There is something about writing a blog that reminds one of the death drive. Both share the same innate desire to self-destruction, an outward manifestation away from the instinct of self-preservation.

The form insists on brevity, quick consumption, easy digestion. Summary impedes exposition in the desire to pull off a great masterful stroke, the remarkable quip, startling statement, or proof of some revered authority that we are forced to conclude that a great genius breathed through these words before passing on into the great unknown.

In truth, blogging is not an obsession with death, but rather an urge to be epigrammatic: not the urge to die as much as the urge to die well, to go out on the strongest possible terms, the climax being the start and the end, the whole point (in the full sense, the circle) of writing. Freud was wrong to describe the death drive as non-erotic aggression. It is fully subsumed to erotic desire. There is only Eros. There can be no Thanatos.

True, some blogs adopt the form of an unfolding logical argument (conclusion, evidence, evidence, counter-evidence, refutation, summation). The best blogs, however, are driven on by a kind of mad impulse: truth forms a background radiation in which hidden passions are allowed to come to full force. Truth is often assumed and, therefore, hardly in need of repetition. Indeed, repetition is the great sin of blogging. In boredom and nervous anticipation we ask what’s next?

What we yearn for are the great conflicts – the powerful contests of minds, the exposing of failure or weakness in our opponent that in our race to final exudation we end up committing the very same errors we charge our fellow combatants with. Politics? We have no politics, only polemics.

The closest art form we have to writing a blog is pornography. Pornography in style and form, is anti-narrative. The narrative is merely a ploy. The real desire is to strip away the pretense of form to get to a kind of self-referenced truth: to expose life as simple and pure delight and vulgarity. Here there are no narratives, only the reality of the obscene baseness of life.

But, it may be objected, the true virtue of blogging is discursive, the sharing and debate of ideas. But the journey always leads us back to the quick end, to the great divide, the break wherein the silence between posts rests the true heart of blogging – the decision, the what’s next?