An existentialist nightmare of passive-aggressive projections and the endless deferring of responsibility and meaning to every other but one's self.

Bourgeois propriety (etiquette, manners, etc) as proto-bureaucracy, a total entrapment of all social actants by a force greater than, yet totally constituted by, said actants. Those who play into this system are destituted in their belief that they are kept in such a state by the other, by the other's expectations (which are never explicit under propriety). Every banal act must be plumbed for its deception, its depth. However, social success leads to misery (of oneself) and resentment (of the other) for it relies on an emptying of one's will (through one's will, for the sake of the one's will (as social standing)), and the endless anxiety of surface play (of getting things right, by reading them wrong (for sign and intent are unequivocal)). Both responsibility and meaning are hysterically deferred, to an other who must absurdly do the same back (to remain in good standing). All social actants lose their self-will to a Big Other that exists only as a phantasm. Nobody is happy, but everybody appears lovely.

The alternative is neither desirable nor viable, however, for although one can reject society, one must still live in society. Those who act beyond the façade of propriety are never truly outside of it, merely excluded from within, inscribed as queer, loose, common, defective, and so on and so on. They remain captured in bourgeois discourse, but as its abject mirror form, its uncanny invert. To reject propriety is to efface one's own standing, despite such a rejection arising out of a desire to stand on one's own feet. There is no heroism in The Death of the Heart, only cold, bleak loneliness and the impossibility of bridging such a state to the other, for honesty is abjection, and naivety, social death. The other, intent on retaining their social status, can only react in indifference, outrage or mockery.