Cold World is a book about unpleasure: a sermon in the name of death. One of its premises is that socially sanctioned hedonism, in Western societies, is not rebellion but conformism - not a particularly astounding insight by itself, but one which gives rise to the question of what relationship a real rebellion might have with pleasure. Andrea Dworkin, who is not discussed in the book, would have made an excellent example of what it calls “militant dysphoria”, or politicised unpleasure. In the event, I went for Ulrike Meinhof instead. It’s a fairly bleak, grim, angry book; it says something about how I felt about life as an adolescent, and is meant, really, as a comfort and consolation to other adolescents. I hope their parents - and mine - will forgive me.

One of the reasons why I’m reluctant to supply a positive image of how human beings might enjoy their lives, their sexual lives in particular, is that such images are the very currency of consumerism. Actually enjoying one’s life is not the same as conforming to an image of enjoyment. Actually enjoying sex is not the same as enacting a role in some sexual scenario. We do, of course, imagine things we would like to have, or do, or be, and represent our desired future realities to ourselves and to others. What we actually do and become may be orientated by such representations, but even when things work out pretty well it never really coincides with them. It’s comic when Alan Partridge compliments his partner, post-coitally, on a “textbook” shag, a successful performance which needless to say has done nothing to draw off and dissipate his permanent nervous anxiety. We understand that he is a person captivated by an image of fulfilment, that he is unable to imagine his way out of his own fantasies - the classic comedic automaton, in fact. (It’s also implied that his mail-order bride is something of a professional in the execution of “textbook” sexual services).

The cold world is, in one sense, the world in which there’s nothing left to sell, in which the promise of future satisfaction is evacuated of meaning. The image has no potency, and the system of values organised around representations collapses. Insofar as the potency of images is a means by which desire inscribes itself, propagating itself through the “writing machine” of the iterable mark, this collapse entails a libidinal freezing of the world, a terminal slow-down. Auden’s now famous poem “Stop all the clocks”, with its conclusion, “for nothing now can ever come to any good”, explicitly associates the loss of a desired object with the winding-down of the world.

An anecdote. Years ago, when I was at university, I was complaining to an older friend about the end of a relationship, one which had gone badly almost from the start and had finished in a particularly farcical and humiliating way. She suggested that I imagine myself in a picture frame, with my former lover standing beside me. The lover departs, exits stage left; I’m there in the frame alone. What do I do next? What happens in the frame? I couldn’t answer this question. I couldn’t see any reason to remain in the frame. Therefore: exit stage right, out of the picture. Whatever image I had had of myself before was no longer tenable. There was nothing left that could be done with it. Walk, just walk away.

I don’t know how common this is. It might be the most common thing in the world. Some people give you the impression that it’s never happened to them, but how would you know? It may be that it takes a lot of effort to give that impression, to maintain the social presentation of a self-confidence that has been painstakingly assembled out of the figments of a chaotic life history. In any case, it turns out in the long run that what makes you the same creature at 30 as you were at 15 is not the consistency of a self-image but something more instinctual and less brittle: when Keats talked about the truths of poetry being proved on our pulses, it was this submerged, resourceful, passionate animal beneath the skin he was addressing.