The narratives we build our lives around are haunted by 'simulations of god', by ideas of sovereignty, of wisdom aligned with truth, of full transparency. These notions are expressed in relationships and so give rise to a sort of perpetual low-level war between appropriations and nodal points, in which alliances are as important as hostilities. The aim appears to be to ground one's substantiality, to be fully persuaded and thus unshakable in the face of other subjectivities - which is the generic form of the real. It is a world of towers and the crumbling of towers. To search for persuasion is to already have failed to find it, but the past is irrelevant when the present is only the opening to the future. Although present names a state and desire a drive, such a present is equivalent to desire, which can only exist in the present as a rejection of the present and a drive to exceed it. Desire can however be directed towards the past as well as towards the future, in which case it is the drive or compulsion towards the future intrinsic to the present that desire opposes, just as present always opposes itself. There is this irritant in the present, a sort of disappointment, something burning or else overcrowding, an inability to contain itself, and so the imagination of an outside which can only be conceived as another, better, more embracing, more sovereign, form of presence.