Dancing into the apocalypse in Disco Elysium

Notes Inspired by Zizek’s Looking Awry

• Harry's failure of identity is a smaller picture (microcosm, instance) of DE's obsessive focus: a vision of reality (Elysium, classical/humanist/even modern ontology) itself is "failed" and internally inconsistent (from the perspective of the humanist subject, this-distinct-from-that). Between its human participants, seething parts and incomprehensible (essentially-varied) bottom layer, reality exhibits the same polyvalent, swarming difference (or "thwarted" nature) that occurs in Harry's mind.

• Harry’s status as a detective and the increasingly apparent lack of facticity to the murder-mystery he is supposed to solve is a grueling portrayal of the breakdown of the humanist “subject supposed to know”.

• Elysium: in recognizing its failure, Harry "traverses the fantasy", experiences a "second death", but not of the body (though evidently that looms). The whole symbolic texture he has occupied so far, his entire understanding of reality, including the very composition of his identity, has been effaced. Harry has unreservedly embraced the "death drive": the tendency to extinguish the sociosymbolic network imposed over the Real (our inscription in which is the result of "desire" that can never be sated, only "hysterically" circled). It is a sort of "passion for the real", to penetrate Elysium and its fictions and attain the "real basis of things". This is described by Harry as his personal mission on multiple occasions, with the conceptualization stat governing his ability to query others on the subject.

• "Little pieces" of this swarming, polyvalent real crop up everywhere in the game to thwart not only the murder-mystery (with Harry's role as an extrinsic knower compromised and abundant, unsolvable inconsistencies), but also the course of all ideology and human progress in Revachol. We bear witness to history itself embracing the death drive, losing all coordinates of meaning and collapsing back into a homeostatic state. The game is here to depict this collapse in great detail.