The cover of The Anti-Oedipus Complex depicts the labyrinth carved into the wall of the Cathedral of St. Martino in Lucca, Italy. Hermann Kern (Kern 2000) speculates about the precise placement of the Lucca labyrinth, suggesting is a game for the fingers of the faithful as they enter the Cathedral, analogous to the French pavement labyrinths, supposed to help spiritually prepare the devout for the religious experience that they were about to have. He also noted that the labyrinth is placed opposite the Fall of Man, suggesting it represented the way back out of sin into a state of grace.
Oakley begins his review with a comment from Martin McDonagh, the director of the award winning ‘Three Billboards’: “I'm coming from a punk rock background: The Clash and the Pogues. It's all about trying to shake things up. You are taking people to places that they hadn't thought about before” (the latter claim a potential rallying call for psychoanalysis)“ (Oakley 2018, 117 italics added). Agreed! This is the labyrinth on the cover. But this labyrinthine wandering and shaking up takes place in the context of our deepest traditions. Thus ‘shaking things up’ presupposes something to be shaken up, something foundational. This book lies astride these two positions and my claim is that psychoanalysis itself has been in this place of between, until recently.
Clearly the book was taking Oakley to places he would never go and his review seemed intended to make sure no one else goes their either, notwithstanding that his very definite ire might work as a temptation for some. Thus, as for the Radical Orthodoxy2 which features in the book's tentative conclusion, this is a priori out of the question for Oakley. There is an anti-Catholic joke: “I was leaving a coffee shop in Miami a few years back and I came across a bumper sticker proclaiming ‘Not all Catholic priests are paedophiles’ – to which the obvious rejoinder might be: ‘But a lot of them were’”. Actually, the real figure is about 5%. We might
add many of the rest are working tirelessly for the social good. But here is the difficulty: Oakley like Lacan is doubtless deeply suspicious of the social good – whose good? And the laughter at his joke is the laughter of the unbelievers when Nietzsche's madman announced the death of God in the town square. Thus, Oakley can dismiss “the alleged afflictions of our contemporary world … as we all head for hell in a handcart”, as the author's “jaundiced and ultimately pessimistic world view”; maybe viewing with indifference and / or celebration a Europe increasingly without its Christian and Jewish heritage. As Rémi Brague asks: “But are Europeans really living? Do they want to continue to live? Or are they zombies frantically agitating their limbs [‘shaking thing up’?] so as to pass for being truly alive?” (Brague 2009, 19). In the book, I cite Berlin, the club capital of Europe, where even the reporter is alarmed at what he sees (61)3
Postmodern discourse is entirely free from such judgement – to be alive or dead, zombies or not, agitated or enjoying – there is nothing outside the text. Such is the plenitudinal provision of nihilism – God is dead; everything is permitted. Žižek commands us, “to fully assume the non-existence of the Other” (Žižek 2006, 296). Or as Lacan said, ‘There is no, I have told you, Other of the Other. There is not in the Other, any signifier which is able on this occasion to answer for what I am’. (Lacan 1958–1959: Lesson 16, 16.4.59: 206). Lacan's assertion here directly opposes the Christian notion of a community between being and thinking. As Cunningham puts it: “we have been thought … we subsist as the lived nonidentical repetition of divine thought” (Cunningham 2005, 95).
To be fair, in part at least, I affirm Oakley's position,
[F]ollowing Baudrillard, everything is seduction. What is celebrated on the plane-of-immanence is Kerouac's dream of ‘saturating every atom’, forsaking all resemblance, analogy and comparison, without memory or desire. Being present at the dawn of the world’ (48)(also Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 309). Again, “is not the hyper-real an improvement upon the real? In the same vein, is not the anti-Oedipal impulse correct in its revolutionary ‘wrenching
Page 85from its hinges’ transformation translation of the original sclerotic Oedipus?” (139). Mao was right in his assertion of revolutionary subjectivity – there is disorder in the Real, so the situation is excellent!
Thus the only real question for postmodern politicised psychoanalysis is how to clear the decks sufficiently to achieve this pure freedom of becoming ex nihilo. Apparently, this is the message any contemporary psychoanalytic book worth its salt should be conveying.
However, I was challenging this new orthodoxy, conveying something quite contrarian: seeking rather to undo the disappearances and subtractions to recover the (transcendental) losses and articulate them forcibly, hyperbolise them, not in a fit of nostalgia, but as part of a process of mourning. Thus the last page of the ninth chapter makes this prediction:
Generations to come will have to negotiate their survival mentally and psychically through a bewildering array of lethal substances and, as mere nodal points in an infinite network, avoiding violence by skulking in safe areas in cities, staying “below the radar” grabbing a few intense but brief “highs” followed by the darkest nights imaginable… And the best that the radically helpless, unjudgemental and indifferent liberals, democrats and educationalists, all decent souls, will ever manage or muster is ‘damage limitation’: warn them of the dangers and let them decide (182).
I felt the need to call on experts in the recovery of the Real. There are many and some of them originally from the Left. For instance, Girard warned, “Violence can no longer be checked. From this point of view we can say the apocalypse has already begun” (Girard 2010, 209-210). Sloterdijk accuses intellectuals of failing to gauge the “monstrous cold”; of languishing like “the summer guest in his full pension” (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2001, 217-19). Houellebecq describing himself as
“depressionist”, because he believes “our societies have come to a terminal stage where they refuse to recognise their malaise”. (Houellebecq 2008, 63). Patočka speaks of decadence, “life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature” (Patočka 1990, p97). Steiner refers to the “after-Word”, summarising the anti-Oedipal, where “Today, we stand orphaned but free in the place of the a-Logos”. The loss of the Real began in Europe and Russia between the 1870s and 1930s, with the “break of the Covenant between word and world” (Steiner 1989, 127, 93), or in Lacanian terms, the non-Covenant between being and speaking (Lacan 2002, 517).
At the end of the book (213), I call on Levinas in his slim volume Humanism and the Other. Levinas speaks ominously of “a mutation in the light of the world” Levinas 2006, 58-59). He notes the logical formalism and mathematical structures, which have no need of the subject. He is critical of Heidegger and the submergence of the human subject in the impersonal “truth of being”. Absurdity says Levinas, “does not lie in nonsense, but in the isolation of countless significations, the absence of a sense that orients them … Absurdity lies in the multiplicity within pure indifference” (Levinas 2006, 24). Referring to the climax of the German language in Hegel – the “Bacchic delirium when no limb escapes from drunkenness”, Levinas declares that “there needs to be a cell that is itself sober” (Levinas 2006, 48).
Oakley has quite simply misrepresented this book.
I wish to thank Sitgeist for allowing me to respond to the original review.
Radical Orthodoxy combines post-structualist French thought with Catholic orthodoxy.
Numbers in bracket refer to the pages of the book being reviewed.