WW1 casts a long shadow of death over Europe. In this paper of two halves, the first part recapitulates the Lacanian understanding of the ubiquity of the death drive with examples, centred around the machinations of the Symbolic register and the breakthrough of desire. The second half begins a critique of the dominance of the Lacanian orientation and the decline of psychoanalysis in the public sphere, which possibly mirrors the decline of Europe itself.
I started off with nothing and still have most of it left.2
Call it the Original Sin, or the primal scene of the century, ‘[t]he traumatic upheavals unleashed during the course of this four-year-long conflict (WW1) called into question the moral and intellectual premises of Western culture and civilisation. For many, the war served as the ultimate symbol of moral exhaustion and Western decline’ (Furedi 2018). The outworkings of this demoralisation and decline will be traced out below under the twin headings of guilt and the (Lacanian) celebration of desire.
In August 1914, Kafka began writing The Trial, the same month that the Great War started. According to George Steiner, 'Kafka prophesied the actual forms of the disaster of Western humanism which Nietzsche
and Kierkegaard had seen like an uncertain blackness on the horizon' (In Bradbury, 1988, 260). And in his essay, “The Great Ennui”, Steiner looks at the confident, liberal century before the Great War as the source of the inhuman: ‘the crises of our own time that compel a redefinition of culture, are to be found in the long peace of the nineteenth century… at the heart of the complex fabric of civilisation’ (Steiner 1971, 9). And are we not in roughly the same position today after the long period of peace in Europe at least since 1945, lulled into a false sense of security with two generations at least who have not known war first-hand? The storm clouds of the political extremes are gathering again accelerated by the desublimative effects of the (un)social media.
The well-known Lacanian cliché about the death drive: “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” (Lacan 1959-1960, 314), Lacan tells us that this is a “last judgement” on your life. 'The only thing that one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire“ (Lacan 1959-1960, 319). There is ethical purity here – conforming to desire and not compromising or ceding ground at all. Are you ready to die for your desire?
However, this guilt at having given ground to your desire has another older meaning of course – guilt at having given ground, or yielded to desire – being lead astray by desire as sin or temptation to sin. This is clearly not what was intended by Lacan; quite the opposite, but the words remain and thereby they echo the universal myth of the Fall which is stronger than any particular religion, hints at a wrong turn that was taken and today the wrong turns are proliferating.
We are no longer called upon to sacrifice our lives tragically for anything anymore – for God, our country or our own desire. Today's is a hedonistic ideology – suit yourself; be yourself. Your goal is happiness, grabbing pleasure wherever you can get it. However desire – pure desire – irrupts, interrupts, destroys – you only have one life, one destiny. Ask an old Left-wing politician who has made too many compromises over the years with the status quo in order to stay in power: is this what you
fought for in your youth – cutting welfare to pay off the national debt? Haven't you ceded too much? Or, maybe there is the unbearable question that poses itself, as you lie awake restless in the early hours: what have you done with your life? Has it been worthwhile? As Lacan says, this giving ground, ‘is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal…‘ (Lacan 1959-1960, 321 emphasis added). For Lacan, this is the ethical question. Maybe, you have ceded to the demands of others, i.e. betrayed your own singular desire? And Lacan makes his opposition to Aristotle clear; there will always be a bourgeois compromise with power.
In the context of the secular postmodern: all is radical uncertainty and pure accident – Quantum physics, Bohr, Heisenberg, Relativity – indeterminacy at the infinitesimal level leading to the radically chaotic nature of the Real, beyond the traditional Laws of nature. The self is a fetishistic illusion; there is no self, awaiting realisation. To coin that wonderful phrase from Kundera, this is ‘the unbearable lightness of being’. Being that is so incredibly free and so light.
[T]he absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
Maybe such lightness or dizziness caused Catherine Millot to worry for Lacan for an instant: ‘We had climbed to the summit of Etna. At the edge of the huge crater among the gas and smoke, I suddenly became anxious and overwhelmed at the crazy idea that he might throw himself in, as Empedocles had done and pull me with him’ (Millot. 2016, 115).
By contrast, recall the old psychoanalytic joke (Žižek 2014, 67-69) about the terribly anxious man who was preoccupied with himself because he was convinced he was just a grain or a seed. He went to a psychiatrist who convinced him after many sessions that he was really a man not a seed. He left the psychiatrist's office pleased to have his real identity as a man stabilised. He strolled along the street until he met a
chicken. In panic he ran back to the psychiatrist's office in a state of near collapse, shouting at the psychiatrist – Okay, I know, I know, that I am a man, but does the chicken know?
The joke needs updating. There are allegedly no longer any chickens to fear or avoid on the one hand, and the grain, on the other hand, is not obligated in any way to become a man. Whatever he wants to be must conform only to the desire that is in him, i.e. have nothing to do with any repressive normalisation as a man. His analyst might now add that these days it is safe to live as a grain or a seed in an equal, inclusive, pluralist world with all traditional chickens consigned to history.
To continue the Lacanian deployment: ‘The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary [normative] run of things’. (Žižek, 2006, 62) The key word is “drive”. Its strangeness consists in its tendency to fixate and get stuck and circulate around a particular object seemingly forever – the repetition compulsion – ultimately a very conservative pointless repetition, very often observed as being caught in a loop of guilt and pain. No longer a passionate metonymical search for the (lost) object of desire, but often being caught prematurely in loss itself and the seeming endlessness of it due to the libidinisation of the loss and pain that spells a life of suffering which is excessive and immune to relief. Thus instead of translating Freud's Wiederholungszwang as repetition compulsion, Lacan prefers repetition automatism to avoid any psychological overtones. To make it clear that Lacan's stance is about the structuring effect of the Symbolic order: ‘it turns out that the symbol's order can no longer be conceived of there as constituted by man but must rather be conceived of as constituting him’ (Lacan 2002, 34).
Thus the death drive with its automatism comes from some structuralist ‘beyond’; it is thus determining of human nature rather than determined by human motivation however extreme. Thus the subject seems compelled via the authoritarian operations of the signifier. The subject is always already de-natured and automated. Maybe a way of
detecting the operation of the death drive clinically is the degree to which the subject seems automated in his speech and behaviours. Clearly this Lacanian approach represents a move against Freud's ‘paganism’ – the alleged cosmic conflict between the life and the death instincts (Freud 1940 [1938], 148). According to Žižek (2010, 305), “there is only one drive, the libido, striving for enjoyment, and the ‘death drive’ is the curved [repetitive] space of its formal structure”. There is an excess of negativity peculiar to human existence a kind of basic fault of self-sabotaging. The death drive is the name of a basic malfunction, the stickiness of the drive. But also, “humans are not simply alive, but possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life to excess of the ordinary run of things – and ‘death’ stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ‘ordinary’ biological life. Žižek (2001, 104). Lacan says as much, “It is not a perversion of instinct, but rather a desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form we can find of the death instinct” (Lacan 2002, 263/320). This Kantian shaking off the human with all of its compromises to prevent a greater evil is reflected in the chorus at the beginning of Anouilh's Antigone. “The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason and sorrow are on the march” (Cudden 1977, 985).
Thus the ordinary harmony and homeostasis of the pleasure-reality principle oscillation of everyday life has something of the same repetitive nature of the death drive – the nine-to-five job, the pension after 40years in the rat-race, etc. – against the exuberant real life of living (dangerously) – the ethical act of striking out for freedom not counting the cost; as per the 1968 slogan:” Soyons Réalistes, Demandons L'Impossible (“Let's be realists, demand the impossible.”).
There is some foundational ontological fault, like the gap in the order of Being which enables the subject to be. Lacanians understand the death drive as a violent striking out for freedom, against the clamour of the real, clearing a space for the act of creation ex nihilo. As we have said, the death drive as ‘freedom’ is the high point of a Lacanian analysis. The death drive is not the blind pointless will to self destruction, but the violent energy required for the (revolutionary) Act-Event to blast a way through
an ontological blockage. As Zupančič makes clear, “After the act I am not the same as before. In the act the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn” (Zupančič 2000, 83). Something or some act breaks the One of the smooth peaceful sea of Nirvana. Something emerges from the One nothing – the drive – contrasted with tedious ‘the wheel of life’. Authentic human autonomy is a life that exceeds life beyond measure, an anti-adaptational seizing the day. As Alejandra Pizarnik (1962-1972) says of the singularity of her poetry, “Like every profoundly subversive act, poetry avoids everything but its own freedom and its own truth”.
Likewise, the view of the most ardent Brexiteer staking everything on the sovereignty of Britain? Desire, authentic national autonomy, emerging out of the immovability and confident elitism of the EU, surely the Brexit vote is a good example of the near suicidal ethical Act. There will be no more business as usual.
Business as usual is the repetition compulsion of let us say for example the Remainers, stuck in the inexorability of Symbolic order. The compulsion to continue in the same old way, Lacan would call, “the mask of the symbolic order” (Lacan, 1954-1955, 326). After all, the signifier as such, 'whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death… This is why every drive is virtually a death drive“ (Lacan 2002, 719/848). And that is why there is a certain fatality in the ”declinist“ view of Britain's position. There is no way out but to stay in.
Primarily, Lacan links suicide with narcissism – “the terms death instinct and primary masochism – depend in my view, on the fact that man's death, long before it is reflected in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through”, birth, prematurity and weaning. Lacan continues, “Thanks to Freud we can think of them as expressing the first vibration of the stationary wave of renunciations that scand the history of psychical development” (Lacan 2002, 152/187). He continues, “we see the primordial ego, as essentially alienated, linked to the first sacrifice as essentially suicidal. In other words here we see the fundamental structure of madness” (Lacan 2002, 152/187). The subject is crushed from the beginning long before he knows it.
The ominous ‘first vibration’ was noted by Freud who observed his grandson's repetitive game, where the child makes an object appear then disappear repeatedly, accompanied by the fort/da phonemes. “[T]he child thus begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing … his Fort! and Da!” (Freud 1920, 14-15) Lacan rejects what he calls the ‘out-dated notion’ of primary masochism being used “to explain repetitive games [in general] in which subjectivity simultaneously masters its dereliction”, seeing in it rather, “the moment at which…the child is born into language…Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (Freud 1920, 262/319), the birth of the symbolic order. Thus vital being is over-written by the signifier or the symbolic chain, which precedes him and lasts long after his death. The Symbolic is more deathly than mere biological death. We are written off while we are alive. It is a blind automatism. Žižek points to the radical nature of this postmodern discourse: “an animal excoriated by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language)' (Žižek 1989, 4). Thus the death drive operates from beyond, hollowing out being, the being of an animal no less.
Every drive presses beyond satisfaction, need and ordinary pleasure and tilts toward the excess which Lacanians call jouissance. Paradoxically, jouissance in turn threatens the Symbolic whose deathly negation created it and could yet destabilise it and destroy it. Any conceptual contradiction/confusion about the death drive is covered by the unconscious where opposites can co-exist; to the extent of an apparent reversal of the life and death drives. What we ordinarily thought was giving life, normal life, was on this register giving death! What we thought was utterly destructive was in truth the bursting through of life risking everything.
Lacan summarises Freud's grim Real: “it is explicitly around masochism, conceived only in the dimension of the search for this ruinous jouissance, that Freud's entire text revolves” (Lacan, 1969-1970, 46). As Lacan has it, “this [jouissance] dimension is introduced as soon as the historical chain is isolated, and the history presents itself as something memorable and memorized in the Freudian sense, namely something that is registered in the signifying chain and dependent on its existence”. (1959-1960, 212).
Thus the symbolic, machinic process engenders the dangerous surplus that could turn around and destroy it. The death drive is not just found in the signifier but also in what might destroy it. This underlines Freud's claim that the death drive is omipresent, in for instance the superego and the id, as the former borrows its energy from the latter.
For true adherents, the death drive acquires a mythical status, especially with the notion of the lamella and its asexual undeadness inspired by the endlessly replicating protista whose substance never dies.
Or as Žižek says, “flayed, skinned body, the palpitation of raw, skinless red flesh” (Žižek 1995, 208). Lacan contrasts this eternal life of the lamella with the finite life of sexual beings, who, from the moment of conception have death on the horizon. Lacan refers to ‘immortal … irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, indestructible life’ (Lacan 1964, 198). Thus the death drive is the drive – the pure drive of life, for the pre-Symbolic state prior to our own history. The first loss is the loss that occurs at conception (Lacan says birth) – man that is born of woman has but a short time to live (Job 14:1). In his myth the lamella that flies off at the moment of conception, the originary lack of the finite creature in the Real is displaced onto the Symbolic-Imaginary register as the lack in the signifying system, where the game of lack is played out incidentally and by displacement around the phallus – who has it and who hasn't it. But the real longing remains beyond the phallic economy, the longing for pure life.
Jagodzinski understands techno rhythmic pulsation as precisely the function of the body-as-machine akin to Deleuze and Guattari's “Body without Organs” (BwO) – ‘immortal irrepressible life of zoe that needs no organ…the attempt to regain that which has been originally lost’ (Jagodzinski 2005, 260). In the pulsation of the techno-rave one becomes lost in the mother.
As a variation on the theme of the Symbolic resister, Lacan, following Heidegger, linked science and technological rationality specifically with the death drive. Cut off from tradition, cut off from Being, from
blood, soil and belonging by modernity, and globalization, the subject of science as subject of the signifier is already dead (already sacrificed) while still living. This is why we should be suspicious of neuro-psychoanalysis, interesting as it is qua science, because it is the opposite of psychoanalysis proper. Lacan saw that the domain of the Real – the domain of death – is extended by means of science. Miller echoes this concern as he parodies Heidegger by proposing that the analyst should be “the shepherd of the Real”.3 The reference to Heidegger is: “Man is the shepherd of being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as ‘care’.” (Heidegger 1978, 234). The editor of Basic Writings, Farrell Krell explains care in this Heideggerian sense as being involved with “one's birth, life and death, projects, inclinations, insights, illusions – awareness of my proper Being” (Heidegger 1978, 223), all of which are foreclosed by the scientific method and capitalism in their deracinating effects. At the same time, new scientific discoveries, new technical discoveries right up to the iPhone are surely examples of scientific desire pushed to the extreme; we call them break-throughs!
However, with a slight shift in parallax, the death drive becomes just mundane pathology, the foundational basis for mental illness. We could not miss the critical parallax between two versions of the death drive. The heroic / tragic / ecstatic alluded to above; the one favoured by Freud and Klein that sees the death drive in quasi-scientific terms, as an extreme of the drive leading to violence, dissolution and the silence and peace of the inorganic, or at least mental torpor, unless it is redirected by the life drive into ordinary aggression. This utterly common-sense notion of the death drive, observable every day, has great clinical relevance (Segal 1993). For Freud, the death drive is linked with biology as every organism retains a desire to return to the inorganic state, to rest in peace, as we have noted. Or, as a destructive / self-destructive impulse beyond ordinary assertive aggression, a kind of narcissistic rage, a compensatory omnipotence, so visible in our post-Oedipal times in any city centre.
As Freud makes clear:
We may regard the self-destructiveness as the expression of a ‘death instinct’ which cannot fail to be present in every vital process … some portion of the death instinct remain operative within the organism and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological processes and phenomena to this internalisation of the destructive instinct.
Furthermore, Laplanche and Pontalis make the central point: recognizing in the death instinct, “a new conceptual departure: the death instinct makes the destructive tendency, as revealed for example in sadomasochism, into an irreducible datum; it is furthermore the chosen expression of the most fundamental principle of psychical functioning; and, lastly, in so far as it is ‘the essence of the instinctual’, it binds every wish, whether aggressive or sexual, to the wish for death” (1973, 103).
While Freud is sanguine and stoical, it is clear that this orientation sees the death drive as entirely connected to severe mental illness, not least the perversions of the superego which enjoys suffering (of the melancholic, the obsessional), so much so that the more you obey it and cede to its demands, the more you feel guilty. Nowhere is this clearer today than with the increasing demand to be politically correct: the more you conform the more you have to virtue-signal as the new evolving superego clings onto you.
In addition, I have already made reference to the biological phenomenon of apoptosis – programmed cell death (Weatherill 1998, 112ff). And here it is tempting to note a biological confirmation of the specifically Object Relations' assertion, contra Lacan and Freud, that relating is primary and biological. “Modern biological findings show that cells, on their own and isolated, die for want of signals from their neighbours to keep them alive” (117). In ordinary tissues, cells are kept alive by (chemical) communication. However, all cells are genetically programmed to die under some circumstances. This is termed apoptosis. Thus, “Protista and cancers cells are immortal – they have lost the ability to die, but their very ‘aliveness’ is death bearing” (118).
As a Platonic philosopher reminded me, Lacan's ideology is extreme. All the foundations are destroyed, leaving a kind of cognitive futility, undecidability, impossibility and so on. We live in a post-apocalyptic non-world; in Blanchot's terms, ‘writing the disaster’ with our suicide preceding us. This situation resembles a tactical nuclear weapon strike that kills everything that is alive while leaving the infrastructure looking unchanged; the disaster ‘ruins everything, while leaving everything intact’. (Blanchot 1986, 1). Thus, being without being, or being otherwise than being. In the manner of Becket in The Unnamable: ‘I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on’. Or, the Silicon Valley slogan: ‘Fail early, fail fast and fail cheap’: their formula for creativity, creative desire, whereby failing does not have such a final quality.
As Lacan says in Seminar 20, ‘The discordance between knowledge and being is my subject’ (Lacan 1972-1973, 228). Earlier he had made it clear that, ‘I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking’ (Lacan 2002, 517). There is therefore in this radical discourse, no community between being and thinking; each negates the other. Thus thinking, speaking, intelligibility and so on are enabled only via a violence done to Being. Being itself is dumb (Lacan 1959-1960, 55) and lacks all Logos; it is language that imposes a structure on Being. Being, or the Real is too much of a fullness, therefore it has to be reduced or lacked so that thinking can take place. ‘The symbol is the murder of the [Real] thing’ (Lacan 2002, 262/319). Thus the Lacanian notion of the subject is already ‘thin, empty and weightless’ (Bowie 1991, 75). Now the signifier has to cover all that was formerly meant by mental life and indeed mental illness. In the disaster, the near nothing, which is my life and the life of our patients – I can't go on – becomes: from nothing to something as nothing.
Thus the insubstantiality of the text is all we are left with. If we follow Baudrillard: “We are afraid of language since we have been told about the signifier and all that. The signifier has introduced terror into language. ”The unconscious is structured like a language“ – nothing has wreaked such havoc as that kind of proposition” (Baudrillard 2005b, 95).
There is nothing outside the text. Now, even within the text, there is a war between names, as one name negates another. Names are necessary as Being is dumb, but names are violent because they are imposed upon the Real. Thus every name is a point of contestation, where a fight can breakout. And truth becomes a fight with the untruth (disinformation, fake news, etc.) or a fight with the non-sense that exceeds it. Thus all names, truths and so on compete for attention via omnipresent slogans lest they be reabsorbed into the Real. “Our starting point, the point we keep coming back to, since we will always be at our starting point, is that every real signifier … signifies nothing” (Lacan 1955-1956, 185). The nothing that must be as something.
Writing in Le Monde recently, the historian and leading authority on Lacan, Elizabeth Roudinesco (2019), deplores the loss of prestige suffered by psychoanalysis now that ‘its heroic age is past’. She argues for a return to “humanist” psychiatry, suggesting that “psychoanalysis has entered an endless phase of decline”. She complains that its practitioners use “incomprehensible language in their writings intended only for their inner circle”. Their works of ‘dense theory’ are printed in small editions not exceeding a few hundred copies. She notes that the psychoanalytic movement in France has splintered into nineteen associations with a majority of women members, who often know nothing about each other. They organise conferences, enjoy belonging to an association, but younger analysts have difficulty setting up their practices because clients have become scarce as psychoanalysis attracts fewer and fewer patients. She concludes by suggesting that may be analysts have become humiliated by the success of the many “abject rantings discrediting Freud”, and have largely “abandoned public debate, turning a blind eye to any undertaking critical of them”.
Recall the days when Michael Ignatieff hosted discussions on late night Channel Four, with analysts such as Bruno Bettelheim, Hanna Segal,, Adolf Grunbaum, Andre Green, Robert Young, Elizabeth Spillius, Juliet Mitchell and others, published in the Voices series (Bourne et al 1987) and discussed in The Listener weekly magazine which itself ceased publication in 1991 after 62 years
Roudinesco's observations remind one of literary critic John Carey's provocations. On a visit to Dublin, in discussion with Irish literary critic Declan Kiberd, Carey dared to suggest that Joyce's Ulysses was a treatment for insomnia. Carey was reheating a theme from his The Intellectuals and the Masses (Carey 2005), about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture more than a century ago. The Education Acts of the 1870s created a mass reading public with mass circulation newspapers. Literary intellectuals were hostile to these developments regarding universal education as a mistake. As Carey suggested, ‘they resented the “semi-literate” masses, despised their pretensions to culture and detested newspapers’ (Carey 2014, 326). They created ‘modernist literature which cultivates obscurity and depends on learned allusions, comprehensible only to the highly educated’ (327). Carey noted similar developments in the other arts.
Kiberd himself was to say something similar on the fortieth anniversary of May '68.
Those who failed to make a revolution in the world settled instead for making one in language. They retreated from the streets and factories to university arts' facilities. There they propounded extreme forms of post-structural theory in a specialist jargon, which no normally intelligent person could (or should) ever hope to understand.
The ‘incomprehensible language’ and ‘specialist jargon’ of the Lacanian groups was in part an elitist response to the newly emergent mass therapy culture during the 1970s and 1980s including Anglo-American psychotherapy post-Freud. The Lacanian intent, never stated, was to exclude the therapy-hungry masses from such high culture and esoteric doctrines. When a colleague attempted to purchase a copy of Lacan's Écrits in a small Parisian bookstore back in the '70s, the owner of the shop strongly discouraged him from spending his money on a text of such supreme difficulty.
Of course there is so much that is of great value in Lacan. But here again we can usefully follow Carey approving of Orwell's observation to the effect that, in Joyce, Orwell detects a gradual death of feeling and its replacement by literary cleverness. In Dubliners, for instance, there is an identification with the suffering of the people, whereas in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is ‘intolerable’ and Leopold Bloom does not evoke much pity even when his situation is pitiful.
So when Roudinesco invokes (a return to) “humanist” psychiatry, before it is too late with the psi world now dominated by science, drug therapies, turning away from the subject and so on, this term “humanist” is very problematic for the post-structuralists. For them, care and improvement are sometimes synonymous with the death drive itself, with hints of crushing normative and adaptive assumptions. Consider the Lacanian versus ABA debate in relation to the treatment of autism (Weatherill 2018).
As Borch-Jacobsen (1991, 124) complains, “[W]as it really a psychoanalyst's role to transform his office into the scene of a grandiose Greek tragedy [following desire, pure life, etc.] Wouldn't this completely belittle patients' request for solace and finally drive clients to despair…?”
There is the joke about the analyst who dies and goes to Heaven. An angel there offers to show him around. So, here's the room for the Freudians; here's the room for the Kleinians, and so on for the Winnicottians, Jungians, Attachment theorists, etc. Then the angel says sh…sh.., as they approach a high wall. Why keep quiet, he asks? Because behind the wall are the Lacanians and they think they are the only ones here.
In the long shadow of WW1, all kinds of evils are identified widely and over-simplistically to do with the Enlightenment, Colonialism, Capitalism and the Imperialism of reason, and such like. The death drive has insinuated itself into the most intimate of places, creating what Baudrillard called The Transpiration of Evil (Baudrillard 1990) and Bruchner confirms that Europeans are growing timorous and self devouring: 'the Old World is in danger of dying, like Rome, of obesity,
and ectoplasm that grows larger as it loses its substance' (Bruchner 2006, 190). A self-lacerating guilt lives side by side with ‘living the life’ – living the pure life, or as people declare, ‘this is my life’. There are deadly side-effects (as rights conflict) as we abandon any real notion of the social good. As Miller says in almost a Thatcherite moment, ‘The collective is nothing but the subject of the individual’.4 And even the social good conceals the death drive, ‘as we wait for it to drag us to our destruction’ (Lacan 1959-1960, 232), and especially when we raise the question: ‘for the good of whom?‘ (319). There is no such thing as society!
The deeper reason for the alleged ‘endless phase of decline’ of psychoanalysis, beyond the complexities of the academic language and terminology, beyond scientism and reductive materialism, beyond pharmacology and so on, is the anti-Christian, anti-humanist orientation of the new atheistic religion to which politicised psychoanalysis now belongs almost by default, which knows no evil, or to be more precise, knows evil only as out there – in capitalism, the Symbolic, the white man, religion and so on.
Instead of the burden of responsibility and realistic personal guilt we have inherited from earlier centuries following the Socratic injunction know thyself – gaining insight, becoming reflective, forming therapeutic alliances, renouncing impulses, improving relations and so on, Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely dispensed with all that emotional ‘work on the self’, in exchange for a return to the pre-Christian Greco-Roman polytheism and the heroic affirmation of the death drive. Here there was / is no real question of good and evil.
It is no longer just elites, artists, and so on that really know this kind of freedom. It is now available for all. The silent masses, still mired in the old ethics, are rapidly catching up but becoming worried about what real freedom without scruples and total openness actually entails. Even the new BBC app “Sounds” is advertised as “without limit”. Maybe, we should heed Baudrillard's claim (2005a, 163): ‘If you don't like reality, don't ruin it for everyone else’.
Meantime, in the fractal universe there are thoughts without a thinker, maybe unthinkable terrifying thoughts whose depths have not yet been
plumbed. This must be the web: thinking without thinking, thinking free of thinking – obscene, sometimes unimaginably so, on the dark web for instance. Who can now say it is bad or evil? Maybe it is art. A young boy is groomed on the web. He meets the man who groomed him who then kills him. The grieving family are sent videos of the killing at intervals anonymously during the following months. Transgressive art? In 2014, Petr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to the cobbles in Red Square. The year before he had wrapped himself naked in barbed wire, and sewn his lips together. Drill music videos posted online feature hooded and masked gangs threatening each other, with lyrics about drugs, guns and stabbing rivals with knives. The real difficulty seems to be how can you continue to transgress in an already transgressive culture which celebrates and promotes transgression? But there is always more death drive to defuse.
A child is born to a mother on Methadone maintenance treatment. He is taken into the care of his maternal grandparents when his father dies soon after he is born from a suspected drug overdose. By the time he is seven or eight his grandparents can no longer cope with his violent outbursts. And at school he is becoming increasingly violent hitting other children and abusing the teachers.
We are more and more paranoid-schizoid these days than depressive. Is it not true that everyone has a crime hidden within them? We are just waiting to be accused, to be called out. We are guilty before any possible trial, like Herr K. Thought fragments. Random juxtapositions. A fractal universe. All ultimately pointless, lacking points de capiton. This is the death drive unbound. In the Lacanian anti-religion religion, death is free to roam without query. The analogy is with the free radicle coursing through the body damaging cells and tissues as it goes. But just as the free radicals depend upon a healthy body for their disruptive activity, so too does the supremely free (Lacanian) agent depend upon a lawful network of facilitation and protection. Maybe it is strange that the so-called ‘endless phase of decline’ of psychoanalysis is marked by its only truly active principle, the death drive and its celebration!
The radical Left seems to have shaken itself free of any residual gravitational pull. It welcomes the pure life of the death drive fully
unleashed that might finally cleanse several centuries of white guilt. Will this not be matched, according to an almost Newtonian principle, by an equal and opposite unleashing on the Right?
One by one they come knocking at your door. They cry out, they beg you for help and you say: get them away from me … these people who come with these ridiculous stories … I've always loved people who enjoy good meals, who look forward to watching good performances … I've struggled hard to get what I have, but my struggle has always been against others. In fact I have been struggling against the ones who are poor … I'm not on their side, and that too is a choice I am making. What will be home? My own bed, my night table, then on the table, what? Then on the table, what? Blood, death, a fragment of bone, a piece of a human brain, a severed hand. Let everything filthy, everything vile, sit by my bed, where once I had my lamp and clock, books, letters, presents for my birthday, left-over bright coloured ribbons.
Forgive me. Forgive me. I know you'll forgive me. I'm still falling. I am still falling (Shaun 1996).
Italian Marxist Franco Beredi who was at the Labour fringe in September 2018:
Five centuries of colonialism, capitalism and nationalism have turned Europeans into the enemy of human kind. May they be cursed forever! May Europeans be swept away by the storm they have generated, by the weapons they are building, by the fire they have ignited, by the hatred they have cultivated5
There is no longer any objective judgement, no final accounting for the rightness or wrongness of our acts; psychoanalytically, politically, it is a question of radical desire. There is no big Other to guarantee or judge.
There is no covenant or possibility of ratifying things. Your only duty is, or your orders are, to follow the orientation of your desire. Collateral damage is the price to pay.
And Zizek's most recent response? The Courage of Hopelessness (Žižek 2017), or as somebody quipped: Don't just sit there; do nothing.
MCMXIV Philip Larkin.
This is a title by blues singer, Seasick Steve.