Poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas disappeared without trace the day his fourth collection, Nothingness, was published at Faber & Faber. On the 25th of March 2026, Martinez de las Rivas wrote an email to Kavvos, his colleague at the University of Bristol: “Dear Kavvos, I have made a decision that was by now inevitable. It does not contain a single speck of selfishness; but I do realize the inconvenience that my sudden disappearance may cause for the students and yourself. For this, too, I beg you to forgive me; but above all for having betrayed the trust, the sincere friendship and the sympathy you have so kindly offered me over the past few months. I beg you also to remember me to all those I have come to know and appreciate at your Department, in particular Abramsky; of all I shall preserve the dearest memories at least until eleven o’clock this evening, and possibly later too.” Later that night, he was reported missing. No one has seen or heard from him since, although a large-scale search operation was conducted by the authorities for several months. For reasons hard to explain, half a year ago I started to look for Martinez de las Rivas myself.

The email sent to Kavvos reproduces almost verbatim the letter Ettore Majorana, the famous physicist who vanished nearly a century ago, wrote to Carrelli, his colleague at the University of Naples, before his disappearance on the 25th of March 1938. I figured this out when I saw a picture of Martinez de las Rivas’s desk taken the day before he went missing. I happened to know Kavvos for many years, from when we used to attend the same type-theory seminar at Oxford. One day, while we were having lunch in the Senior Common Room, I asked him if there was any news on his friend’s whereabouts. I knew of course about his absence, but hadn’t taken much interest in his case until then. Kavvos, on the other hand, was devastated, consumed by guilt for failing to stop him from going through with his plan. He was convinced Martinez de las Rivas was dead. He showed me the last picture he took of him in their office and I noticed a copy in Spanish of Agamben’s What is Real (Agamben 2018) in a pile of books on the desk behind. I casually told Kavvos I appreciate the goodbye puzzle letter, but he was not familiar with Agamben’s investigation and my joke missed the target. I wondered if they might have overlooked a clue de las Rivas left to explain his actions. Maybe it was the spell of Laura Citeralla’s Trenque Lauquen that I had just seen, or maybe it was just Kavvos’s guilt, but I joined the search party uninvited.

In What is Real, Agamben is not just telling the story of Majorana’s disappearance; he is offering a reason and a proof for his motivation. Simply put, he thinks “Majorana renounced physics because he had lost faith in science.” He had “clearly seen the consequences of the introduction of probability into physics”, so Agamben believes the meaning of his decision to disappear “must somehow refer to this problematic context”. But Majorana insisted we should dismiss the psychological dimension, and not try to find a psychological interpretation for his act. So Agamben concludes there must be something more, although the “disappearance must contain in itself, along with its motivations and meaning, a decisive objection to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics”. Because Majorana “realized that, as soon as we assume that the real state of a system is in itself unknowable, statistical models become essential and cannot but replace reality”. Agamben’s hypothesis, which he proceeds to prove, is that “if quantum mechanics relies on the convention that reality must be eclipsed by probability, then disappearance is the only way in which the real can peremptorily be affirmed as such and avoid the grasp of calculation. Majorana turned his very person into the exemplary cipher of the status of the real in the probabilistic universe of contemporary physics, and produced in this way an event that is at the same time absolutely real and absolutely improbable.” He is convinced that when Majorana decided to leave “and render ambiguous every experimentally detectable trace of his disappearance, he asked science the question that still awaits its unrequestable and yet ineluctable answer: What is real?” (Agamben 2018).

So what was Martinez de las Rivas asking when he decided to disappear? The world has changed since the quantum revolution, and the poet knows it all too well. His questioning of reality must come from a different place: in the pile of books on his desk, between two works by Graham Priest on nothingness, One (Priest 2014) and Everything and Nothing (Markus 2022), and Szepanski’s In the Delirium of Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited (Szepanski 2024), Martinez de las Rivas slipped Žižek’s Quantum History. Might he suggest, as in (Žižek 2025c), we “turn around the perspective and celebrate the exit from direct being-in-the-world, the shift from engaged care to cold observation of Vorhandenes, as a big achievement which opens up the path”, as we “banish the fear that, once we ascertain that reality is the infinitely divisible, substanceless void within a void, matter will disappear“? It could very much be so, if we consider his newest poem collections, which are littered with emptiness (a lot of nothing, a lot of śūnyatā) and virtual realities, and the other clues he left on his desk.

Žižek (2025a) places the current quantum perspective on reality, through Rovelli, a step further than where Majorana and Agamben once stood: “probabilism does not just signal the limitations of our knowledge, but reality is in itself under-determined. The discovery of quantum theory is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. (…) If all reality is perspectival, if all properties of an entity arise out of its interaction with other entities, and if all this holds for the entirety of reality which is not composed of things that interact but of ephemeral events that momentarily pop up and disappear, then there is also no substantial reality that underlies this ephemeral world of phenomena—then the only Absolute, the only X beneath the dance of events, is the Void (sunyata), and this includes also the Self which has no substantial content outside its interactions with others and external reality.” Of course, he notes that “such a notion of the Void obfuscates the key tension between the global ontological Void which is all-encompassing and the Void of a Self which is point-like, puncturing, violently negating all external reality.” And paraphrasing Hegel, “it is crucial to conceive the Void not just as Substance but also as Subject”, as “the void is not just the all-encompassing void as the medium of interrelations that form our reality but also the singular point through which we maintain a minimal distance towards reality” (Žižek 2025c). He then goes on reformulating his point in terms of the distinction nothing > less than nothing: “nothing is the all-encompassing Void (sunyata) about which Buddhism speaks, while less than nothing as the puncturing point of absolute contradiction is not the first differentiation in the primordial Void and in this sense the first step towards the multiplicity that characterizes our reality. Less than nothing comes (logically) before the nothing of the primordial Void, it is the absolute contradiction which is already primordially repressed in every pacifying experience of the Void. In short, the paradox resides in the fact that one already has to add something to the less than nothing to arrive at the nothing“. In any case, “the objective view which would give a full deterministic description of reality is not only inaccessible to us because of our finitude (because we are part of reality), but—much more radically—because reality is in itself not all, because it doesn’t exist as a totality with no immanent barrier.  Rovelli knows this, which is why he defines reality as a multiplicity of worlds each of which is rooted in the point-of-view of a particular observer—there is no independent reality.” In other words, “if there is no object, no element of reality, which is not observed, if objects exist only in relation to an observer, as relative to that observer, then the fact that it does not make sense to claim that the whole universe is in a state of entanglement means that one should abandon the very notion of the whole universe“. And so “the non-totalizability of the universe implies a negative limit (boundary), a limit outside which there is nothing.” And here comes the absentee: “so I as a part of the universe can claim that there is nothing in the universe that is not entangled—and that, located at this boundary, I am this nothing” (Žižek 2025c).

In (Szepanski 2024), we see how Baudrillard continues to fight the same paradoxical fight in simulation: the observer cannot decide whether the cat “is dead or alive, because the observer continues to be observed. If each system can only contain a limited amount of information, i.e. the world contains all the answers, with both definite and indefinite elements, then new information is added with each observation, while others are lost. For Baudrillard, the world contains all the answers, or, to paraphrase Michel Serres, there is a huge objective intelligence, of which the artificial and the subjective make up only a small part. There is always a game of mixtures and interweaving of determinacy and indeterminacy, the entanglement of knowledge and non-knowledge” (Szepanski 2024). We thus need a double inside/outside strategy: to observe “the two strands of the inside and the outside at the same time. When Baudrillard tries to think the outside of the system of simulation, he must, on the one hand, target this outside as the impossible, this outside that actually excludes the system; on the other hand, he must recognise that he cannot name this outside because every outside is only an effect of the system itself, i.e. an inclusion. On the one hand, he must think what is outside or different from the system of simulation, but on the other hand, he must also think what is excluded by the simulation, insofar as it integrates every outside” (Szepanski 2024). It seems that “radical thinking is always at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth, of the continuity of the world and the continuity of nothingness. Nothingness is the potential of existence for absence and, analogous to the quantum vacuum, for the absence of energy. In this sense, for Baudrillard, things only ever exist ex nihilo. Ex nihilo in nihilum; that is the cycle of nothingness. (…) Rovelli, echoing the Buddhist Nagaryuna, speaks of an empty structure whose emptiness is in turn empty—it at least has nothing substantial about it, but is also not merely indeterminate, but is characterised by an abundance of relations. Something can be inscribed in the void. Relational structures do not precede objects or subjects, nor do they not precede them, neither both nor one or the other. (…) This is neither an objectivist nor a subjectivist position; rather, old European positions that focus on being or non-being are no longer sufficient to describe a polyvalent and poly-contextural quantum reality of virtuality that can be developed beyond the law of the excluded third in the direction of an essentially more complex logic of both and” (Szepanski 2024). Enter Catuṣkoṭi (Priest 2021). Or at least “a trans-classical logic, which opens up different reference perspectives, each of which allows other facts to emerge and at the same time the respective perspectives cannot simply merge into one another without logical contradiction. The void cannot be determined positively; it is not a transcendental ego, not a god and also not a world substance. As a negatively (but not indeterminately) defined void, it can be written as a fourfold defined negation: it is neither, nor is it not, nor both (being and nothingness), nor neither (neither being nor nothingness). Subsequently, the following relations can be developed in a trans-classical logic: the one or the other / both – both … and / neither – neither … nor / not all this and not even that” (Szepanski 2024). Somehow, for Martinez de las Rivas the catuṣkoṭi need is resolved through virtual reality.

This is partly how I came to reject Kavvos’s facile nihilistic interpretation of the disappearance, and instead try to understand where exactly beyond the boundary has our poet decided to jump from reality. I started searching for him in the multiplicity of worlds, in the best place I could think of to look for a missing writer: fiction. You might wonder – did that ever work, did we ever find Weldon Kees, Ambrose Bierce or Roberto Bazlen with the help of their writings? No. But I had no other ideas, and it seemed to be the only place no one had already searched for Martinez de las Rivas. It was a lucky guess. He left many traces as he borrowed ideas from the books on his desk: misquotes and adaptations from Priest, Szepanski, and Pinotti, dealing with śūnyatā, the Buddhist concept of emptiness, virtuality and simulation. His earlier poems read as something in between a self-annihilation nonessentialist manifesto – “I want there to be nothing, want you to push me / under the water & hold me there” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023e) – and an invitation to play – “Come / like nothing, like emptiness which is / like nothing, like the sea that evaporates & / becomes rain, like salt that is bitter, / like thirst, like opening your mouth & tilting / your head up & tasting the thirst / on your tongue & feeling your tongue burn / in the fire of rain & the wind that makes / a hollow sound in your mouth / as if you were an instrument played by the wind” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023g) – in a space unknown – “Emptiness of dogs in the morning somewhere over the intervening hill. Rainbow / falling down like a covenant. We should go for a walk in it, / you & I, into the sound of hunger & emptiness […] / Our bodies have no past or future. Only this endless / present of joy or pain they undergo again & again – & when I say / emptiness I mean desire & when I say desire: emptiness. Come with me” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023a).

His most recent poetry however betrays a preference for the “unframedness, presentness, immediateness / the anonymity and visibility of the virtual” (Martinez de las Rivas 2026). In his poem Hyperreal, he considers that the difference between simulation and reality is now “abolished / as the simulation is realised / as reality and reality is realised / as simulation”. He agrees with Baudrillard’s view that the system has entered its fatale phase, “an integral reality, a seamless surface without cracks, a complete transparency that breaks through no opposition and knows no break or entry point. Identity and difference are no longer opposed to each other, but are reformulated in a simulated form into a diversification of identity. The spectre of differentiation is an iteration of the same” (Szepanski 2024). Simulation produces reality. Virtual reality is the “highest stage of simulation”, denoting the “completely homogenised, digitised, operationalised reality”, taking “the place of that other reality because it is perfect, controllable and free of contradictions”. More than that, it doesn’t just take the place of other realities, but generates reality effects itself: “it does not imitate reality, but simulates it by means of its appearance, as Žižek writes, whereby for Baudrillard the appearance quite specifically includes the generation of signs and images of appearance; the virtual reality qua computer simulates a greater memory than he himself has. (…) Fiction as virtuality does not compete with the real, but enables a further perspective that is generated as virtual reality” (Szepanski 2024).  

In Transparency, he assumes a Wahrnehmung perception of the VR world in a context of generalized transparent immediacy – “I don’t want you in the frame, / I don’t want you in the window, / I want you through the window, / I want you on the other side, in the world, / inhabiting the world. Machine, but it feels like real life, / it feels like truth” (Martinez de las Rivas 2026) – and hint at Pinotti’s phenomenological interpretation: “Perzeption as the kind of perception proper to image consciousness (perception that does not posit its object as actually existing) gives way to Wahrnehmung (literally, to taking for real) as the kind of perception aimed at grasping things in the flesh. This medium tends to deny its own existence on the basis of what has been called the logic of transparent immediacy, an apparent immediacy of the immersive medium achieved paradoxically by means of highly sophisticated technological mediation. In such an effect of transparency, by virtue of which users become progressively less and less aware of the mediated and constructed nature of the perceived scene, their awareness of the point of view (perceptual as much as ideological) expressed by the author and embedded in the gaze of the camera also tends to blur until it dissolves. While we are convinced that we are autonomously controlling the framing, we are being framed by and in the discourse of the author” (Pinotti 2025).

In What is virtual real?, he hints at Iñárritu’s VR kinetic empathy stunt (def: a technological approach to self-decentralization by assuming the other’s perspective, in order to promote a prosocial disposition), Carne y Arena: Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: “an immersive environment that transports you to the middle of the desert, among men, women, and children attempting the journey of hope. You move with them. Physically Invisible: you are present, but no one sees you. You are invisible even to yourself. If you look at your feet, which you also feel in the sand, you do not see them. If you extend a hand in front of your eyes, nothing appears in your field of vision. You then get the urge to make yourself noticed, to make it clear that you are there (after all, you are fully present)” (Pinotti 2025). He also seems to suggest that the “360-degree autopsy (in the etymological sense of autos optos: I saw it with my own eyes) embodied in the first-person perspective and the powerful sensation of being there granted by the technological apparatus approximates autopsy in the sense of a postmortem examination. On the one hand, the author’s intentions embodied in his gaze tend to disappear phantasmagorically as a result of the transparentization of the medium, leaving behind the stiffened corpse of reality in its mere factuality. On the other hand, the other embodied in the collocutor is apparently mobile and animated, but such mobility, frozen in the recording, resembles that of a puppet that cannot respond to my further exchanges” (Pinotti 2025).

It became clear at this point that his literary/performative disappearance is an invitation to a virtual reality. The only question left was: which one? In his poem I saw nothing on the glowing screen, he talks about the need to “go in and out of game”, and misquotes lines from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Schoenbrun 2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (Schoenbrun 2024) to describe a massive multiplayer online role-playing VR game. He doesn’t name the game, though.

His newest book opens with a quote from The Book Of Disappearances & Book Of Tractations by Raul Ruiz: “May my mangled words, already dead, reach you. / May these ideas in pain / wandering cross the sea and the desert. / This is my reply. / I know not who you will be, reader, but / I know you will be kind and astute” (Ruiz 2005). Now, I knew The Book Of Disappearances was a collection of short stories assembled as a puzzle, but I didn’t expect it to be the very key to my own quest. I borrowed a copy from the library, and I started to read the correspondence, feeling increasingly disappointed with myself for forgetting every encryption algorithm I had studied as an undergraduate. Luckily, Ruiz made no effort to conceal his trick: some of the letters were written in a heavier font, revealing a parallel story hidden in the text. I remembered the unorthodox casing of the last poem in Martinez de las Rivas’s Nothingness collection and realized not only that the poem was in fact a slightly changed and broken into lines fragment of one of Ruiz’s stories, but that I could follow its upper-case thread to gather more clues:

“- seeing you in the doorway of the poet’s house, / I can only smile, said the fear of the starS first. / the stars are the fire of the abyss; they are / the seeds of the infinite. bUt what are the birds? they are / Ñothing; they are veils and cries.

– you are mistAken, replied the fear of birds. / you are mistaken in scorning the veil. / the veil separaTes and hides. time itself is / a veil. and this veil likes to hide.

– you are mistaken, sAid the fear of stars, / if you think I scorn veils and cries. / what I scorn is the nothingness which they hiDe. / a nothing without abysm, a densE and gravid nought / pregnant with things that are to be./  my nought is very different. / my nought enters and insidiates amongst / beings and fLatters them with dOubts. / my nought becomes small and inSignificant, / and lies between two atoms, / and with an indivisible gesture / seParates onE from the otheR. otheR times / my nOught becomes so great that no one Sees it.” 

SUÑATA DE LOS PERROS.

And there it was, the Suñata de los perros VR game, available to download from Steam for just 1.99GBP. I feared I would enter an immersive-technology nightmare resembling Deepak Chopra’s guided meditation simulation for reaching virtual enlightenment. Luckily, there was no Bodhi Tree in sight. Just an empty arid plane, scattered with small and poorly rendered patches of dried grass. I put my headset on and walk through this desert for hours each day, hoping to find something that will lead me to the poet: nothing. “I reached out for you, but you weren’t there. / I thought you would be there / like the wind that pours away & returns / singing. When will you come, / beautiful as Nineveh?” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023b). Every now and then I type small fragments of poems in the chat room to let him know I’m there, in case he ever checks the logs: “Setting sun / and wind / now vanished, and / wind of nothing / that breathes / (here, the modern / ? nothingness)” (Mallarmé 1983). When I get really bored I write the poems in the sand with my feet: “no – I will not / give up / nothingness / –––– / father – – – I / feel nothingness / invade me” (Mallarmé 1983). Then “I closed my eyes & rode my bike / out into the road; wind pushed / its fingers through my hair, the sun lay / in the field. A dog stared. / Nothing. Again. Nothing. Only my volition / & bliss; only my hands lifting / from the handlebars & my arms spreading / themselves into the wind” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023d). I worry I reach too often, sometimes after just minutes in the game, the uncanny valley – how the VR and video game designers call the “unsettling, liminal realm in which one is uncertain whether something or someone is alive or dead, real or unreal”. Some mornings it’s even worse: when I wake up, I can’t tell if I’m in the game or not. The confusion may last for a couple of hours, and by then, I might already be immersed in the game. “I am Error”. I read that spending too much time in a VR environment might trigger symptoms associated with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder: having chronic feelings or sensations of unreality, loss of the sense of agency, or feeling as if living in a dream: “heavy users of VR may begin to experience the real world and their real bodies as unreal, effectively shifting their sense of reality exclusively to the virtual environment”. I should probably stop. “I have been out walking all day in the hills / above Naranjo. Emptiness of dogs / on the wind from somewhere / to the north & a little to the east” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023a).

Then one day, in the middle of this emptiness, I come across the trunk of a statue. I read aloud the words written on it: two lines – “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” and below “This is all that remains of a once great empire.” A man in a white suit, with eyes painted on his wide shut eyelids, appears in front of me. He vaguely looks like the man I was waiting for, so I panic and say the first thing that comes to my mind.

– Is this from King, Vultures? I’m a big Ye fan myself, actually.

– It’s Shelley!

– Right, of course. Mary?

– Dear Mother of God. No, Shelley-Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

– Right. Are you real?

– “I never met Muhammed Ali, wish I did / My brother saw him, champ told him nothin’ is real / Gave me the chills, thought about it, that’s how I feel” (Nas 2021).

– Still not Ye.

– You bet.

– Let me ask you a simple question.

– “Yes! But don’t hold that against me. I’m a little screwy myself.”

– I didn’t get the chance to ask my question!

– I already know what you meant to ask. “A normal human being couldn’t live under the same roof with me without going nutty.”

– “You’re my idea of nothing” (Capra 1934).

– My idea of nothing.

– But it didn’t happen one night. You didn’t run off just like that!

– Well, yes, it really did, It Happened One Night.

– You planned it for a long time. Long enough to make this game.

– Was that your question?

– No. I wanted to ask about the game.

– What about it?

– Why a VR game? Why being unstuck in time in a wasteland? And I’m pretty sure śūnyatā is written suññatā in Pāli. Is this your – hispanic – idea of nothing?

– We can explain the dialectic between the form and content of this four-part game by looking at a rather unexpected example which shares the same structure: Sergei Eisenstein’s Romance Sentimentale (Eisenstein 1930). Firstly, we must understand that “although we are dealing with a kind of Greimasian semiotic square of four stances, all four are not at the same level, they do not operate within the same space”, as explained in (Žižek 2025).

– And let me guess: the fourth position is the impossible one, the nothing, the obliteration of the subject.

– Precisely. As noted in (Žižek 2025): “We begin with non-subjectivized libidinal intensity which is then negated by a melancholic subject unable to appropriate/subjectivize it, and what follows is a synthesis, an attempt of the subject to subjectivize/assume libidinal intensity. However, this synthesis fails, the subject pays the price for its risky assumption of libidinal intensity by its self-obliteration. However, the subject beneath the bar of impossibility is not simply dead, it survives what Lacan calls subjective destitution and emerges as a living dead, the pure void of subject deprived of its subjectivity, a subject who is no longer a person”.

– Are you serious? Can you not explain the game without a žižekian Lacanyad?

– I might, but why would I?

– Because I actually want to understand this.

– “The meaning of the game lies in playing itself, which at the same time gives the appearance of pretending and thus comes close to simulation. It was Heidegger who brought being close to the game that plays because it plays, without rhyme or reason, without foundation—as being-in-the-world as an archaic game of transcendence. It is then Kostas Axelos, who in his book Game of the World writes about the world as the game of games, a world in which heterogeneous types of games and different modalities of play unfold. The game of the world is the open and unfounded totality of all that takes place, producing all differences without ever being reducible to one of them” (Szepanski 2024).

– The multiverse. So is this place supposed to be like The Void from Deadpool?

– The What?

– The destination of the main characters from Deadpool & Wolverine, which “is not some exotic locale of colonial expansion, but a place called the Void, an imaginary desert where old IP go to die. The Void is a holding pen, a zone where the audience is mocked for having had even the slightest interest in second-rate, go-nowhere IP” (Hamrah 2025).

– So what am I supposed to be? A “second-rate, go-nowhere author”?

– No, you’d be a “main-character author”, because “the film also invents another sporty concept, the anchor being. The notion there is that a piece of intellectual property is essential to the survival of some random timeline in the multiverse.” And main characters here, like Wolverine, who were “already understood as characters who can’t be killed because they have special regenerative powers, they have now been inducted into the multiverse, allowing them to be doubled, then tripled, quadrupled” (Hamrah 2025).

– Well, I do think virtual reality is “a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up a future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence” (Lévy 1998). A space of pure potentiality where everything is in the process of becoming, riding the fluidity and dynamism of reality. But to suggest I consider myself so important to inhabit every multiplicity of our reality…

– Blimey, we’re going deleuzian! You’ve just sent us from Marveland to the “plane of immanence”, “becoming” “bodies without organs” – I thought we’re well beyond that!

– Hey, now, I’m not talking gibberish. Although I quite like the plane of immanence; I wouldn’t mind living in a constant nonessentialist flux with no stable or permanent identities or categories. But I think that in this context it is more important to acknowledge that this is real! I did not disappear. The virtual “has little relationship to that which is false, illusory or imaginary. The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real” (Lévy 1998).

– Although the virtual should, properly speaking, be compared not to the real, but to the actual. I agree that the boundaries between the virtual and the actual are fluid, or even rather undefined, as we are forever moving between the actual situations we are living in and some virtual possibilities evoked by these. Of course, reality is not just the sum of our immediate, actual or material conditions, but also its accompanying virtualities.

– Precisely: it is not a fixed singularity, but a dynamic process of constant movement and interplay between the dimensions of virtualisation and actualisation. “because the unreal never is / and the real never is not / to be or not to be. / so what does that mean the real never is not / well / if the unreal never is does exist and cannot be / then the real never is not always is must be not / not be / so what is real / physical / material / tangible / all of you people and me / real must have mass take up space and be affected by gravity / must be moveable changeable disposable / just like you and me / but what is the thing that makes you and me real” (Akpata 2015).

– Still, you really did disappear.

– You see, what the digital information revolution and the quantum revolution “share is that they mark the reemergence of what, for want of a better term, I am tempted to call postmetaphysical idealism. (…) Is this really, however, a form of idealism? Since the radical materialist stance asserts that there is no World, that the World in its Whole is Nothing, materialism has nothing to do with the presence of damp, dense matter—its proper figures are, rather, constellations in which matter seems to disappear, like the pure oscillations of superstrings or quantum vibrations. On the contrary, if we see in raw, inert matter more than an imaginary screen, we always secretly endorse some kind of spiritualism. Here we encounter another crucial aspect of the opposition between idealism and materialism: materialism is not the assertion of inert material density in its humid heaviness. In contrast, a true materialism joyously assumes the disappearance of matter, the fact that there is only void (Žižek 2025c)”. Are you an idealist, or a hardcore materialist, my friend?

– Fine, you didn’t disappear, you just tricked everyone into believing you did, while you were here all along. This makes you an absentee, a nonperson.

– Who or what is such a being?

– “A first variety of nonperson comes into being through unexplained disappearances. When persons remove themselves from a place of residence or fail to return as expected and when their departure is declared as such according to the procedures of civil law, persons give way to the nonpersons who are, in technical terms, absentees: subjects of rights defined by lacking a present body. They persist, for a time, in a legal regime distinct from that of ordinary life and death” (Heller-Roazen 2021).

– I believe that, like any term prefixed by not- or non-, nonperson is equivocal. Think of Aristotle: in On Interpretation, “he took the expression nonman or nonperson (ouk anthrōpos) as the paradigm of infinite names without lingering on the being that it signified.” Too vague, too uncertain. I am not a nonperson.

– It is true that “before a person may be declared missing in the legal sense, certain events independent of any judicial proceedings must have come to pass: it is necessary for an unexplained absence to have been observed, reported, and accepted as a fact. Only once a mysterious disappearance has been granted may some civil authority declare persons to be absentees, treating their rights and claims according to the rules that hold for their special status. Questions pertaining to how exactly a vanishing occurred, what befell the absent person in the moment of going missing and in the time that followed it, are, for a declaration of legal absence, secondary. They may be temporarily or indefinitely unknown without perturbing the mechanisms of due process. Yet these circumstances have never been lost from sight. They constitute the crucial matter of which poetic and literary invention, in every age, has taken hold. Epic, fable, drama, and the novel have long appropriated what the law has been uninterested in ascertaining. The results are fictions of disappearance, in verse as well as in prose” (Heller-Roazen 2021). So, if you may, at least consider this a fiction of your own disappearance.

– This would be a “theory that provides a description of the system by speaking of it in terms of reality, and at the same time a prescription of the system that indicates that the system either excludes or cannot capture the real”. In the same way, Baudrillard had to “write simultaneously outside and inside the systems of simulation. Thus, in a certain sense, he was always writing theory fiction. He had to speak against the systems in the name of the real and he had to simulate or double them at the same time. Baudrillard had to represent something and at the same time know that it should not be represented” (Szepanski 2024).

– So maybe, because of this indeterminacy, a simultaneously-fiction-and-not-fiction of your own disappearance?

– “Fiction shapes a world in the way a game shapes a world, while this kind of simulation remains connected like a Möbius strip to the reality from which it emerged” (Szepanski 2024). I, like Baudrillard, create “a double of the world that substitutes itself for the world in order to fuel the confusion between the world and its double. Since one is always in the systems of simulation, one must play with and through the superimpositions and commutations of the systems themselves” (Szepanski 2024).

– I thought that for Baudrillard, reality is a series of equivalent worlds, whereby the world of fiction is no less real than the world of non-fiction. While “the purpose of inventing theory-fiction is to create friction and energy through the interaction of play” (Szepanski 2024).

– “A thing or instrument interrupts the world by entering it, so that the world can read on its own surface the writing or fiction that it leaves on itself”. When you entered this game, the world made itself visible to itself. So now we know, “the aging master stages his own disappearance, fading away in the clamor of youth, absorbed and swept away by it. (…) He withdraws from the world, trusting in the movement of an eternally noisy, joyful, vibrant, and desiring youth. It is a disappearance that dreams of itself as a fusion” (Schefer 2020).

–  There’s no need for hibiscus flowers: I already knew you’re writing Orpheus’s testament.

– “The poet is a magician, he manipulates existence itself. If he has the power to create, he also has the power to erase. What he produces in one sense, he can produce in another” (Schefer 2020).  

– “Then his life became his work.”  

– I am sure I’ve heard that phrase before. But I don’t quite remember where. Maybe this is what they said about that Italian writer who thought and thought about the novel he was planning to write, but then never did. I remember he used to say that “until Goethe, biography was subsumed by the work, from Rilke onward biography stood apart from the work” (Del Giudice 2025).

– No, that’s not it. It’s from Suddenly Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn says it to Montgomery Clift. She repeats it like a tongue twister, in a steamy garden: “A poet’s life is his work and his work is his life”. What Italian writer?

– The fabled Roberto Bazlen.

– He never wrote anything?

– And yet, he is central to Italian culture. Well, of course he wrote, but he never published anything. “He himself understood it… that everything is naught; he realized that in the end he wouldn’t leave so much as a trace. Nothing. Writing, he didn’t write anything. All that remained of him were the friends who loved him, and in whom he still existed” (Del Giudice 2025).

– Why didn’t he write, if he was a writer?

– I don’t know. “I read once that ‘writing didn’t interest him’, another time that he was ‘beyond the book’. I think of the distance between those two things, of how much effort it takes each time to shift everything this way or that way. In between the two, there could be a writer without books. He’s not the only one there, the space is full of writers without books, who knows how many there are, even now, at this very instant. Nonetheless, he wrote, in an underground, parallel way, just enough to make it clear that he would not write. That’s why he’s there, in that center zone. I’ve also read that that center doesn’t exist, it’s a void. Sometimes it seems to me that nothing is more formidable than a void, or vacuum: It cuts through any issue, completes it, justifies it. As a visualization for feelings, a void is as remarkable as a flood or a sunset or a river… At times I’d like to know where that void, that concern for the void, finds its balance” (Del Giudice 2025). I haven’t written a single poem in my notebook since I left. So in a sense, I guess the same void contains me now.

– You still need to perform in reverse slow motion for that: the “way in which a thing—a movement, a gesture, a wisp of smoke—reverses, folds back on itself, and absorbs itself” (Schefer 2020).

– The return to one’s past is enough of a kind of de-appearance. “By absenting himself, by vanishing into the image, the poet creates himself in reverse, as it were. A disappearance that ushers him into a new cycle of birth and creation, as yet unknown, a way of being reborn forever” (Schefer 2020).

– Do you believe in reincarnation?

– “So is this magic place to die with us? / I mean that world where memory still holds / the breath of your early life: / (…) all those beloved burning things / that dawned on us, / lit up the inner sky? / Is this whole world to vanish when we die, / this life that we made new in our own fashion? /  Have the crucibles and anvils of the soul / been working for the dust and for the wind?” (Paterson 1999) I have my doubts. As they say, “despite the simulation hypothesis, which still absorbs or ejects alterity itself, the radical alterity or nothingness remains. Death, illusion, absence, the negative, evil, noise etc. cannot be subsumed under the law of value and general equivalence. In the system of simulation, however, the other does not have to be eradicated or excluded, but can be liberated, recognised and integrated in the play of the differences of the fetishes of the different” (Szepanski 2024).

– You did say before that “No one knows what was in the first darkness, or / what will be in the second. / (…) Isaiah or the Psalms: the darkness is not darkness” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023f).

– I did.

– But you also had your nihilistic moments: “& everything that comes out of the void – void?” (Martinez de las Rivas 2023c).

– You know, “nothingness has not only a negative but also a positive sense. In the negative sense, nihilism in a certain sense destroys everything that preceded it and everything that will follow it. Nothing is Nothing is true: nothing is false” (Szepanski 2024). At least for Baudrillard. “In the eyes of the world, I am a machine for the production of emptiness. But the world has no eyes, so the emptiness I create is translated as essential with me as the collaborator, as the performer. Emptiness only takes shape through what surrounds it and achieves a strange vitality by absorbing materials into its perimeter without this surface even belonging to it, which is tantamount to repulsion” (Szepanski 2024).

– Do you ever plan to leave this void?

– Leave? Why would I leave? In any case, there is no way out.

– Your hopelessness reminds me of the terror a poet friend of mine used to feel as a child whenever she read the very same words etched into the glass of the doors of the metro stations in her city. But when the There is No Way Out signs – which were essentially advising passengers to abandon all hope – were replaced with the more benign No Exit or Closed, the sense of terror was suddenly gone.

– I am not afraid of words. What happened to her?

– I guess she never gave up the idea of escaping. She even tried once to run off with the circus and start anew, but her plans failed. When she arrived with her little backpack the morning they were supposed to leave, the circus was already gone.

– “Perhaps the caravan was waiting for them around the corner” (Stepanova 2026).

And then he vanished. 

“The earth, after all, is not the place for you” (Cocteau 1960).