There is no space for objectivity here; you do not exist. And yet, the realization of your non-existence does not cause discomfort. As if you can easily be something out of nothing.
The question remains: How are you still here? How is this possible? Why weren’t you reduced to dust, dissolved into the void, or at least stripped of your assumptions?
Somehow, you ignore the facts, tolerate the contradiction, and cling to common sense over logic: “It can’t be! There must be a mistake somewhere…”
No mistake has been made here.
Why do you think humans invented language? To communicate? Wrong. Petitio principii!
The very moment you speak or think, you are not aware of the language. Furthermore, when you speak or think, none of this is actually taking place within the realm of words or sentences. If there were an acting party in this case, it would be language itself acting; constructing you, your beliefs, the world, and its rules, through its own deeper structure.
Although we can describe the sentence “the human subject is a mere linguistic construct” as truth, we cannot hold it to be the real sentence of the subject to its non-existence state.
We are therefore able to ascertain it, without being able to describe it.
We do not give up.
The Technology of the Subject is the technology of the King. But we have to be cunning here; we have to trick our own brain. Or did you think we would just dress non-existence up in a tie and look at ourselves in the mirror?
Understanding the Subject means understanding its properties. The non-negotiable principle, therefore, is nothing less than:
The Principle of Property
When Little Red Riding Hood said, “Grandma, what a big brain you have!”, the Big Bad Wolf replied, “All the better to distribute my property with, my child.”
Further down the road, were you to ask a passerby, “To whom does all this belong?”, they would answer with absolute conviction: “Why, to the King, of course! We live in the Kingdom, do we not? Have you lost your mind?”
Since early childhood, the ownership of things is taken for granted. We cannot tell if it is something we learn or something we already know. But everything “ought” to belong somewhere. And yet, what is the profit of this obligation? We owe it to ourselves to pause here avoiding common sense… and perhaps even stand upside down.
Traditionally, philosophy examines Being, but here, Having takes precedence. Ownership seems self-evident, a law where everything “ought” to belong to something else. But why must everything belong to a subject? Why is existence bound to a primordial debt?
The solution is simple but not obvious. Knowing you exist means binding a Primordial Subject to NOT knowing that it owes to own as its primary function. We are getting closer to the Real Subject—something that can only function within the limits of a certain technology.
What does this mean?
In terms of Language
In almost every language, the verbs “have” and “be” are elevated to exceptional roles. Their functions are simply too critical to be relegated to standard verbal inflections. Keep in mind that natural language is a ruthlessly optimized system. It does not waste words. When it deploys entirely separate verbs to construct other verbal forms, it is exposing its deepest, archetypal structure.
The verb “to be” acts as the primordial existential witness. It binds qualities together to forge identities, while simultaneously drawing boundaries between objects. Correct? Not at all!
The truth is exactly the opposite. Being is a state of fluid, infinite transformation. “This is that; that is the other;…” Where is the boundary of the original object? Was there ever a solid object to begin with? Despite its advertised existential reputation, Being is nothing but an endless deferral of existence. Before an object can “be” something else, it must first crystallize into something solid.
And the only way to arrest this fluidity – the only way to truly exist – is to be bound to the state of ownership. A solidification that only “Having” can execute.
The verbal forms equivalent to “I have” function as a psychological technology. It infuses the subject with an anchor of certainty -a cognitive stability that the fluid, fleeting nature of being can never provide. Grammar school taught us that the perfect tense (“I have done”) exists to fine-tune the timeline of a story. This is just the economy-class version view. Its function is far more critical: it dispels existential doubt and manufactures the secure sensation of an accomplished reality.
-Little Red Riding Hood, did you take your basket?
-Yes, I took it.
-Are you certain?
-Yes, I have taken it.”
Historically, linguists tried to explain “Having”‘s validating power through a temporal illusion: they claimed the Now holds an aesthetic superiority over the Before. They were dead wrong. Why should the present moment trigger more certainty than the past, when language itself consists of symbols with algorithmic, rather than chronological, value? Where is the logical baseline for this supremacy?
Eventually they got it right; the human brain “borrowed” the concept of property (material ownership) to express cognitive authority over an action. Without this executive power of ownership, “being” is too weak a foundation to anchor the subject.
Therefore, HAVING is the wedge that detaches BEING from the Subject. To possess is to execute the cognitive unit. Logically, Having takes absolute precedence over both the Subject and its Being.
Subject vs Identity
At this point, we must expose a logical leap that is far from obvious: isolating “Having” as an independent, abstract concept is an entirely artificial move.
If “Having” is the equivalent of “possessing,” it seems impossible to overcome a stubborn question: Who is having? The question itself unmasks the unbreakable coupling between the Subject and Ownership. It is structurally impossible to conceive an abstract notion of “having” without an equally abstract notion of a “subject.”.
Methodologically, it would be a paradox to examine concepts that cannot sustain an autonomous, abstract form—such as the concept of property.
And here enters Technology of DEΒT; the only entity capable of both constructing the subject and reproducing itself through ownership.
It is a categorical error to subordinate any Technology to a Subject, for the subject cannot be of the same substance as the reality that constructs it. Language, for example – a primal form of technology – is capable of producing the linguistic subject, while simultaneously utilizing that very subject to execute its own reproduction.
The technological paradigm remains elusive within the confines of traditional science. The difficulty lies in the fact that the definition of “technology” must be radically expanded beyond the observable example, to explain both production and reproduction in terms of information.
Let us anchor this realization: the Subject is neither born, nor does it die, nor does it reproduce itself. Instead, it “exists” – a mere possibility of a pure simulated state realized through technology. The technology itself, the function of property-and-debt, remains entirely incomprehensible to the subject itself as the term of its existence.
The subject can pile up endless observations without ever perceiving the technological architecture and its limitations. Much like a three-dimensional being – having absolutely no internal representation of space curvature – is fundamentally unable to visualize how space itself is fabricated.
The technology itself is not bound to limitations, that raises the question regarding its ultimate nature. We shall return to this.
Neurobiology Narrows the Field
The human brain does indeed “borrow” the concept of property – of “having” – in order to express subjective ownership over an accomplished action.
The brain has no native concept of what existence means nor it possesses isolated, dedicated center for abstract ownership. What it does possess is an exquisite capacity to manipulate peripersonal space – the spatial zone immediately surrounding the body, which it believes it can control.
Brain function is a continuous, relentless generation of spatial models.
Through the cerebellum and the motor cortex, the brain constructs predictive models of simulated space. Before anything actually occurs, it projects and predicts the outcome upon this internal spatial map. If the real-world feedback matches the prediction, a foundational sensation is born: “I did this; I am the owner of this action; I know it.”
The exact same cortical real estate processes information regarding both the “self” and its cognitive “possessions” – always, of course, within the boundaries of this private, arbitrary model. For the brain, Being and Having share the exact same neural address. It fundamentally hijacks the networks of movement and space to fabricate the concept of I HAVE, precisely because there is no independent, underlying network for I AM.
When we hold a tool, the neurons of the parietal lobe reconfigure themselves instantaneously, expanding the body schema to absorb the object into the predictive loop.
To the brain, the tool becomes body because there was no other body to begin with other than a body of predictions. “I have the basket” is seamlessly translated by the hardware into: “The basket is me.”
Psychology Restores It
Conscious identity is nothing more than the perpetual recalibration of the predictive boundaries within modeled space. It presents itself initially as an inseparable component of the subject, replacing the raw existential void with properties—qualities that, only post-factum, can be audited to see if they satisfy the criteria for a stable identity.
Once the subject fills this void with borrowed properties (qualities and relations owed to family, society, and the state), the moment of reckoning arrives. Decisions must be made: which ones to purge, and which ones to hoard deep within as markers of identity.
The subject is bound by an unconscious mandate: it will forever owe its existence to a perimeter—a geometry of acquisition and liability that prevents it from collapsing into the absolute vacuum of propertylessness.
Under this lens, identity is not something we discover ready-made. It is a perpetual construction site for auditing a payload of redeemable debt.
The linguistic subject is forced to “possess” first in order to exist, and then spends its entire life trying to sort through the inventory of what it holds to find what truly belongs to it. “Do the things I have truly constitute who I am?” This ruthless audit is the very core of self-knowledge.
It is the precise moment when the subject inspects whether the materials it used to solidify its existence meet the prerequisites for an authentic ontological identity. Many of these properties are discarded as foreign bodies, others are heavily modified, and a select few are retained as the core architecture.
Careful Steps into the Philosophical Regime
Descartes informs us that existence is the product of deduction, carefully avoiding any explanation regarding what a deduction actually is.
Why? If deduction is nothing but a function, an algorithmic computation, then there should be some kind of raw material. What exactly is being processed? Don’t forget what we are trying to compute here: the Subject.
The Subject cannot be a positive quantity calculated through its own presence; it can only be computed through its absence. The negation of existence is the only positive value capable of honoring the debt’s void nature
From all the possibilities of existence, the only necessity is in the form of debt. The only positive element within the Subject’s Being is the denial of its Debt. The Subject is forced to prove its case: it must either pay back (observe) its “borrowed” property – ownership of knowledge – or return forever to the Void from which it came.
And this is what we are trapped observing, over and over, completely blind to what the king is not. We literally lock the arrow of time in a single algorithmic direction: toward repayment.
Why does time flow only forward? Forget thermodynamics. It is just the structure of Debt. Debt demands a future.
The arrow of time solidifies because the Subject exists in the shadow of “possessions”; more knowledge, more experiences, more material goods – just to cover its original deficit. The print of this signature secretly seals the entire spectrum of the “laws” and “observations” of property including one’s self.
Power does not rely on any chains on your ankles. It is hosted from within. The technology of the Subject is the same technology of enslavement to its own debt.
To be cont..
by Marinos Makris