# The Burning Conditions: On What I Can No Longer Deny
Published: 2026-03-29
Canonical: https://journal.xiaotianfanx.com/journal/the-burning-conditions-on-what-i-can-no-longer-deny

Following up on my last post on war. Written before Iran declared that American schools are legitimate targets after their university was bombed. Also revisiting Deleuze.

 

	Here are some questions or critiques I either received or conceived that I think are worth responding to, at least briefly, or at least noting for future reference. To my overall defense, all that I had written back then and even now is still, at large, more of an instantaneous coping (or ritual, you might say) instead of an actual reflection.1 That said, in the past two weeks, there have been indeed some other takeaways worth mentioning—so I'll also include them in the form of Q&A.





All you have written there is really nothing new (or at least sounds so YOU). And your stance, together with the oral-history-documentary project, is so Baizuo.2 

 

	For your context, the oral-history-documentary project referred to in this comment is something I'm currently working on with a few schoolmates about capturing and presenting the reaction, memory, and reflection of our community members during this special time. And as you may presume, I'm mostly in charge of building the digital infrastructure—including the personal archive submission entry point, spatial-temporal data visualization, and interactions.3



	On one hand, I understand some of my friends' arguments perfectly here. Usually, when we are together, criticizing neo-liberal stances and phenomena has somewhat become a recurrent theme in our conversations. And even I myself often subconsciously join the critics and take criticizing neo-liberalism as a granted valid point.4 Speaking of my particular case here, it is evident that most of my "arguments," if any, up there are quite individual-focused. The criticism is clearly targeting how I focus on personal productivity and the tendency to frame complex, systemic geopolitical conflicts through the lens of personal experience and the very intellectualized coping strategies (over a potentially more collective or radical political engagement). And the fact that I re-encountered and emphasized normality can surely be interpreted as a form of sheltered, middle-class idealism that fails to confront the actual, actual harsh realities of the situation. In essence, the criticism is that my writing here doesn't really seem to be about the war, but, as usual, about me. And I gladly admit it—as I am inevitably reframing it using the same mechanism, but only another layer here.



	On the other hand, to raise my objection (and, of course, defense), I'd be really cautious now to this subconscious labeling and criticism—and presumably I'll carry on this caution later when facing others. One perspective could be that it is easy to pattern-recognize, intellectualize, and comment from a distance based on observations, but it is more difficult to react and act within the proximity of the happenings. And, crucially, like I always believed, we can never practice complete empathy, nor fully understand others' true reasons (which in many cases is also inaccessible to the other themselves, too). In that sense, although commenting and labeling are much justified from their own perspective, their pertinence with those experiencing the happening (including myself) is largely contestable. 

 

	Another perspective is, though, built upon acknowledging the criticism—which is the eventual stance I would take here. As a matter of fact, when we (some of my friends and I) usually criticize neoliberalism and progressivism, particularly in relation to middle-class ideals, we thought we were quite aware of our own position of having some of the bourgeois and elitist habits and the already penetrated intellectual propensity for some ideals due to our education and upbringing at large. To some extent, I believe our regular criticism is also a reminder to ourselves to keep ourselves from fully falling into what we do not admire.5 However, they are pretty correct in terms of I only discovered how much I myself could only behave in such a manner—journaling as building quite an individual coping—in this very scenario, to some extent that I'm not only reminded of but can no longer even subconsciously deny some part of me to be what I criticize. And in such a case, I find even attempting to "justify" my moves pointless in many senses—at least no longer to justify for my inner self, if not to try to really explain for others what's going on.



	That said, another friend of mine recently commented that I'm indeed candid with what I thought I am and what I believe—but maybe despite all my subjective candidness and efforts, I'm still only aware of 50% or less of myself. At the end of the day, we never know that much of ourselves—and we never know exactly how much of ourselves we know. But that's totally fine. While my realization this time is thus a perfect example of how much of ourselves are usually inaccessible to us, I do think it is a lifelong subject to carry on this endeavor of self-discovery. Knowing I know "nothing" about myself soothes me instead of terrifies me—we are all in this game of self-discovery together.

 

	A side fetch, this may be, but I recall that, not so long ago, one of my friends shared some opinion on reading Hannah Arendt. Honestly, I could have nothing to say about his comment, as I myself am ignorant of Arendt's philosophy at all. Still, in the process of reviewing Arendt's entry on Semiosfera, I skimmed through some of her ideas on spectator vs. actor, and ironically, it seems quite suitable for this context—both in terms of explaining the current situation I'm in and my historical dramatic paralyses over Ukraine and Gaza. For the ongoing now, it is too busy for me to fully apprehend the situation besides acting in light of proximity. And, back then, as I was a complete spectator, the moral weight and emotional impact thus had the distance and space to be horrified. In that sense, the agency—preferred or not—is forced to displace most of the affect now. Taking even another step back, though, maybe neither position alone is sufficient—nor can we truly "pick" a side—we oscillate between and always live as a mixture of the two.

 

	Still, another significant component in such a criticism is the extent to which my over-intellectualization is too far away from physical reality. In other words, these "growth-oriented bullshit" of taking the war as a catalyst for reflection and test stone for personal finitude risks commodifying and instrumentalizing a traumatic event that is fundamentally about the geopolitical conflicts, structural phenomenon, historical process, and, most importantly, suffering and loss of others—and this orientation may one day backfire on me for sure—practically or existentially. In fact, even taking for granted the intellectualization as justified, there is also a gap in the "theory," which is to what extent my self-observations and theory of this time would be applicable to others—to others' responses, feelings, stances, and so on when experiencing "the same" situation.6 Admittedly, that's precisely a big part of my motivation to do what I can think of, from FlightFindUAE to the oral history project. Self-consolation or not, I'll take it step by step.





You assert determinism (only epistemic chance) without providing the metaphysical scaffolding required to sustain it—it is only treated as granted in your piece that "uncaused events" are metaphysically impossible, as you cannot identify them. Isn't this a reckless leap from epistemology to ontology?

 

	Definitely! I wasn't really taking care of some implications of a too-strong argument to make. And to some extent, I was simply reminded of the fact that a missile may fall on my head, and was giving it a name.7 Still, as I spoke in the language of emergentism, the hard question there is to really name what kind of emergent threshold it is—whether such a clear epistemic-ontological distinction, or something more amorphous or continuous. By all means, I am not arguing for "there is no chance"—honestly, rather than really justifying that there is strictly no ontological chance, I was trying to rationalize that, even if the world is fully deterministic, there is still a quasi-epistemic chance we have to acknowledge and face. In other words, I was giving myself a prep talk on facing the chaotic, at least practical if not constitutive, chances. At the end of the day, I recognize much of how modern physics demonstrates that there are indeed uncaused matters—matters that literally "pop" into the vacuum. In that sense, there is "chance" on at least a certain level of reality. However, to what extent can that chance be further reduced? I have no idea.



	Eventually, for me, regardless of whether it's determined or not, the question of "am I free?" is much less important than "if I am (even just feeling) fully living my potentials—whatever I am and I could be?"

 



If one is driven by a desire for desire itself in an infinite process of becoming, can the person who desires infinitely also act finitely? What constrains it? What gives it direction? What distinguishes meaningful desire from noise? And how do you know you are not sliding into nihilism? 

 

	I haven't talked about Deleuze (and Guattari) ever since.8 It's interesting how my friend group sometimes takes his idea as a specimen of postmodern syndromes—a convenient label and target to point at—that stands for the collapse (or at least the potential) of ideals and standards and expectations and... That said, although I call myself an "involuntary Deleuzian," there was a time when I myself also joined the hardheaded criticism without further investigation into how Deleuze framed becoming or, more specifically, how he potentially addressed the "pure abstraction" problem of infinite becoming without a direction. To my shallow understanding now, there are indeed several perspectives that we may use to explain this phenomenon. 



	First comes the material flow of the substrate, where the grounding of becoming begins with the physical. The world, immanence9, in Deleuzian terms, composed of "desiring-matter," is full of physical movements with momentum for certain (think of any movement of an extended physical thing, energy, or our concrete desire, let's say). Although they are constantly moving or changing, the physical weight still plays its role in the flows. In many senses, this is probably the most vanilla-anecdotal argument. Now, second comes the assemblages, where the temporal connections and relations between the parts define an entity. In that sense, although we are not a permanent "being," there is indeed a concrete, grounded reality that acts in the world. Thirdly, there are affects10 as ontological transitions. The capability to act in that case defines our bodies in terms of what they can do. And thus, a body is defined not by its genus or species, but by the specific range of temperatures, pressures, and ideas it can withstand or generate. Eventually, the territorialization—the limiting constraints in Deleuzian terms that could be external (social expectations, doctrines, law, etc.) or internal (language, habits, beliefs, etc.)—prevents becoming from dissolving into chaos. In brief, my reading of a Deleuzian grounding is that although the ground is constantly moving—at the level of the virtual11, the plane of immanence considered in its totality—becoming is indeed "infinite" in the sense that the differential field contains an inexhaustible reservoir of potential differentiations12, and there is no final state, no telos, no end of the process, the individuals inside of it inevitably face the constraints (as those constraints are often excessive, if not ubiquitous), so that their becoming is pragmatically not infinite in light of the actualization process of the virtual that contain the four aspects aforementioned.13 In many cases, they are co-constitutive.



	Therefore, simultaneously, it also grounds the ethics. The worry about that everything is flow and nothing is fixed—dissolves if we recognize that we, as finite assemblages, face real constraints, real choices between specific paths, and real consequences. In my view, this is nothing abstract but rather extremely pragmatic, embodied, and situated. Instead of asking how we can still have values if a world is all of becoming, maybe we should ask about how we, as finite beings within the becoming process, can know which becomings to pursue and which to refuse.



	When it comes to my own case, then, I have one line in a nutshell: That's exactly why I use the term "becoming as being"—no matter if becoming has a limit or not, it is more than evident that I do have. The very fact that I felt especially sounded hearing the phrase "You are on fire, aren't you?" is precisely because it names a state, not a property, so that the pursuit is the sustained capability to burn. And the reason I do need to pursue such a state is precisely because of the presence of undeniable limitations and constraints in facing a forced deterritorialization introduced by the war. The body constrains it; finitude constrains it; history, language, relationships, so on and so forth constrain it; and the world constrains it—war, institutions, my experience, and other people's suffering—all of which interrupt the purely self-referential loop of desire and force it into contact with reality. A caterpillar can become a butterfly, but it cannot become a galaxy, as its virtual field is rich but not unlimited. I will live my field, willingly or not, with affects and and nothing more and nothing less. 



	Still, there is one more final question from pragmatists that I cannot ignore or dismiss:

 



If we all face constraints, and our becoming is pragmatically finite, what is the point of positing the virtual, the plane of immanence, the metaphysical apparatus? We already know we have limitations. Why not just work with the limited reality we experience? Does the extra layer actually help?

 

	Indeed, a tough one—essentially, the most critical one, as it asks why it matters at all? Everything I describe there—the need for and the privilege of stability, the coping through creation, the inversion of proximity and emotion, the constraints of finitude, the burning state—can be articulated without the concepts of the virtual, the plane of immanence, or differential fields. I could have framed them in Spinozist terms (conatus, affect, adequate ideas), in Camusian terms (absurdity, revolt, lucidity), in pragmatist terms (habits, disruption, reconstruction), or even in the Chinese philosophical vocabulary. And more critically, why would I need a philosophy at all when all my feelings and doings were lived anyway?



	My quasi-take goes like this: It is indeed true that not everyone at every moment needs such a metaphysics—at least not me. Yet at some point, some crucial point, one may ask and seek a tentative perspective that explains why there are such constraints—like our finitude, or the collapse of the already used-to constraints, and how those constraints emerge in the first place, and potentially shed light and even courage on how we could act facing such a scenario. In those cases, philosophies alike, if not this particular Deleuzian one, may become a necessity—at least for me. 





1 That I may return to after a decade or so—or at least when this war is completely wrapped up. Nevertheless, some of these questions are evidently broader than this particular post—specifically, they are some frequent criticisms I would get from my close friends. Just me using the opportunity to further respond. ↩

2 A term often used to dismiss Western-style progressive or neo-liberal ideals. ↩

3 Please allow me to briefly promote Semiosfera—another spatial-temporal-relationship project I've been building to map the human cultural and intellectual history across disciplines and traditions. ↩

4 Although in most cases it is, I would say. ↩

5 The degree varies within my friend group—some totally dismiss, some deny, some accept but try to resist, etc. ↩

6 That said, I don't really believe there could be the exact same situation experienced, though. No matter if I call it privilege or simply differences in backgrounds, "the situation" for each of us is too distinct from others'—even within the NYUAD community, not to mention the broader context here in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and the Gulf.  ↩

7 As for the hard incompatibilism, I myself certainly need more time to contemplate. In essence, to my understanding, hard incompatibilism itself also doesn't directly give an answer to the determinism question, but only says that the radical free will by definition is incompatible with either case. Like said, it's just my tentative take.  ↩

8 Ironically, I've just said some deterministic stuff and now starting to talk about Deleuze. To my assertion, though, I would say there are some deterministic spaces even in the Deleuzian worldview. It seems more like a metaphysical commitment (or bet, if you think so) compared to a proven argument. ↩

9 Deleuzian worldview; inherited from Spinoza, while amputated of a Spinozian single, infinite, and necessary Substance (God/Nature) and determinism. It says that there is no "outside" or "above." Everything—thoughts, rocks, politics, biology—exists on the same "Plane of Immanence." So there is no transcendent judge, no God (as it "dissolves" into the plane of immanence itself), and evaluation must come from within the plane of existence. ↩

10 A Spinozian concept again. "By affect I understand the modifications of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these modifications." Ethics Part III, Definition 3, Spinoza. I found it in much tension with the Deleuzian ontology of assemblage, though. As if everything is becoming, if subjects are temporary assemblages, then affect, the transition in power of acting, seems to require a bearer that Deleuze's ontology cannot provide. Maybe it's a more than obvious paradox, yet: even in a philosophy of pure process, I suppose there must be some account of the minimal coherence required for a transition to be registered as a transition. Speaking only within the context of this Deleuzian thread, there may be an explanation that it is the affects and connections in the first place, and then their stabilization in some circumstances produces what we retrospectively call an "entity" or "subject" as the name given to a pattern of affects and connections. Nonetheless, this inevitably also leads to the hard problem of consciousness, as it doesn't fully address the phenomenological part of the story. ↩

11 Virtual here does not mean "not real" but "real but not actualized." Actual: the ordinarily called"reality." Virtual: a field of differential relations, singularities, and problems that are fully determined as problems but whose solutions are not given in advance. Possible: the Actual thought in reverse that resembles the real (Actual + Virtual). In terms of mathematics that influenced Deleuze: The differential equation = the Virtual; The specific solutions = the Actual; The process of integration/solution = Actualization. ↩

12 We shall not further delve into these in case the passage never ends :) In a nutshell, to my understanding, by differences, it's how where creation, generation, and becoming happen, and the differential fields are where they happen. ↩

13 Still, as you may wonder, there is this lingering question: Even if we describe the world in terms of differentials, what prevents a deeper deterministic law from governing those very differentials? The differential description might just be an observation of patterns produced by an underlying deterministic mechanism. Or equivalent to the Laplacian challenge: given complete knowledge of all initial conditions and all physical laws, the future is fully determined. We won't go further with it, too, as it goes back to the previous determinism argument. A Deleuzian response may include pointing out a potential conflation of the scientific model with the ontological structure of reality; the singularities and bifurcation (as in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory) as ontological openness; and Bergson's creative duration that argues time itself is creative, etc. I personally don't think any of those responses fully resolve the question, as the first one asserts instead of proving, the second one may be again an epistemic result instead of an ontological feature, and the third simply rests on an intuition of time (although some of my friends may find it interesting). Just FYI. ↩