Psychoanalysis at the End of the End of History

What is, or was, the End of History? The political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the victory of the “Western world” in the Cold War and ended, definitively, the struggle between competing ideological grand narratives. Fukuyama's theory asserted that the basic formula of human government had been settled once and for all in favor of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

How can we describe the actual historical period that followed? It was characterized by a collective fantasy of a smooth, conflict-free society run by experts as a form of “post-politics.” Having grown up in this period as a child and teenager, it's not that people did not argue. People still argued, of course. There were all sorts of cultural debates about lifestyle choices. But there was seemingly no urgency to these discussions. The idea that fundamental conflict or class antagonism was central to politics was not part of our day-to-day experience. The appearance of conflict-free management of society was reflected to the public by party politics that seemed to be based on the fundamental agreement that the needs of “the market” were of the utmost importance. The idea of imagining a future that did not center on the logic of the market was not only unpopular but unthinkable. In the words of cultural historian and critic Mark Fisher, it felt like the future had been canceled. Everything resides within the here and now.

“The End of History” was characterized by a postmodern sensibility. Discussions of values were shaped by a deepening feeling of relativism, and relativism was widely accepted as a philosophical and theoretical presupposition. Irony was the favored mode of expression, and people who held strong political views were seen as hopelessly anachronistic. In the meantime, the actual gulf between rich and poor widened.

But what did this postmodern turn in our cultural milieu have to do with the world of