Nickname for the recalcitrance of nature to our efforts. Especially: our experience of applying the force of muscle exertion against something. The resistance of the target to our effortful work of pushing—and which also makes our own effort to present to us empirically—is the archetypal counterforce. Physical mass—the occult mark of an object that is a magnitude and which varies.

Counterforce is the essential mark of the real. The archetypal mode of counterforce is counter-pressure to muscular exertion. Counterpressure is the immediate and original presentation of the real, and how the real must finally be schematized. It is what we reduce other (derivative) notions of reality to when we render them intelligible. In the same way as space and time must finally be reduced to, and schematized as, a line.