“…madness: its most succinct definition is that of a direct harmony between universality and its accidents, of a cancellation of the gap that separates the two—for the madman, the object which is his impossible stand-in within objectal reality loses its virtual character and becomes a fully integral part of that reality.  In contrast to madness, habit avoids this trap of direct identification thanks to its virtual character: the subject’s identification with a habit is not a direct identification with some positive feature, but an identification with a disposition, with a virtuality.  Habit is the outcome of a struggle for hegemony: it is an accident elevated to an ‘essence,’ to universal necessity, made to fill in its empty place.”

Zizek, from Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (358)

This bit from Z. resonates.  My ongoing, currently stuck, project (Appearances: A Novel in 365 Fragments) is very much about the Virtual and the Real.  In fact, the Virtual and the Real are both characters in that wannabe book.  In Appearances, phenomena and noumena dance together in public.  And a recurring iteration of a Chalk Outline character makes orphic pronouncements in fulfillment of Vaudeville without Organs' collective dreams.

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