculation.

      At first my methods were accidental. I was originally scheduled to take a train to Paris and then southward in late June, the brutalist monastery an affordable retreat in the countryside, all my meals cooked by monks. A friend had finished her dissertation like that! She found a Michelin star chef ensconced with the monks in the mountains…But I also planned this trip out of a half-ironic desire to connect to the impulses of my protagonists. I already spent all day working in my room in a manner that pretty much amounted to isolation; I needed a change of scenery. But as I experienced increasing health problems in the weeks leading up to my trip, I realized that I wasn’t going to get the one I’d originally imagined. 

      I was loath to describe my issues in group settings, always alluding to the vague euphemism of “digestive problems.” Only after whomever would recommend me various teas, herbs, etc. and ask what part of my stomach was ailing would I finally admit that nothing was wrong with my stomach. My anus had developed a series of ever-worsening fissures that arrived after other health problems limited my mobility for the first half of the year. The fissures didn’t respond to treatment. Despite my efforts at recovery, it was eventually determined that I needed anal sphincter surgery, which was scheduled on my original day of travel.  

      “Follow those anal rabbit holes!” a friend urged as we discussed this turn of events. “DE-COLONIZE!” chanted another in the introduction to Berlin’s eponymous smut gazette, political aspirations for the anus inspirational.^[5] Surrounded by loved ones either studying psychoanalysis or leaving academia behind for its seemingly cheerier corridors of practice, it was perhaps inevitable that I would be led to Freud’s ideas on the anus.^[6] Laplanche and Pontalis’ The Language of Psycho-Analysis, a red tome adorned with a reclining woman whose armpit hair folded over at a languorous angle, beckoned.

      Freud saw the anal-sadistic stage, they write, as the second of four phases of libidinal development, unfolding between the oral and phallic stages. In the anal phase, the libido organizes itself around the pregenital zone of the anus, namely around its dual purposes of holding in and pushing out feces. While the subject is able to recognize an external object outside herself, this act has not yet been relegated to the genital zones. Laplanche and Pontalis note that, “At the anal stage, the symbolic meanings of giving and withholding are ascribed to the activity of defecation; in this connection, Freud brings out the symbolic equation: faeces = gift = money.”^[7]

      the anal phase is structured around the retention and release of desire, so is capitalist subjectivity built around the poles of accumulation and spending. My own body seemed to offer the chance to experience the push and pull of these contradictions. It is both impossible to withhold forever and to go beyond these dynamics.

^{Negative Space}

Critical theory’s negative is often associated with Adorno’s negative dialectics, a method in which contradictions of an object, person, theory, etc. are embraced without resolving them. This is because any attempt to conceptualize something, be it object, theory, or person always fails. If we describe a room, we picture a space with four walls. Yet we fail to grasp the reality of this room—not just its air, temperature, and scent but the crush of its shadow against our skin—because it is beyond our abilities of conceptualization. Negative dialectics preserves this tension between definition and what we cannot define. The object, person, or theory itself resists easy capture, creating a means to also refuse capitalism’s totalities. If my body performed the dialectic contradictions of retention and release, the novels of entrapped women brought it into physical spaces of rooms and cages. Confinement is a stage to explore the contradictions of life under capitalism: escape is impossible but life goes on.

      Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin follows a jaded Palestinian woman losing her sanity to the overriding filth (read: wealth) of New York City. The persistent memory of a shekel lodged in her stomach, intertwined in Israeli occupation and dispossession, binds together with purification rituals to scrub the city’s filth from her body. Clad in luxurious outfits that situate her as both money adjacent and haunted by the spirit of capitalist domination roomed inside her, she eventually understands that she must withdraw from the political. “The answer is not democracy, it’s equal opportunity. A clean slate. I needed to start from the beginning, from the roots.”^[8] Afterwards, she gathers supplies from Home Depot and retreats to her apartment, determined to turn it into a mini-Palestine. “The project,” she underlines, “was to create a new natural order.”^[9] Although there is no explicit mention of the genocide in Gaza, the protagonist’s declarations can feel devastatingly prescient.   

      The aim at a new order also plays out in Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. The feminist sci-fi novel follows a group of 40 women confined for unknown reasons to an underground cage, constantly monitored by whip-armed guards who keep them nominally physically healthy but discipline them for touch, overexcitement, or suicidal ideation. Unlike Zaher’s protagonist, they are not trying to create anything, their thoughts rendered soup-like by imprisonment. But when the guards vanish for unknown reasons, the women reemerge above-ground and must create their own system of order. For the protagonist, a young girl who grew up in cage life, the issue is that of seeming freedom on this seemingly foreign planet ultimately mirroring her original conditions of imprisonment. Wide open spaces become a bigger kind of cage because there’s no external society, motivation, or guiding purpose. One by one the women around her lose hope in the new world and die before their time, leaving her alone. 

      In queer theory, the negative pushes up against the limits of mortality. In No Future, Lee Edelman positions queerness as embracing a Freudian death drive, not because it wants death, but because it rejects a futurity bound up in reproduction. Pessimism in this sense is not despairing, but rejects this vision of child as future. At first, my novels seem to embrace this mission in a manner less queer and more heteropessimistic, or despairing of the future of heterosexuality.^[10] One protagonist never knows men, two choose reconfigured apartments over boyfriends. Yet limits arise. One of the most prominent and devastating examples of negativity and the anus in queer theory is Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Written at the height of the AIDS crisis, Bersani’s text marks a limit in which the negative moves from theoretical proposition to real negation of life. 

      Coin’s protagonist seeks to escape the specter of death by hiding out in her new apartment, now reconfigured with sand, dirt, a boarded-up bathroom, litter box, and blue painted-on sky. On the one hand, she ironically reflects on how this descent into supposed wilderness renders her an orientalist stereotype of a wild Palestinian. On the other, it is a chance for her to both commune with the coin lodged inside her and artificially recreate the natural order as inherently capitalist. “No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty” she tells us before lying naked in the dirt mixture for days.[11] Her “body’s borders were loose, not just physically but spiritually as well” and thus she “ate the dirt, and chewed the life and vomited and declared myself dead, [and] I had the biggest, strongest orgasm of my life.”^[12] Dying once and then welcoming a little death, her body’s borders seem to be left behind. 

      At first the protagonist of I Who Have Never Known Men also experiences orgasms as escape and life force, fantasizing about her cage’s one young guard with determination. In a world in which she must eat, shit, and bathe in front of an audience, orgasms become her one private moment, a secret withheld from the others. Yet she yearns both for touch and others to populate her world, which begins to slowly die out.  

^{Anal Solipsism} 

The medication they gave me after the surgery was clear, lucid: drops held in a brown glass bottle. It had a vaguely Victorian feel, the ritual tipping of three drops at a time into water four times a day, like I was measuring out my laudanum cure in a sanitarium. It only felt appropriate that its side effect was a lightheadedness that left me on the verge of fainting all the time. A tingle would start in my right big toe and spread throughout my body, till my head felt like a careening balloon and feet like heavy, firm stones. In one of these dazed states, I wandered past a store selling fans, chose one trimmed in lace, and tried to fan myself while swooning. The doctor eventually said that the medication had made my sodium levels dangerously low and prescribed a diet of salty snacks. One morning, I found myself cutting open a ripe plum, its insides a shock of deep purply red that glistened as I coated them in salt. I thought of wounds gleaming from frozen Christ statues. Is that what I had missed at the monastery?

      My days were regimented by bright stars of pain during defecation in the morning, then their slow fading. Medication, dizzy walks in the shade (I wasn’t to sweat), showering constantly, eating soft foods, and pacing around my room or lying on my back to avoid directly sitting down. I wasn’t supposed to work in the first week after the surgery, and felt quickly exhausted upon my efforts after that. My body was using up all its energy on one place.

      I mostly felt disgust for it, it being my anus, this needy orifice that stubbornly oozed all kinds of reds, greens, yellows, and browns. My body felt subordinated to the anus, my limbs head face an extension of the anus. Everything making space for the discontented anus. But I will be fine, I chided the part of me that loves complaining. There were no underlying conditions. I had access to healthcare, loved ones who shared bowls of buckwheat and walked slowly with me in the shade. Everything was healing, I just had to be patient.

      I hadn’t given my anus a lot of attention before that. But there was one person, years ago—I remembered this with a jolt on one of my walks—who loved my hands and anus. Of my hands, he always requested photos, preferably with my grandmother’s thin gold chain dangling on a wrist held up to the sunlight. Of my anus, just a readiness for one finger, sometimes two, to be inserted. I didn’t find this incredibly pleasurable, nor unpleasant. No other parts of my body seemed to interest him. When asked what he liked about my anus so much, he replied that it felt like his finger was a key being inserted into the hold of a tight lock.

I floated down the street, hand clamped to the side of my head wondering if there was something to that: lock and key.

Lock and key, giving and withholding. Honks, hot litter blowing about under the strip of shade.

Lock and key, retaining and releasing. Splatters of water from a concrete fountain engulfed by pigeons.

      Main door clapping shut, sucking in the air. My room, a perfect rectangle in which I count one two three four white walls, two windows shut tightly to block out the swarm below. Tracing four white lines, hot air blowing back and forth as the fan whirls. Here I am, finally: body a (w)hole mirror of my protagonists, walls firm but oddly porous, gasping.

^{Lock and Key}

On the one hand, The Coin, I Who Have Never Known Men, and most of the novels on my list are reminiscent of Clarice Lispector’s mystical feminist classic The Passion According to G.H. (1964). Protagonist G.H. sheds the illusions of modern society in an isolated room housing a dying cockroach companion, eventually reaching a state of transcendence. On the other hand, these novels echo commodified mystical trends in popular culture, in which young women choose to stay at monasteries to deal with burnout, “Gen Z’s version of luxury looking more like spiritual retreat than poolside party.”^[13]

      In The Passion, we are left with the futility of modern artifice and the power of natural forces. This is the guiding theme of Lispector’s corpus, which could be described as a series of meditations on bourgeois women suddenly realizing the silliness of money, marriage, and housekeeping upon contact with a larger, primeval force. But in The Coin, the protagonist eventually dusts herself off and returns to normal life with the coin still in her stomach. “You’ll go with me everywhere I go,” she tells it. “We have no choice.”^[14] She has never stepped outside of the system, as perhaps was the original aim of her cleaning rituals, but become further entrenched within it. There is no escape, Zaher tells us rather heavy-handedly. It’s the classic question that Gillian Rose (and about a zillion other thinkers) level at Adorno, ultimately flung right back at her through these novels: can a critique that rejects resolution ever lead to political transformation?

      In I Who Have Never Known Men, it doesn’t. Or at first it doesn’t seem like it. At first the protagonist, who the others simply call “child” until they all die out, tethers a thin strand of hope to the possibility of other survivors on her planet. She makes exploratory journey after journey, only to find bunkers filled with increasingly mummified dead bodies. Her existence is lecherous, taking the leftover clothes, food, and books of the dead until her own body starts showing signs of disease. “I am all alone,” she muses as she dies, “Even though sometimes I dream of a visitor, I have walked backwards and forwards over the plain for too long to believe it possible. No one will come because there are only corpses.”^[15]

      Yet in both cases, if any thread of hope emerges, it’s through the dialectical push and pull of life simply going on. Living with the coin, writing down everything even if the pages crumble. It’s not as satisfying as witnessing the primeval forces of the universe after miraculously consuming a cockroach, but it’s something. It’s not a full ecstatic moment, but bits and pieces, glimpses of retention and expulsion within and from society’s burdens. My protagonists are, at the very least, able to keep sitting in their rooms, perhaps forever tarrying in the negative but at least not fooling themselves. Probably they will heal and get over it in some imperfect way, retaining a shadow of despair as they pull their solipsistic heads out of their anuses.

^[1] Róisín Lanigan, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There. London, Penguin, 2025, p 276.

^[2] Simon Critchley, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. London 2024, p. 20.

^[3] London Review, “Simon Critchley & James Butler: On Mysticism”, Podcast, 61 minutes, Tuesday 29 October 2024

^[4] Martin Jay, “The Conversion of the Rose.” Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997), pp. 41-52, p. 50.

^[5] a.Monti and Erin Honeycutt (eds.), Womanwood, The Smut Gazette

#3, Venus Cloacina: Goddess of the Roman Sewer. Berlin 2025.

^[6] In his 1917 “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism”, Freud writes “[...]As a starting-point for this discussion we may take the fact that it appears as if in the products of the unconscious—spontaneous ideas, phantasies and symptoms—the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable.” (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London 1999, pp. 125-34).

^[7] J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London 1980, p. 36.

^[8] Yasmin Zaher, The Coin. New York 2024, p. 250.

^[9] Ibid, p. 254.

^[10] The term was coined by Asa Seresin in “On Heteropessimism”, The New Inquiry (October 9 2019), https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/.

^[11] Zaher 2024, p. 260.

^[12] Ibid, p. 288.

^[13] Ashley Fike, “Gen Z Women Are Booking Convents Instead of Beach Houses This Summer,” VICE, June 30, 2025.

^[14] Zaher 2024, p. 292.

^[15] Jaqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men. Trans. Ross Schwartz. San Francisco 2022, p. 128.