The Stage
— After God
Bodies, Ritual, and the Politics of Ruin
— After God
Bodies, Ritual, and the Politics of Ruin
EN/KR
: Shattered Star
The microphone shakes in my hand, beating like a small and stubborn heart.
A roar rises—thick as a tide—and carries me toward the center of the stage.
For a brief second my presence flickers, and the stage becomes whole in place of me.
I tilt; the cheers consume me; the world restores its order around my unsteady shape.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Lines of light fall endlessly and close over me.
Inside the steady rush of applause, I stand alone and burn.
The downpour of brightness feels like a blessing, though it lays me on the altar all the same.
Ecstasy and sacrifice arrive with the same borrowed face.
Song and cry, stage and altar—none of them stay within their borders.
Everything moves like one long river, and I flood with it.
Light cracks, sound splinters, applause grows heavy.
The microphone slips deep into my opening and fixes itself there.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Then the paradox turns over.
My body becomes whole, and the stage begins to shake instead.
I stretch into something eternal, swallowing the world, reigning inside the contradiction.
If eternity is possible here, I do not mind kneeling.
I press my face to the floor, stripped without resistance.
I lift higher for you, as far as the spine will allow.
And again the lights rush in and devour me,
and again the microphone drives into the hollow at my center.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
The stage has always held me—not as a place of performance alone, but as a ritual where society studies its own reflection. Desire folds into control; rapture meets violence; and the body at the center absorbs every trembling of the time. I have watched how this body gathers the world’s pressures and reorganizes its own sensations around them.
I understand the body as a kind of script: a living text marked by belief, guilt, pleasure, and contradiction. It is revised relentlessly. Reverence and destruction land on its surface at the same time, inscribing the crowd’s longing and dread in one gesture. Through this rewritten body, the architecture of the world becomes legible.
We claim disbelief in gods, but the forms of divinity remain necessary to us. A figure is lifted only so it can be broken. Sacrifice replaces salvation; frenzy slips into the place of faith. The body onstage becomes the emblem of this paradox—cherished through rupture, praised through exposure. Applause becomes a language where devotion and punishment coil together, and the crowd both relies on and denies the structure they animate. In this I glimpse a modern rite: a secular belief system that survives long after religion itself has thinned.
The queer body makes this mechanism visible. Situated at the margins, it gathers desire and prohibition at their rawest points of contact. But it is not simply the object of repression; it writes back. It translates the world through sensations once forbidden, turning power in unexpected directions and revealing the violence embedded in the ordinary. This body is no emblem of sacrifice, but rather a delicate sensor tuned to the breakage of the world.
Through the stage—and through the body—I watch how belief continues to be rehearsed. Rituals survive in altered forms: in pop culture, in politics, in fandom and media. People refuse the divine yet still search for a body to offer up. The stage gathers that desire, and art gives it form.
Art does not promise salvation. What it does preserve is the moment of fracture. There, the body is revised and meaning rearranged. In that rearrangement a different grammar of sensation appears—not organized around belief, but around perception; not promising redemption, but opening a space for exposure.
Shattered stage. Shattered star.
Every stage eventually collapses, and from the debris a new language begins.
: On the Aesthetics of the Offering
Bodies gathered from different places begin to tremble in strangely similar rhythms, and they are consumed through familiar patterns of looking. For a while, spectators forget themselves. Following the pulse beneath these scenes reveals something more enduring. Forms shift, but the mechanisms beneath them rarely do. Violence is not erased—it relocates. And through this relocation, sacrifice continues to tune the hidden vibrations of the world.
2.1. The Language of the Offering — Violence and the Techniques of Stability
Sacrifice has not vanished; it has simply shed one face for another. The altar no longer stands within a cathedral. Instead, it hides beneath stage lights, appears on political platforms, and flickers across streaming screens. Each day, contemporary life selects new offerings, lifts them up, consumes them, and calls them back again. Blood may not be spilled, but emotion circulates freely, and pain becomes a ritual vocabulary rather than a taboo.
Society constantly negotiates between order and violence. René Girard once argued that human communities do not eliminate violence but condense it into a single figure to keep it under control.1 This is not a relic of older cultures—it remains one of the core techniques of the present. The tone of political debates, the choreography of media, and the structure of stages may seem unrelated, but they share a remarkably similar pulse. Stability forms when someone’s suffering becomes public, and once that suffering is visible, the crowd briefly feels justified.
That sense of justification is thin. Mary Douglas reminds us that an “impure body” is always required for a community to affirm its own purity.2 By looking toward a body marked as burdened, tainted, or excessive, people confirm their own safety. Light appears to bless, yet it also polices. Applause resembles support, yet inside it hides an imperative: show us more. The body onstage becomes adored and surveilled at the same time—no longer a person, but a device that seals the contradictions of its era.
I sense this most clearly in the quiet after a performance. Even when the lights have gone dark, the room holds the trace of something spent. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, this expenditure is dismissed as waste, yet without such “waste,” neither society nor art would function. Civilization calibrates itself through moments that refuse productivity; it condemns excess while secretly craving it. The burnout of a star, the hunger strike of a politician, the exhaustion of an ascetic—these scenes seem disconnected but are all reprocessed as techniques for stabilizing collective feeling. It is difficult not to think of Georges Bataille’s description of sacrifice as “the necessary expenditure of excess energy.”3 Seen against the scenes of our present, the phrase becomes unexpectedly precise.
Giorgio Agamben’s figure of homo sacer—“abandoned between law and life”4—also shifts in meaning today. Such bodies are no longer pushed to the margins; they are summoned first. News feeds, fandom timelines, and political live broadcasts all echo the same arrangement: they seek not a role but a body willing to bear discomfort, a face ready to fracture, a presence that absorbs fear on behalf of others. Their suffering does not affirm an ideal; it becomes an ornament of emotion, a spark that activates social self-preservation. Agamben’s “abandoned one” has become one of the most frequently summoned figures of our time. The modern offering is not excluded—it stands at the very center of emotional circulation.
Ultimately, sacrifice functions as a system for managing collective feeling. People regulate their own emotional temperature by observing the pain of others. They release their anger, adjust their sadness, and steady themselves through someone else’s collapse. Pain is not an ethical truth but a tool deployed for emotional organization. And this tool now works with increasing speed and refinement. Contemporary society produces offerings endlessly—faster, more smoothly, and with ever more polished surfaces.
The altars of this age are unstained by blood. They are built from light, sound, image, and mood. The offering does not die. It is consumed alive, reshaped, and summoned again. Sacrifice never left. It simply returned in a subtler, more intricate language—softer, smoother, and closer than before.
1 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966).
3 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Modernity once claimed it had shed the need for sacrifice, yet that conviction faded long ago. What followed was not the disappearance of sacrifice but its quiet reinvention. The apparatus remained, expanding in reach and emotional density as digital affect, political mobilization, and fandom culture intertwined. Didier Fassin describes contemporary societies as driven by a recurring desire to reinvent who counts as a “legitimate victim,”5 a formulation that feels less like a diagnosis of the past than a direct description of today. The absence of religious ritual did not leave a void; it was immediately filled by a more agile and discreet form of offering. Sacrifice has not retreated into history. It has simply adapted to the present.
Moments of instability intensify this pull. Slavoj Žižek suggests that even when we no longer believe in God, we nonetheless construct elaborate fantasies to fill the void his absence leaves behind.6 People distrust salvation, but they still cling to its scaffolding. Politics, media, and fandom all function inside this emptiness. The crowd does not seek solutions; it seeks a surface on which its emotions can settle—a surface that nearly always takes the form of a body. Anxiety drifts until it locates an object, and once it does, the machinery of offering is activated with startling speed.
Politics makes this mechanism unusually visible. Hunger strikes, stories of martyrdom, and narratives of discipline and redemption recur across the spectrum. Political authority no longer emerges from persuasion or vision but from occupying the place where collective feeling converges. Figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Yoon Suk-yeol, and Giorgia Meloni are summoned not for policy but for their capacity to absorb public rage and exhaustion. They function as “proxy bodies,” bearers of delegated injury. In this landscape, authority is shaped not by argument but by the display of wounds. Rational modernity gives way, and in its place an older logic—sacrifice as political expression—returns.
Popular culture follows a similar curve. When RM of BTS reflected that he is, in the end, only a person facing a volume of emotion that has become almost unbearable,7 I did not hear a simple confession of fatigue but an articulation of an entire system. Stars endure the velocity of collective desire, expectation, and emotional overflow as living conduits. Fans speak of empathy, yet pain becomes swiftly reorganized into narratives of loyalty and triumph, strengthening attachment rather than softening it. Suffering becomes raw material—content, symbol, aesthetic resource. A wound is no longer a crisis but a reinforcing thread in the fabric of identity.
Digital space accelerates these transformations. The crowd that commands an injured performer to “keep going,” the SNS framing of an idol’s hospital bed as proof of resilience, or the posthumous elevation of a celebrity’s death into “evidence of solidarity”—all reveal the efficiency of this logic. Online affect moves quickly, decisively, and without mercy. Targets emerge, are consumed, and are discarded in real time. In such scenes, sacrifice is not a ceremonial event but a continuous process embedded within everyday emotional circulation.
Social media repeats these patterns with ritual regularity. Demands for apologies, explanatory videos, and hashtag-driven persecution now resemble a kind of digital execution ritual. The crowd lines up its anger in real time, and in doing so recalibrates its own emotional order.
Didier Fassin’s notion of the “moralization of sacrifice” originally described the way societies legitimize particular victims in order to stabilize themselves.8 But in the contemporary scene, this mechanism has shifted. It no longer operates as morality; it functions as a technique of affective consumption, a tool for platforms built on mood, outrage, and attention. Sacrifice, in this sense, becomes the smallest operative unit of affective capitalism.
What modernity believed it had abandoned has merely changed pace and habitat. Within the accelerated economies of emotion—politics, fandom, social media, cultural industries—sacrifice returns with new precision. Each time I watch these circuits move, I am reminded that sacrifice is not a myth of the ancient world but a contemporary operating system. Crowds do not aspire to eliminate pain. They reassign it. And in that brief act of reassignment, the world steadies itself.
Sacrifice has not ended. Only its tempo, its targets, and its media have shifted. Today, it is not a religious remnant. It is one of the quickest forms of emotional consumption we possess.
6 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
7 RM (Kim Namjoon), remarks in BTS 2022 Festa dinner conversation video, HYBE LABELS Official YouTube channel, June 2022.
8 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Whenever I look at a stage, I am reminded that it is not simply a site of entertainment but one of the clearest rituals through which society reenacts itself. It operates as an altar, animated by light, sound, and the body. Illumination falls like a benediction yet slices downward with the precision of judgment. Sound carries joy while shaping collective movement. The microphone opens a passage for speech but can also tighten around the performer like a wire of constraint. Onstage, the star’s body is pushed into a position where priest, offering, and idol collapse into one another. The stage does not replace religion; it extends its architecture into a more secular grammar.
Ritual has long reorganized emotion and power around a designated body. Religious ceremonies once performed this function; so did festivals, rallies, competitions, and concerts. Across these scenes, similar patterns surface—repeated motifs, shared rhythms, synchronized gestures, orchestrated light and color, vibrations that pass through everyone present. Norms loosen, boundaries blur, and emotion flows outward into a communal field. Victor Turner describes liminality as the dissolution of thresholds, a condition in which structure gives way to a collective, fluid state.9 Today, that state emerges naturally wherever crowds gather.
A particular charge rises in these moments. It is not reverence for a sacred origin but an energy created through exposure, risk, and collective devotion. This intensity becomes a form of sensory authority, a force that aligns the crowd’s disparate emotions—anxiety, anticipation, anger—into a single direction.
Once the stage assumes the function of an altar, the body at its center is no longer perceived as an individual. It becomes the temporary surface onto which the crowd projects its emotional weight. The star speaks in the register of a priest, is expended like an offering, and is adored with the insistence of idol worship. These roles do not replace one another; they coexist, layered within the same body. Through that body, the crowd confirms its own desires and standards. What looks like depletion becomes ritual, and fatigue becomes an emblem of devotion. In such moments, Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on homo sacer—a figure suspended between law and life—resonates not as exclusion but as an affective pattern that reappears at the very center.10
The height of this structure always arrives at the final moment. In religious rites, the last mark upon the offering unified the community’s emotional field. Contemporary stages reproduce this gesture almost directly. In K-pop, the “ending fairy” marks the climax of this secular ritual. As breath runs thin at the end of a performance, the camera closes in on a single face. Sweat, trembling breath, and an expression resisting collapse combine into a brief icon where sublimity meets exhaustion.
That face holds a double charge—sacred and subtly erotic. Fatigue, pleasure, devotion, and exposure gather on its surface, creating an image that is both vulnerable and desired. Just as saints in religious art radiate between pain and ecstasy, the ending fairy stages their exhaustion openly and becomes a kind of offering. In that instant, the performer is no longer simply an artist but the “final surface” presented to the crowd. The fervor that answers this moment mirrors older forms of worship: the long history of consuming an image that fuses wound, youth, and rapture. The ending fairy signals not death but the peak of depletion, and from that peak the next performance begins.
Ritual structures always carry the possibility of rupture, and this peak is where instability emerges. As emotion overheats, the rhythm of the altar becomes erratic. Collective ecstasy has often led to destruction; history is filled with festivals that turned violent or celebrations that ended in catastrophe. Today’s concerts, rallies, matches, and performances follow the same architecture. Technology conceals the danger, but the underlying structure has not changed.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the lightstick. When thousands of lights pulse together in a single color, the crowd shifts from separate bodies into one organism. Light becomes a reply, fervor becomes a pact, and the motion of the hand becomes a sign of allegiance. The lightstick appears playful, yet it is a circuit through which the collective body regulates itself. Within this arrangement, the star is summoned once more—priest, offering, and sacred surface aligned again—and every tremor of their body becomes an emotion offered on behalf of the crowd.
Truth reveals itself in the silence afterwards.
When the light fades,
when the crowd dissolves,
when the final vibrations sink into the air,
what remains is the residue of offering and the trace of a body spent.
In this quiet surface left behind by ecstasy, I see the political-theological structure our society tries to conceal. The stage is not simply a space of adoration; it is the edge of ruin and the mechanism through which sacrifice continues to operate discreetly. It has not erased religion. It has reassembled its emotional, ritual, and political elements into a form suited to the present.
In the resonance after the lights go dark, I can read the architecture of the world. Violence and devotion, command and fervor, no longer moving as opposites but intertwined as parts of a single organism—one of the most potent political-theological engines of our time.
9 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
10 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
: The Choreography of Lack
The crowd is not after truth. What it wants is a body that can tremble again, a surface that can be entered, a break that can be used. And it is in that moment—when one body falters and another is quietly summoned—that a new scene rises.
The crowd’s desire rarely moves in a straight line. It often speaks in the language of affection, but its trajectory loops back through another body before returning to itself. What the crowd seeks is not another person, but the reassurance that its own feelings are still alive. Someone’s tears, someone’s shaking, the moment someone falters—these become instruments through which people confirm their own emotional pulse. Desire does not reach outward; it completes a circuit.
Whenever the crowd fixes its gaze on a body, I notice a familiar operation. A fracture in someone else is taken less as a call for empathy than as proof that sensation has not gone numb. Collapse functions as a quiet guarantee that one’s own moral ground is intact. The star’s exhaustion, the politician’s faltering, the trembling of someone labeled a victim—each becomes a reflective surface. They do not drift away; they absorb feeling for a moment and send it back. Desire, in the end, is an emotion that returns.
Although this longing appears spontaneous, it moves along paths already laid out for it. Earlier theories imagined the crowd as a force driven by instinct or a pressure that builds from within. That image no longer fits. In the digital environment, emotion seldom erupts on its own. Platforms decide which sentiments rise first. Media offer events in fixed angles. Fan communities outline which reactions are acceptable. These systems do not dictate feeling outright, yet they map the channels through which feeling can move. Crowds slide into these channels, forming emotions less from inner impulse than from structures designed long before the moment arrives.
Within this shaped flow, a single body becomes necessary—a body capable of trembling, a surface wide enough to hold excess, a figure onto which collective intensity can settle. Through this body, the crowd experiences emotion indirectly and reflects that experience back onto itself until it forms conviction. The star’s pain is consumed as evidence that “our emotions still function.” The politician’s wound becomes a tool for staging borrowed anger. Emotion is not truly shared; it is replicated.
For this reason, the crowd does not look for truth. It seeks the next body capable of shuddering under its weight. When someone collapses in its place, the crowd gains shape. That shape circles back and organizes the crowd again. What appears as love begins and ends in the same place. Salvation follows the same pattern: the crowd invokes it, even as it remains skeptical of its arrival. What it trusts is not salvation itself but the scene that performs it—the moment a body breaks open.
Desire carries a hollow at its center. When that hollow closes, desire disappears with it. This is why the crowd, after consuming one body, immediately reaches for another. A different face, a new trembling, another fracture around which to arrange its feelings. Desire does not emerge from an individual interior; it arises from a collective mechanism that keeps lack in circulation. And as long as that mechanism persists, the crowd will always summon the next body to carry what it cannot hold on its own.
Crowds always move toward fulfillment but recoil from the moment it arrives. Completion signals the end of desire, and without desire the structure holding the crowd together loosens. This is why collective longing gravitates toward what is slightly unfinished—a story that hesitates, a promise suspended, a body that seems one breath away from breaking. Lack becomes the loose center that gathers emotion, and only while this center remains open does the crowd feel itself connected.
The language of salvation returns for this reason. The crowd invokes redemption, yet what it truly wants is the delay rather than the event—the tension of something forming, the outline instead of the arrival. Laclau’s concept of the “empty signifier” describes this precisely: the messianic position is never fully occupied, always emptied out and ready for the next temporary figure.11 At the same time, Žižek’s critique of contemporary belief suggests that, in the absence of transcendence, societies construct elaborate fantasies to take its place—a compensatory imaginary rather than faith itself.12 What the crowd seeks is not a savior, but the atmosphere produced by a savior who never fully appears.
Slowly, the gaze narrows onto a single body. This body must show hints of salvation and equally hints of its failure. In politics, the dynamic becomes blunt. A “strong leader” is valued less for skill than for their capacity to absorb collective fatigue and anger. What they perform is not transcendence but suspension—a body that neither falls nor stands cleanly. Only a body held in this unresolved state can maintain the crowd’s sense of lack.
Such a body is not symbolic decoration; it is a hinge in the emotional circuit. Through it, the crowd checks its own pulse. Someone’s shaking becomes proof that the collective is still intact. Someone’s collapse reassures individuals that their own fractures remain unseen. Tears from a star, a politician’s fast, or the tremor of a designated victim become small centers around which emotion gathers and returns. The body of another becomes a screen receiving what the crowd cannot hold.
Baudrillard’s argument that substance dissolves under an excess of signs gains new texture here.13 What the crowd seeks is not a message but a continuation of tension. Not presence, but an opening. Not fulfillment, but the space where fulfillment is withheld. Desire moves only when lack is alive, and so the crowd sustains an environment in which absence is never fully resolved.
For this reason, the chosen bodies must show strain. They must be able to tire, bend, or waver. A body that is too stable cannot hold the emptiness the crowd depends on. Vulnerability, or the suggestion of it, keeps the center open and extends the movement of desire. Through the exhaustion of others, the crowd feels its own ethics reflected back; through another’s fatigue, it maintains its own cohesion. This is not morality but a technique of regulating emotion.
And the scene never stays with one body for long. Once the rupture in one figure is consumed, another is pulled forward. Platforms accelerate this relay—algorithms elevate a fresh fracture, search trends redirect attention, and social media delivers the next trembling surface. The crowd appears to choose, but the options have already been arranged.
Within such a structure, a messiah cannot emerge. The moment a messiah truly arrives, lack evaporates, and desire stops. What the crowd protects is not the messiah but the place where the messiah is expected yet absent. As long as that place remains unfilled, desire keeps circulating.
Ultimately, the crowd survives through lack. To preserve this lack, it summons new bodies, new surfaces, new fractures before emotion runs still. Salvation does not come—and for the crowd, it cannot. Lack is the pulse that keeps the collective moving, the quiet engine of its emotional life.
11 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
12 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
13 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
The crowd does more than react. It creates its own emotional currents, builds its rituals, repeats them, and through that repetition keeps its sense of lack alive. From the outside, it appears to watch a single body, but in truth its attention moves sideways—toward the faces beside it, the shifting breaths, the subtle confirmations exchanged between strangers. What matters most is not the gaze toward the object but the glances traded within the group. To remain part of the flow, each person must offer the “right” response.
As time passes, this emotional structure begins to move on its own. It hardly matters who feels something first; what matters is the sequence in which feelings rise. That sequence follows lines already drawn—by platforms, media, fandom norms, political communities. Emotion does not erupt spontaneously; it falls into channels designed ahead of time. Feelings that drift outside the frame are lightly pushed aside, while those that match the expected rhythm remain. Emotion becomes something performed, a gesture repeated because others are repeating it.
This performance never settles after one outburst. To preserve its lack, the crowd must keep generating new scenes. The fall of one figure looks like an ending, but it is simply a hinge that opens the next moment. Desire does not seek resolution; it survives by holding on to absence. This is why scandals recur, why events are consumed so quickly, why new narratives rise without pause. The crowd does not try to close the gap at its center. It maintains an emotional stage where that gap can continue to thrum.
The mechanism that sustains this repetition comes from within the collective. The object may change, but the structure of worship persists. A star may be replaced, but the affective frame of the fandom remains intact. A leader may exit, but the space where anger gathers must be filled again. The crowd attaches itself not to a person but to the architecture of feeling built around that person. If lack disappears, desire collapses. And when desire collapses, the crowd disperses.
As this structure deepens, the crowd begins to require more bodies. To keep its emotional engine running, it needs new surfaces—someone who can tremble again. It waits for a crack, for a misstep, for the appearance of a body close enough to breaking. This waiting is not a hope for salvation but a desire to keep lack alive. For the crowd, closure is a threat. Emotion travels more freely when it remains unfinished.
In the end, the crowd crafts its own rituals. The offering changes, but the ritual continues. The collective builds mechanisms to arrange its feelings, repeats those mechanisms, and keeps its lack in motion through repetition. Within this apparatus, some bodies are pulled into the center, others drift away and reveal the machinery, and still others shift slightly out of line and create new fractures. In these moments of rupture, the politics of the stage and the body moves into another register.
People imagine the final moment as an explosion, but the first crack usually appears in the body most exposed to pressure. When that crack widens, it points toward a structure that has been concealed for a long time, holding the world together in ways we rarely notice. Following this fracture is less like watching something fall apart and more like watching its interior come to light.
In this sense, apocalypse is not destruction but disclosure. It is the moment a quiet disturbance makes a hidden order visible—a gentle but irreversible change in how the world touches the body and how the body senses the world.
Apocalypse is often treated as another name for disaster, yet its core meaning points elsewhere. At its root, apokalypsis marks the moment something concealed slips into view. It is an act of exposure rather than a scene of ruin. The queer body performs this exposure with unusual clarity. Forces that normative culture tries to mute—violence, taboo, the routes of desire—surface when they meet this body. What appears is not collapse but disclosure, an unearthed architecture that has been operating quietly all along.
Every society hides something in order to function. What it chooses to hide, and the methods it uses, become its order and its sense of morality. But concealment cannot remain seamless. A breach forms, and that breach shows itself first on the body. As Eve Sedgwick writes, visibility often works through concealment,14 a tension that marks how queer bodies, placed along the edges of social order, register the earliest tremors. At the boundary—before language catches up—the body senses the shift. Apocalypse begins there, as a movement felt rather than spoken.
I have seen these beginnings many times: tremors without vocabulary, unease that refuses explanation, vibrations passing among those who live closest to the threshold. What remains invisible in the center reveals itself at the margins. The fractures carried by queer bodies are not merely personal narratives; they map the instability of the structures surrounding them. This knowledge is swift and exact, acting before theory can name it. In this sense, the queer body’s disclosure is not prophecy but a real-time record of where the world has already begun to split.
This is why apocalypse, when it arrives, does so quietly. It unfolds in the loosened edge of a taboo, in the brief slackening of a moral boundary, in the moment something forbidden leaks through the body. I understand this moment as a bodily event. The hidden order seeps outward first through sensation, before repression gives way completely. These small ruptures are the true beginning of apocalypse—not as an ending, but as a way something becomes visible.
Queer apocalypse makes this sensitivity unmistakable. Queer bodies draw buried desires to the surface, return muted violence to embodied memory, and force the limits of normativity to shift. They are not merely targets of repression but finely tuned instruments that register what power tries to hide. The instability of the normative world becomes clearest in the reactions of these bodies, and this clarity emerges precisely because the world continues to operate—not because it has fallen apart. Apocalypse is a current event, not a distant catastrophe.
For this reason, queer apocalypse shares little with religious visions of the world’s end. Instead, it reveals how the world actually functions: through accumulation of harm, through managed taboo, through the quiet rationing of who is allowed to feel what. The queer body does not promise redemption or pronounce destruction. It simply brings things into the open. What was hidden, unspoken, or buried returns through the body. That return is the apocalypse, and once it occurs, the society that produced it can no longer pretend not to see.
Apocalypse, then, is not the end but the moment when the machinery of the world becomes visible. The queer body stands at the edge of that threshold, in the narrow opening where the curtain first draws back. The tremor that begins there is the first movement of everything that follows.
14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
The queer body appears at the edges, but this edge is not a simple border of identity. It is the line where the pressure of social order gathers and begins to warm. The center holds itself steady, yet the first signs of strain always surface at the margins. Cultural theorists such as Régis Debray note that societies often protect their centers while allowing their boundaries to disclose what is shifting.15 The queer body stands precisely on that line, carrying the first trace of what is about to be exposed.
Norms keep their shape by pulling certain bodies inward and pushing others away. But the border they draw is porous. It is less a boundary than a residue of repeated failures to classify. The queer body holds this residue on its surface, sensing—before the center can articulate it—how thin the ground beneath normative identity truly is. The body reacts faster than any discourse, becoming the tactile membrane where prohibition and concealment reveal their outlines.
This dynamic becomes stark in popular culture and art. Crowds adore the polished image of the star but crave the moment that image cracks: burnout, error, trembling, pain. Only when the surface breaks does the crowd grant the label of “authentic.” This hunger is not about the individual onstage—it is the emergence of desires the crowd has long repressed. Perfection is demanded, yet the most intense emotion comes from its failure. Norms rely on this contradiction; fracture is the very mechanism through which they remain intact.
The queer body does not follow this script. It cannot fully inhabit the normative role, nor does it aim to. This refusal unsettles the norm, and that unease exposes its fiction. Judith Butler argues that norms become perceptible precisely when their performance falters or cannot be sustained.16 Through its inability to comply completely, the queer body makes normative language unfamiliar, forcing a rearrangement of desire and affect. The crowd reacts fiercely not because the body deviates, but because it reflects the structure of their own impulses with unsettling clarity.
Art history is filled with such bodies. Ron Athey’s HIV-marked flesh, Gina Pane’s wounded skin, Leigh Bowery’s sculpted and unclassifiable forms—they show how normative categories carve themselves into the body. These works lift the imagined borders of taboo and contamination directly onto the surface, pulling the viewer’s gaze away from the center and toward the edge. Through these surfaces, we see which bodies society has imagined as dangerous and which it has offered up to secure its order.
This pattern persists. Today’s crowds do not simply love or reject queer bodies; they encounter in them the impulses, taboos, and lacks they have long denied. This is why reactions escalate so quickly—fascination becomes fixation, dislike becomes violence, empathy hardens into contempt. The excess is not accidental; it is structural. The queer body becomes the first surface through which the architecture of collective emotion becomes legible.
Its force does not stem from being easily sacrificed. It comes from refusing the role prepared for it. The crowd seeks a body that will tremble in its place, but the queer body slips away, and that deviation becomes a breach. Through this breach, the origins of social desire become visible. The body remains capable without collapsing, operative without reenacting normative roles. For this reason, it becomes an organ of disclosure, revealing what the world has tried to keep hidden.
In the end, standing at the edge may make the queer body appear vulnerable, but the edge is where sensation is sharpest. This body feels the pressures and desires that the world disowns. It moves before the norm can speak, exposes cracks the structure tries to cover, and registers what society fears. The ruptures that appear on its surface are not breakdowns but information—vibrations rather than explosions, beginnings rather than endings. The world steadies itself at the center, but change always begins at the edge. The queer body is that first tremor, the quiet site where the world reveals its fault line.
15 Régis Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
16 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Sadomasochism is often framed as a matter of preference or deviation, but its core is far more political—and far more tactile. It unsettles the grammar of command written onto the body and exposes, at the scale of sensation, the structures of violence that normative order prefers to hide. Gilles Deleuze describes masochism as a practice in which the person who seeks punishment rewrites the coordinates of power rather than submitting to them.17 Michel Foucault likewise sees in BDSM an ethics of relation—one where power is dispersed, rearranged, and reconfigured through the careful choreography of sensation.18 In this space, pain does not punish; it shifts the structure. Pleasure is not compliance; it is a spark that briefly reorders authority.
I understood this most clearly not through theory, but through the body. When I enter the submissive position, it appears from the outside as if power has passed to someone else. Yet the moment the body is fixed—tied, held, made still—the energy in the room gathers around that point. The dominant issues commands, but must constantly adjust, calculate, and respond. Meanwhile, within immobility, I feel how the entire scene pivots. Authority does not rest with the one who speaks, but with the surface where the command lands. This is the first inversion: power does not fall from above; it traces itself along tension, breath, and the minute tremors of skin.
Submission is rarely what it appears. By performing obedience, the submissive shifts the shape of domination itself. The immobilized body is not the passive object of control but the axis through which control must pass. As command meets sensation, its meaning changes. Forbidden pleasure marks the fractures of authority; pain loosens the residues of discipline. In this scene, the body is not the site of destruction but the surface where structures open. Religious rituals once used pain to seal order; here, pain quietly turns that order inside out. Nothing is sanctified. Nothing is purified. Pain becomes an interruption, sacrifice becomes a muted form of laughter directed at the old order. Norms, confronted with this, reveal how thin they are.
A body held in place becomes a sensor. It gathers the traces of taboo, the weight of violence, the pressure of desire more quickly than any other position. Commands slip, meanings drift, and pleasure draws the limits of what power can touch. The idea of a stable “center” dissolves; power spreads sideways along the nervous system, moving with breath rather than doctrine. In this circulation, sadomasochism becomes less an erotic act than a political-theological event—one that rewires the relation between power, sensation, and what a society calls sacred.
In the end, what this practice stages is simple: power does not cling to the one who commands, but migrates toward the one who turns dissolution into sensation. Domination and submission are not opposites but shifting lines redrawn by tension, proximity, and touch. The body held in place opens a space where normative language falters, where taboo folds back on itself, where power loses its outline. This body is not defined by enduring pain; it is defined by how pain becomes a tool for rewriting the world’s grammar—reassembling what remains of old rituals into the beginning of another order.
17 Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
18 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
Across religious history, the sacred has rarely entered the world through clean or completed bodies. Before it appeared as doctrine, it trembled through flesh—bodies already marked by heat, wounds, or imbalance. These bodies were not passive vessels but sites where sanctity and violence pressed against each other, producing meanings impossible to reach through order alone. Religion never spoke most clearly through stability. It spoke through the surface that shook.
The ancient oracles make this plain. Prophecy emerged from voices that slid between genders, from bodies whose outlines seemed to blur even as they spoke with certainty. Their ambiguity was taken not as lack but as a sign that something unseen had drawn close. The message did not rise from a calm center; it arrived through the small vibrations at the threshold of a body.
The shaman follows a similar logic. Their body is crossed by multiple worlds—life and death, sickness and recovery, human and nonhuman—layering themselves inside one frame. They do not settle into a single identity. They shake like a doorway that refuses to close. Sometimes this trembling was read as illness, but for the community it was the body that absorbed pressures no ordinary life could contain. Religion understood early that the center remains stable only when the margins carry the heat.
Christian tradition also refused to anchor the sacred in normative forms. The ascetic, the hermit, the mystic—figures suspended between categories—embodied a kind of openness that ordinary flesh could not sustain. Their bodies, thinned or androgynous or strangely lit from within, formed another passage toward the divine.
The martyr is the extreme case. In the violence of torture, the body did not remain a mere object of damage. Torn skin, exposed wounds, and the nearness of death became the crossing point where human and divine briefly touched. The sacred did not shine from intact surfaces; it moved through bodies already breached, bodies whose edges had begun to shift.
Seen this way, religion sought not an abstract idea of the sacred but the structure of the body capable of bearing it—a structure defined by instability. It favored fissure over completion, trembling over composure, the boundary over the center. Through this instability, religious bodies redrew the shape of the world.
This pattern extends naturally to non-normative bodies today. If queer bodies unsettle the contours of social norms and bring buried desires and prohibitions into view, sacred bodies have long performed a similar task within religious worlds. They come from different histories, yet both inhabit the periphery. Both sense tension before the center does. Both open new possibilities not through certainty but through fracture. The space of rupture carved by sacred bodies persists—on new surfaces, in new languages.
The religious body never promised perfection. It stood where two worlds collided and, through that collision, taught the community how its order was maintained. A body at the boundary may appear dangerous, but religion drew its greatest vitality from that danger. The sacred does not declare itself from the middle. It seeps in along the trembling edge.
In contemporary politics, leaders no longer stand as extraordinary beings. They do not radiate sacred authority, and few genuinely believe in them, yet the crowd continues to summon them as though reenacting an old script. This strange rhythm—calling, doubting, ridiculing, then calling again—does not arise from strategy. It is an emotional mechanism. People gather around leaders not out of devotion, but because they need a surface on which to place their fear. The leader becomes that surface, absorbing what others cannot hold.
In this setting, the body of the leader speaks more loudly than anything they declare. A moment of fatigue leaves a deeper impression than a policy. A brief tremor lingers longer than a promise. Collapse becomes both spectacle and warning. The crowd glares with contempt, then looks again. Anger turns into curiosity, disgust into fixation. Failure becomes a temporary shelter for collective anxiety, and the search for a new fracture begins as soon as the previous one fades. The logic of sacrifice remains intact, only softened: the body is not destroyed, merely worn down until its exhaustion becomes useful.
Within this scene, queer apocalypse offers a different clarity. Queer existence does not extend the messianic narrative; it reveals that the narrative has already collapsed. Through this body, one senses that no leader can bear the world’s disorder, that salvation will not arrive, and that the lack sustaining the crowd cannot be filled by another figure. This recognition does not produce despair. It produces a kind of precision—a way of seeing the world without waiting for redemption to rewrite it.
Žižek has argued that while people no longer hold belief in a literal Messiah, they continue to endure the world through messianic spectacle, through the aura or atmosphere of salvation rather than salvation itself.19 This describes why contemporary politics circles endlessly around failure. The crowd does not trust salvation but cannot detach from its shape. The stage keeps returning, the gestures repeat, and the choreography of fall and rise continues. Replacing the actor does nothing to interrupt the script. What interrupts it, instead, are bodies that disclose how the script has thinned—bodies that show the break beneath the surface.
Queer apocalypse does not reject the desire for salvation. It inhabits the place where that desire falters. It shows a mode of living that persists without the arrival of the one who is supposed to restore order. It allows the world to continue, even when its structure loosens. It hints that a collective may form without demanding sacrifice as its anchor. This body is not a new leader. It is a sensor—an instrument that signals the beginning of another politics, one that emerges when the messianic frame finally dissolves.
The absence of the Messiah is not a void. It is an opening. It marks the moment when another emotional order becomes possible, one in which the world endures without returning to the cycle of offering and reenactment.
19 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
The stage arrives with the appearance of brilliance, yet beneath that glow an older machinery keeps working. Light falls like a blessing, then hardens into a cut. Sound gathers the crowd into a single rhythm, and what seems like seamless technology simply conceals a structure that never disappeared. Follow any performance inward and the traces of the altar emerge. Performance does not replace the religious void; it stretches the language of ritual into a brighter, sharper register. Schechner’s remark that “performance is another face of ritual”20 feels less like theory and more like simple observation. Entertainment rearranges emotion and power with disciplined precision.
At the center of this arrangement sits a body. Concerts, rallies, livestreams, scandals, apologies—each scene depends on the same mechanism. Where ritual once sought the wounded body, the modern stage substitutes exhaustion, exposure, and rupture. Blood no longer flows, but the emotional logic of sacrifice remains intact.
The device shifts, however, when a queer body enters the frame. This body does not remain content with its assigned image; it knows how and why it has been summoned. Butler’s idea that politics begins where “norms falter”21 becomes tactile here. In that brief faltering, the queer body bends the ritual out of alignment. The sacrificial subject once performed without understanding, but the queer performer understands too well. That knowledge interrupts the ritual’s completion, and the crowd feels the ground beneath them tilt.
Ballroom culture makes this tilt visible. The angles of voguing, the slicing wrist, the snap of joints, the gaze that cuts through the room—these gestures are not decorative. They fracture the geometry of the social world. Muñoz’s insistence that queerness is “the crack in the present”22 becomes literal in these bodies. The center drifts outward; the margin becomes form. The ballroom body ignores the map the norm demands, and the stage loses its balance.
Drag moves differently but with the same force. It does not imitate gender; it turns gender inside out. Wigs, padding, glitter, sharpened heels—what appears ornamental pushes gender past its limit. Kristeva’s threshold—where fascination and strangeness press against each other—can be glimpsed through this silhouette, though its articulation here is interpretive rather than textual.23 The audience laughs, but beneath that laughter lies an unease. They recognize how easily their trusted categories can tremble.
The shamanic body widens the rupture even further. It is not contained in one identity; it becomes a passage. Moving between illness and healing, life and death, human and nonhuman, the shaman turns the stage into a thin place where worlds brush against each other. What norms cannot hold, this body releases.
When queer, drag, or shamanic bodies step into the light, the stage can no longer remain an altar. Emotion drifts away from its assigned channels, and the rules that once seemed firm begin to loosen. The familiar rhythm dissolves. The stage shifts from spectacle to exposure, and the breath of worship transforms into a tremor.
As this tremor deepens, the structure underneath becomes visible. The circuitry of affect misfires. Norms lose their center of gravity. The crowd senses that the rhythm that once guided them now leads into open space. When silence finally settles, it feels less like calm than like a hollow.
This hollow does not announce a new order. It marks the moment when the old language cannot hold. In that pause, the performing body does not offer redemption or promise a future. It only reveals. And in the quiet that follows, we begin to see how effortlessly the emotional machinery we believed in can slip apart. The body onstage offers no hope—only the knowledge that the form the world relied upon can no longer carry its own weight.
20 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1988).
21 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
22 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
23 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
The end is often imagined as a scene of collapse, yet within queer perception it arrives as a small opening rather than destruction. When that opening appears, the body begins to sense what had been hidden—textures, pressures, tremors it could not register before. Where the messianic order falls silent, the body fills the gap with its own perception. Ruin is not debris; it is the thin air moving between debris.
Muñoz writes that queer utopia exists “in the horizon of the here and now,”24 trembling inside the present rather than waiting in a distant future. This describes the atmosphere of this moment. Utopia is not an imagined horizon but a minor shift in how the body arranges sensation. After the end, the body does not wait for a future to deliver itself. It begins drawing a different map from the point where waiting has stopped. Instead of looking outward for rescue, it tests a new order on its own surface.
The body after the end no longer carries the weight of others. It no longer folds under fears delegated to it. As the demand for sacrifice fades, the body reveals a steadier and more precise texture of feeling. Once it sets down the burden the world once pressed into it, the body moves according to its own pulse, and within that movement a new ethic begins to take shape. Where the old machinery of distributed pain slows, the sensory field becomes the place where another relation can form.
Here, sensation becomes material for politics. The depth of a breath, warmth gathering at the fingertips, the pace of air crossing the skin, the quiet rhythm of bone against bone—such signals begin to reorder the world from below. When external structures fall away, the world must be rebuilt at the sensory level. Some bodies become organs for one another. Certain sensations braid themselves into those of others. Relations shift according to temperature, pressure, vibration. Vulnerability becomes not a wound but a medium of connection.
This body does not strive for completeness. Its blurred edges, marked surfaces, rewritten patterns, and layered skin allow it to continue. Its force lies not in solidity but in its capacity to be remade. The possibility of change becomes its life. It is not a body that rejects salvation; it is a body that knows how to move even after salvation has disappeared from view. It sustains the world by rearranging sensation.
The end is not a decisive break. It is the moment when an older order fails to function. And the ethics capable of receiving this failure always begin in the body. The body touches the world more slowly now, yet with clearer accuracy. What arises within the sense of ruin is not a new world but a new mode of sensing. That slight tremor marks the first movement after the age of sacrifice has finally come to a close.
24 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
The performing body was the first place where this refusal could be felt. It carried the crowd’s emotion on its surface, turned exhaustion into spectacle, and transformed pain into narrative. Yet it also revealed, with unusual sensitivity, how these mechanisms work. The grammar of sadomasochism, the polish of the idol body, the trembling of the shaman—none of these were heroic attempts to overturn the world. They were slight distortions that made familiar gestures feel unfamiliar. They did not reverse structure; they unsettled it. And in that small unsettlement, the body onstage became a tool of analysis simply by refusing to reenact sacrifice as expected.
What kind of body emerges after this refusal? Not one seeking completion, nor one making promises of salvation. It is a body marked by fissures yet capable of finding new arrangements. It does not hide its lack or apologize for its instability. Instead, it begins to assemble sensation along the edges where norms fail. For a body to work again is not to take on a new identity but to gain the capacity to reorder feeling. It pauses the roles the world demands and rearranges the world according to its own sensory logic. Such small rearrangements form an ethic for life after the end—a politics of sensation that stands in place of violent redemption.
The end is not collapse. It is a break in the surface. It is the moment when an older order falters, and through that break the body returns to itself. Queer possibility is not a distant horizon; it trembles inside these small openings. Another world does not arrive as a finished shape. It is already humming somewhere nearby, and to sense that hum is to build the first structure of the new. This capacity does not belong to exceptional leaders or salvific bodies. It belongs to those who can expose where structure has worn thin and loosen the grip of repetition.
What is needed now is not a body that absorbs another’s pain. It is a body that shows how pain has been arranged, a body that bends the logics that have sustained sacrifice, a body that shifts the language of feeling into another rhythm. Such a body shakes, cracks, and sometimes ruptures, yet in its trembling the world briefly learns a different pace. A body that can withstand fissure does not wait for salvation. It searches for its own way of moving again.
Salvation does not arrive. But the body moves. And in that renewed movement, the world senses—if only briefly—a texture of feeling it did not know it could hold.