Ghosting

“…argue as much as [one] like[s], but obey!”
Immanuel Kant (An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?)

“Paranoia in an enlarged social form is the central imaginative concern of American literature since World War II.”
John Farrell (Freud’s Paranoid Quest)

“In a certain sense the people are right to believe in spirits, indeed they must”.
Rudolph Kleinpaul (The Living and the Dead in Folk Belief, Religion and Legend, 1898)

“…as soon as I speak I am betrayed by the situation. I am betrayed by the person who is listening to me, quite simply because I am speaking. I am betrayed by the choice of words.”
Jean Genet (Interview with Hubert Fichte, 1977)

“Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and powerful of past ages, and muflled in which they invert the real meaning of that mode of regarding history into its opposite; whether they are aware of it or not, they act as though their motto were: let the dead bury the living.”
Frederich Nietzsche (Untimely Meditations)

“…ideology is like the blade of an axe whose edge is steeped in guilt.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Guilt)

I feel pretty confident that it is not an exaggeration to say that ‘resentment’ is the engine for Western society, and for Capitalism itself. *Ressentiment* is, however, remarkably complex as ideas (or terms) go, and because of its complexity, I have hesitated to write a post on this topic. It also makes writing about Nietzsche impossible to avoid. And I have hesitated to write about Nietzsche because I haven’t yet felt I understand him. Western society today exists within a massively failed culture. And this is a theme I have (obviously) returned to repeatedly on this blog. And here I will digress a moment on the idea of ‘lateness’. Frank Kermode has a very insightful review of Edward Said’s book on this subject. And Said was, of course, hugely influenced by Adorno.

“Adorno’s prime example of late style was late Beethoven. Said offers a modified version of his views. Adorno had attended closely to the late works: the last five piano sonatas, the last six string quartets, the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. In these works, which still remember, but with extraordinary distortions, the usual musical forms, Beethoven established an alienated relationship with the contemporary social order. Adorno remarks the presence in this music of ‘unmastered material’, unmotivated rhetorical devices, carelessness, inept decoration and repetitiveness. Some of these works seem to be unfinished, or in other ways defiant of informed expectation. They are intended to be, sometimes grotesquely, out of touch not only with the public but with the work of the composer’s own middle period, so forceful, so structured, so consistent with his humane politics, as in the ‘Eroica’, the Fifth Symphony and Fidelio. By comparison with these masterpieces the late works are disorderly and even ‘catastrophic’. ‘For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.’ Said calls this music ‘a form of exile’.”
Frank Kermode (Going Against, London Review of Books, 2006)

The final thought is profoundly insightful. He quotes Said a moment later: “Lateness as theme and as style keeps reminding us of death.” Yes, well, that’s a nice segue back to our present dying culture. And one approach to the arrival of the terminal state of culture is to look at ‘resentment’.

“This is where the real tragedy of Oedipus Rex begins. The oracle reports that the plague will vanish when the person who murdered Laius is found and banished. At that point Freud inserts his first citation: “Where shall now be read the fading record of this ancient guilt?”
Herman Westerink (The Dark Trace; Sigmund Freud and the Concept of Guilt)

I’ve noted before and even in the previous three posts, that the overarching reality of contemporary society is its suffocating banality. Experience in the West of today is a strange pseudo experience. Society is saturated at every turn by screen information– most of it selling something. But this has been true for twenty years. Marketing itself much longer than that. The change is in the processing. The change is in the psyches of the populace. Even various mediums of escapism, of entertainment per se, feel strip mined of meaning and depth. I have used the professional sports metaphor because its rather perfect and big time sports which makes more money now than ever before is also in crisis. Injuries are at epidemic levels for all three of the major U.S. sports of basketball, baseball, and American football. The basic tribal attachments to one’s local team seem to matter less, and do in fact matter less. Player empowerment has resulted in very short amounts of time playing for any one particular team. Young fans in particular sense the betrayal, and find an unconscious suspicion building in them. This is my sense of it anyway. Today the marketing of products that target teens and even pre-teens has trained in the young a more intense distrust of diversion and recreation. Kids distrust corporate authority all-together.

The general tenor of U.S. culture (if that word even fits anymore) is cynicism. But this cynicism is markedly different from earlier versions of it.

Still, before elaborating on cynicism, I think one has to discuss ‘resentment’.

“Resentment is only the most recent word for revenge, and the problem of revenge enters the ethical tradition at its inception. The appearance of the word, in fact, marks the attempt, especially on Nietzsche’s part, to establish a psychological theory of revenge and its representations. Indeed, the fear of revenge may be the emotion that underlies moral philosophy in the West. A society can survive arbitrary acts of violence; it may even withstand warfare, since battle often strengthens the unanimity of a group. But no society can withstand the premeditated and organized violence of revenge because it initiates menacing cycles of conflict from within. Blood feuds, cycles of revenge, and other forms of organized violence endure for generations; as Greek tragedy dramatically illustrates, they place a curse on the house of mankind.”
Tobin Siebers (The Ethics of Criticism)

But this is, I believe, not quite right. Or rather, there are registers of resentment, types of resentment. It is not ‘only’ revenge or only fear of revenge. And this is rather important I think. The reductivist take vis a vis ‘revenge’ is very Girardian. And the Rene Girard groupies are even more reductive than Girard. And I mostly like Girard but at the end of his chain of logic there are problems (Ive touched on this a few times on this blog). But the point is more to do here with a sense of society have become illusory. I feel people’s experiences are dulled. And increasingly people, even the wealthy, are disconnected from what was once called the social fabric.

“The interpretation of the tragedy hinges on this. From here on we are no longer dealing with the story as wish fulfilment, but with the story as a model for psychoanalytic work – in psychoanalysis the dark trace of the ancient guilt is read. The quest for the source of the plague, that is, the identification of the guilty party, is a model for a psychoanalytic quest for the unveiling of the causes of dreams. In the tragedy it is Oedipus himself who leads the search for who murdered Laius. He is the detective who ultimately discovers that he himself is the offender. “
Herman Westerink (Ibid)

Where once the extended family served not just as support (emotionally or economically) but served as physical locations and visible symbols for all of society, in a sense. One didn’t want to go to your Aunt’s house for Easter but you went anyway. And you took your three year old son or daughter. Or even to the in-laws for Fourth of July (if American). Your wife’s Uncle Buster burnt the hamburgers but you ate one anyway. And you avoided discussing Jews or Catholics or which ever politician Buster didn’t like. These were banal mini rituals of familial attachment but today nobody goes to their Aunt’s house. And anyway your Aunt isnt cooking anything this Easter.

Robert Bly quotes scientist/professor Robert Sapolsky:

“My students usually come with ego boundaries like exoskeletons. Most have no use for religion, precedents, or tradition. They want their rituals newly minted and shared horizontally within their age group, not vertically over time. The ones I train to become scientists go at it like warriors, overturning reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors.”
(Sibling Society)

Capitalism breeds resentment. A society built around exploitation is going to be resentful anyway. Competition coupled to exchange value means the ‘other’ is everywhere, and ready to take what is yours.

“Among the prime emotions that come into play when guilt is experienced are resentment and rancour (resentment laden with hate). Resentment can be experienced towards someone who was previously loved and is now felt as responsible for our frustration, abandonment or aggression. The dis- appointment and betrayal caused by the loved or admired person can be seen as a kind of aggression. “
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Guilt)

Guilt, then, is the precursor for resentment. Partly, anyway. But often, I think, in our contemporary society, the sense of ‘what I deserve’ looms before us in irrational ways. This is also tied to the loss of rituals and community. Driving to your Aunt’s house for Easter was a minor sacrifice, especially if you didn’t like your Aunt’s house, or the city she lived in. But one did it, one carried out the sacrifice of one’s own time and energy. These interior narratives were once simple and perfunctory, but increasingly in our current society such stories are mediated by social structures either incomplete, or interrupted, or simply by an absence of social context or structure.

“…resentment can be felt against oneself: `I’m angry at myself, I’m annoyed with myself!”, she used to repeat at moments of acute crisis. And occasionally she would insult herself harshly. The accusation can be that one exposed oneself to the experience of abandonment, or narcissistic frustration (one thinks of the actor or writer who has experienced failure); but self-resentment can also result from the feeling that one has denied oneself sufficient instinctual gratification, say, a more intense and fulfilling sex life – now that it is too late. The refrain “now it’s too late” is often part of the repertoire of resentful self-directed comments.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

I can tell you, as a playwright, that ‘bad reviews’ are something one has to adjust to, if one chooses to write plays and actually have people view them. But that adjustment is rife is rationalizations (many of which are probably justified in the larger scheme of things). But this is where the erosion of concepts like honour or integrity become important and our contemporary society, especially today, in one that normalizes dishonesty and dishonour and cowardice.

The idea of ‘now its too late’ relates, too, to the Edward Said book on late style. One aspect of an artist’s late style is the expression of righting the judgements of earlier critics or audiences. The position of exile then, drifting inexorably toward death, is also a protection against guilt and resentments. For there is an entire constellation of psychological positions tied to being the target of resentment.

“The Erinyes of classical mythology seem to be ideal symbols of the mythical portrayal of the persecutory sense of guilt. Similar to the Moirae (the Fates), they were primitive forces not subject to the authority of successive generations of gods. Even Zeus himself owed them obedience. Originally the Erinyes were indeterminate in number, but later the number was fixed and they took on specific names (which is also what happens with persecutory guilt). Three are known: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. Often they had leather or iron whips in their hands and, when they captured their victims, they tortured them and drove them crazy. Often they were seen as bitches (dogs) who chased after men to sink their teeth into them. The references to whips, torture and biting are signs that we are dealing with the unconscious sense of guilt.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

“From the time of Homer onwards the basic function of the Erinyes was to exact revenge for a crime, for an objective wrong. In particular they punished wrongs committed during family feuds, as in the case of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, or indeed Oedipus. Meleager was killed by Althea under the in¯uence of the Erinyes because Meleager had killed his uncles, Althea’s brothers, during a hunting expedition. It is interesting to note that, although they represented primordial wrath, the Erinyes were protectors of the social order and performed what in psychoanalytic terms is the function of a group Super-Ego. They punished crimes that dis- rupted the social order, and even persecuted arrogance or hubris, everything that tended to make man forget his mortality. They were older than the gods and superior to them, and yet were subjected (and thus allied) to the law of the community against the the interests of the individual. The Erinyes dwelled in the nether regions.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

This is very significant, I think. Now persecutory guilt is close to persecutory anxiety. And I suspect in general they overlap. In the contemporary West anxiety is a near constant state. And as society itself loses all signposts for salvation (of even a personal kind) there will be both increases in persecutory guilt and in resentments. Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare are, I think, the great voices of guilt and rancour but all also knew the subjective interior trials one stages for oneself.

“…there are many situations which might suggest that felt anxiety is connected to persecutory guilt: dreams, fantasies or delusions involving judicial trials, judges, confessors, inquisitors, policemen, figures connected to crimes, wrongs, sins, punishments, as well as narratives taken from everyday life that centre on the state of being accused (where it is not important who is being accused).”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

Today our society of commodification and reification exaggerate the importance of one’s own feelings. Hurt feelings trigger narratives of monumental reparation. But there is another dimension that warrants comment; that is the desire to dominate our unconscious. The spirit of a Puritan and colonizing society (the U.S.) and the sense of ‘progress’ that is so deeply embedded in the western psyche, coupled together to create a reflexive impulse for domination and control. And when guilt (and often later resentment following) is experienced, that pain must be controlled, or dominated (or murdered). I have spoken of fascist cinema during WW2 in Italy and how the goal was to dominate the screen. And those filmmakers who followed the war: Pasolini, De Sica, and Rossellini and Visconti, were consciously working to liberate the screen. Freud wrote of ‘`narcissistic omnipotence’, and how this links with the desire to dominate our subjective selves. And the sense of failure which leads to an erosion of self esteem. This particular subjective state is intensely fought against by all manner of overcompensation. Just taking political figures off the top of my head, a Pete Hegseth is a walking emblem of conflicted narcissistic frustration.

“The Biblical myth of God’s destruction of Sodom transfigures the climatic and geographical situation of that desolate, barren land: the inhospitable desert is seen as having been the result of divine punishment, which in turn was triggered by wickedness, by man’s sins. This idea has important diagnostic consequences. Different degrees of omnipotence correspond to different degrees of intensity of guilt. People who feel responsible for major catastrophes are much more fragile (and therefore in need of omnipotence) than those who blame themselves for minor accidents.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

Actually, the sense of grandiosity in a Hegseth suggests multiple pathologies. Guilt is often Manichaean. Guilt or innocence, good or bad. And in some sense this perfectly suits advanced Capitalism. Certainly it reflects the culture of the U.S. since colonial times. One cannot ever overestimate the effect of Puritanism on the average American. But today the rise of feelings of resentment is marked. As already noted, the loss of symbol and ritual, and certainly of community, even if only abstractly, has intensified the unconscious compensatory impulses to blame others. And the intense competition and more, the binary of ‘winner or loser’ contribute to this as well. The worst thing you can call anyone in the States is ‘loser’. The sense of how ‘I am seen’ — not so much by others but by society, or rather how I am seen by my imagined picture of society, is clearly of immeasurable importance today.

How I am seen projected onto a fantasy society, a picture of society staged subjectively for our interior tribunal. There are also questions that arise (and this seems to be increasing dramatically) the phenomenon of self-sabotage. Melanie Klein calls this ‘persecutory guilt’.

“Freud now wrote of a “need for punishment” (Strafbedürfnis). This need must not be confused with the (ordinary) sense of guilt. In an obsessional neurotic’s “excessive morality” the emphasis lies on a heightened sadism of the superego, while in the need for punishment the emphasis is on the ego’s masochism. The latter is thus not characterized by an internalized hate of a parental figure, but here we are dealing with regression. Pleasure is experienced in the pain inflicted on the ego. In the passive position, the masochist identifies with the mother. “
Herman Westerink (Ibid)

There is something in our pseudo-society that creates a very specific (so it seems to me) hole in people. An emotional lack. And just anecdotally I see this in both men and women, under the age of forty usually, but not exclusively, and it seems most prevalent in arts and in left politics. It is the toll inflicted on outsiders. And it is bound up with guilt but so deep and lacerating is this guilt (an Oedipal guilt) that projection is usually the only fix. And this means, paradoxically in one sense, a punishment of self because the mechanisms of projection are damaged. The guilt cripples ideas of deserving. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve love or success. And one version of this is the person who cannot receive love. I think it is common enough that many cannot give love, but increasingly we have a society in which people cannot accept love.

“The “quantum leap” or radical change in perspective on the dynamics of guilt for which I am trying to find a name was anticipated by other similar shifts in the history of ideas at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the short space of a decade a group of scientists achieved what has rightly been termed the Nietzschean destruction of certainty: Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Max Planck formulated the basic hypothesis underlying quantum theory (1901,1902); the following year Bertrand Russell published The Principles of Mathematics (1903), and a little later Albert Einstein propounded the special theory of relativity.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

This is now the place where one can discuss the start of contemporary society’s regression, or deterioration. Or both, probably. The turn of the 20th century marked a blow to man’s narcissistic view of progress and his trust in his own ability to dominate. The self sabotaging individual desires love but feels unworthy to accept it. But its not only a feeling of unworthiness. The contemporary individual — usually having not worked through the Oedipal stage, remains emotionally infantile. The desire for admiration and respect is normal and healthy, I think, but the narcissism of the child finds no admiration is enough and no admiration can be trusted. Those who resentment is most acute suffer the inability to accept or trust love.

And this ties into Capitalism, certainly, and what Speziale-Bagliacca sees as the advent of a tragic loss of belief altogether. In an almost side bar observation Speziale-Bagliacca notes that contemporary society has worked to eviscerate the meaning of certain words. Guilt is, in fact, one of them. One hears ‘we are all guilty’, or ‘we are all complicit’ and these inflationary expressions render the meaning diluted and also are uttered, usually, in bad faith. He points out the public confessions of world leaders (Tony Blair for the Irish famines, Chirac for Vichy, Pik Botha for apartheid in South Africa and on and on). Celebrities love to apologize for indiscretions even though everyone knows their behaviour won’t change. These examples are also all tied to Calvinism and Puritanism and to (over the last forty years) to a kind of public prostration and confessional ethos that reinforces the general distrust of society overall. Public confession is also tied into entertainment. Its amazing executions are not televised.

The paradox, if that is what it is, of this blow to narcissism is that we saw mankind develop the atom bomb. And we saw them use it. Well, we saw the U.S. use it (and now Israel, which is much the same thing). The Gaza genocide is the distilled pathology of all colonialism. Cruelty as entertainment. As Gabor Mate noted, its like Auschwitz on tiktok. But it occurs to me this is not a paradox. It is actually rather logical.

“The moral masochist has a need to be punished which can now be satisfied by the superego (as a substitute for the parents). Although in both obsessional neurotic morality as well as moral masochism we are dealing with a strict superego directed against the ego, these must be differentiated, albeit that this is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, both are (at least partly) expressions of the death drive which is first manifest as primary masochism, then as hate and sadism towards others, then again by regression as secondary masochism. Secondly, the consequences of both an excessive morality and moral masochism are the same: the repression of the drives, which is also demanded by civilization, results in a strengthening of the sense of guilt and of the conscience.”
Herman Westerink (Ibid)

This is correct, but the conclusion is perhaps not. The sense of guilt is not strengthened so much as deformed. And civilization no longer is known. The subject does not know what society demands. The conscience is riddled with doubt and projection, and the immaturity of most adults in the West is pronounced. This segues to another aspect of resentment and guilt and that is in the realm of pedagogy. The narcissist cannot tolerate being taught. Two hundred years ago the apprentice/master dynamic was dominant. One learned from older artisans or educators, even. The role of student retained a substantial degree of dignity. Part of the loss of this relationship has to do with ageism (via marketing and commodification) but also with the ruthless and intolerant Super Ego of advanced capitalism.

The objectifying tendency falls within this discussion. The Mother who rationalizes her son’s Don Juanism, for example. The inability of the son to receive love is then very useful for the Mother. She does not want the son to ‘really’ fall in love. If he did there is the potential for his morphing into another role, the deflating phallus. The fall of ‘great men’ is always a deflating phallus narrative. (and here I wonder at the IDF soldiers and their videos dressing up in women’s clothes they plundered from those they slaughtered. This speaks to multi tiered sociopathy of misogyny). But the desire for a deflating phallus is also tied into kitsch biographies of the famous and celebrated. This can be both historical and contemporary. The kitsch bio is not all that far from National Socialism and ‘degenerate art’. It is the creation of areas of prohibition or condemnation that serve as eroticized titillations just under the surface. The impulse to search for the deflating phallus is also linked to much of the fascist terrors Thewelheit wrote about (Male Fantasies). For the male fascists Thewelheit catalogued, extreme violence and misogyny were tied into Nazi myths of cleanliness and Godliness. Bringing down the celebrated is more about the need being expressed by those looking to destroy reputations. The Thewelheit ‘Freikorp’ was also motivated by a deep terror of communism, and anti semitism. And a terror or women. (one wonders about the ‘trans’ movement and its actual motivations).The point here is that such abject depressive subjectivities cannot reconcile phallus and progress, and are left to exaggerate domination and destruction. And sadism.

The exercise of judgements about behaviours of historical figures is particularly problematic. Beyond the obvious fact that certainty about historical details is difficult to achieve. But it is also, more significantly, a way to avoid ‘ideas’. The stridency of these condemnations is the give away — there is rarely an accusation that rises to the level of criminal even. This is always more about those making the accusations. Even accusations free of evidence become courts of public judgement. It is rarified ‘gossip’. But this can be extrapolated to include a culture of accusation which is mostly what we now live under. Accusations become trials even if just within the heads of the accussors. The Inquisition as simulacrum. And Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc may be required viewing.

“In the version of Herodotus attributed to Hesiod, there were three orders of powers: gods, heroes and demons. Unlike gods and heroes, demons were not individualised powers and did not possess a cult of their own or engage in ritual practices. Their function was intermediary: they were mediators between gods and mortals. In Manichaean thought, as in Jewish and Christian thought, the demon is no longer an intermediary. In Christianity this function was passed on to the Son, to the prophets and to other figures, as we recalled at the beginning. Intermediation became intercession, which is simply the entreaty that (punitive) treatment be benevolent. When it loses his role as an intermediary, the demon seems predisposed to become the receptacle for projections of everything that human beings cannot stand about themselves and their lives ± or to put it more simply, everything they cannot or do not want to know fully. { } Now we have reached the crucial point. At the very moment of birth, every child and every mother runs the risk of death, and this is the source of strong persecutory anxieties which fuel guilt, with all its need for omnipotence. We now know that the origin of many serious mental illnesses can be traced back to a lack of or deficiency in ± a mother’s care, or to an excess of engulfing possessiveness in early infancy. In the attempt to reclaim the terrain of the early relationship between the mother and the child, a powerful paternal figure comes into play. The father unconsciously takes on a double function, both protecting the family and acting as a kind of lightning conductor: I will relieve you of these anxieties. Fornari called this process (which he did not see as a sign of illness) “primary paranoia”. For him this meant that the unconscious persecution that is part of birth leaves the relationship between mother and child, and is placed instead inside the figure of the father. The father thus acquires “the function of the shock absorber and guarantor in the face of dangers which threaten the birth of the man’s child. { } The child turns towards God as a giver of milk; in other words, a mother. We know that Pope John Paul I maintained that God was a mother before being a father. Behind the Devil and behind God, both the artist and the poet seem to end the wicked mother who devours and destroys and the good mother who feeds and cheers up the child. Turning from the particular to the general, from the devil to the demon, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the pre-Romantic period, under the influence of the Enlightenment and of poets such as Schiller and Goethe, the positive aspect of the demon returns and grows stronger, coming to represent the irrational force of man, the creativity of the artist. Plato’s Symposium taught us that the art of divination, the sacerdotal art of sacrifice, of spells and every sort of magic ± in other words all knowledge that seems to transcend human limits passed through a demonic being.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

The rise of a certain kind of instrumental science, or the culture really, that accompanied it, is also a contributing factor to the dulled strip mined landscape, both inner and outer, of most of North America and Europe today. But of course especially the U.S. The loss of rituals of meaning and history, of tradition, is part of the creation of architecture that has no relation to those who use it or live in it, or pass through it. The great American suburb was the defining example of this, and books such as Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas provided great insights.

Aeschylus wrote the tragedy The Eumenides around 458 BCE. It is uncertain if that was the original title, but the ‘Eumenides’ was the euphemistic name for the Erinyes, or *Furies*. The Erinyes were goddesses, or daemons, who punished men for crimes against the ‘natural order’. Those seeking justice denied them (or even not) could ‘call down’ the curse of the Erinyes. The crimes were what would now be Class A felonies. Homicide in particular. Patricide and Matricide even more particularly.

“Aeneas sacrificed a black-fleeced lamb to Nox (Night) [Nyx], the mother of the Furiae [Erinyes].”
Virgil, Aeneid 6. 250 (trans. Day-Lewis) (Roman epic C1st B.C.)

The Romans continued the narratives of the Furies (the above translation is by Cecil Day-Lewis whose son is Daniel). There is a good deal to talk about in all this, but it falls outside the purposes here. What ‘is’ relevant is this idea of intermediaries, the demons or daemons that exist in liminal worlds, which today see their counterpart is what Marc Augé calls ‘non spaces’. Here is nice short essay on contemporary architecture:

https://www.archdaily.com/996668/why-are-liminal-spaces-eerie-the-case-of-the-backrooms

The ‘junkspace’ or non space of western urban landscapes (industrial parks like those photographed by the late and great Lewis Balz are a good example). But these spaces are also psychological metaphors or symbols. The average industrial park is a non-space but not only is it uncanny, the average person has no idea what its purpose is or who works there or if anyone works there. This is the disconnect between a populace and the ‘state’. The people and their society. The society runs independent of the people. Our own Orestia would be set in an industrial park. For these are the unconscious and uncanny residences for unwanted thoughts. This is spread-sheet architecture, and what sets it apart from the merely uncanny is the aggressive indifference to the human in their construction.

“The uterus could also be considered as the first symbol of mortal danger during birth each human being runs this risk for the first time both actively and passively. If the metis, the preconscious, of the mother functions correctly, then hope and life are guaranteed; if it doesn’t, then the result is despair or even death. We could say that metis is the source of female thinking that is tied mainly to the preconscious and to the right hemisphere of the brain. Female thinking needs male thinking and vice versa. The interaction has to take place on an equal basis because there is a need not only for a dialectic but also for a relationship of reciprocity.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Ibid)

The key word in the above is ‘reciprocity’. As a side bar: the entire transhumanist movement and the gender debates (sic) seem to want to either erase the female, or absorb it into the male, but either way there is an erasing of reciprocity. And this seems in keeping with the new corporate globalist fascism that is on the rise. Heidegger was the lead voice in claiming the Romans took to erasing what was unique in Greek thinking (pre Plato). But others saw Plato leading straight to Roman thought. Either way there was occurring a loss of mythic thought. Heidegger wanted his own Aryan version of mythic reason and inadvertently, in a sense, tripped across a valid critique of techne.

“Virgin goddess and warrior, Athena is the protectress of Ulysses the investigator, Ulysses the incarnation of intelligence *ruse’*. Athena does not give milk, takes no-one inside her; she never holds a sobbing baby in her arms. She never receives within her an erect penis; she will never have children, or procreate. Since she has not experienced childhood and adolescence herself, she will not be able to understand them. Throughout the whole Greek world, and especially in her city, she will shine as the goddess of Reason. She will be the spokeswoman for Zeus, and today represents for us women’s adaptation to power and male paradigms. Born by Caesarian section from a head that appropriated the creative power of woman, the daughter of Zeus and Metis will wield the hand that rocks the cradle of western civilisation.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (ibid)

Remarkable paragraph.

“Memory is always misleading as a record of fact since it is distorted by the influence of unconscious forces. “
Wilfred Bion (All My Sins Remembered and the Other Side of Genius.)

Everything is misleading.

“The Oedipal suffering that was not lived out can be got rid of by delegating it to one’s own children…{ } So, in the Oedipal area, too, it is not the instinctual frustration that is humiliating for the child, but the contempt shown for his instinctual wishes. It may well be that the narcissistic component of Oedipal suffering is commonly accentuated when the parents demonstrate their “grown-upness” to revenge themselves unconsciously on their child for their own earlier humiliation. In the child’s eyes they encounter their own humiliating past, and they must ward it off with the power they now have achieved. In many societies, little girls suffer additional discrimination because they are girls. Since women, however, have control of the new-born and the infants, these erstwhile little girls can pass on to their children at the most tender age the contempt from which they once had suffered. Later, the adult man will idealize his mother, since every human being needs the feeling that he was really loved; but he will despise other women, upon whom he thus revenges himself in place of his mother.”
Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child)

Today, in the U.S., nearly a fourth of the population has at one time been treated for depression. There is a crisis of obesity, because of the destruction of healthy food and agriculture, but also because of this crippling anxiety and depression. The tentacles of neurotic upbringing reach all corners of existence and layered across this are the pathologies of Capitalism. The sense of inadequacy is almost guaranteed in this system. Nobody feels they have lived up to their own expectations (and those expectations are often the result of terrible parenting and economic stress). The dissolving sense of a society, of community, creates pressures on parents who cannot find the time to parent. The 21st century is now the staging area for the final eradication of the experience of society. Perhaps even the idea of society. I asked before, what does society mean today? What does it look like?

“Even Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, evoked his anxious mistrust. Long after Herzl’s death, Freud urged Herzl’s son to eradicate the influence of his father from his personality by abandoning politics: ‘It is your task to rid yourself of all ambition. Your ambitions are poisoning your life. You should finally bury your father within your own soul, which is still carrying him alive. It is he, not anyone else, who is appearing to you in your many dreams. In vain would you dismiss them as unimportant. Your father is one of those who has turned dreams into reality. This is a very rare and dangerous breed. It includes the Garibaldis, the Edisons, the Herzls. … I would call them the sharpest opponents of my scientific work. It is my modest profession to simplify , to make them clear and ordinary. They, on the contrary, confuse the issue, turn it upside down, command the world while they themselves remain on the other side of the psychic mirror. It is a group specializing in the realization of dreams. I deal in psychoanalysis; they deal in psychosynthesis’.”
John Farrel (Freud’s Paranoid Quest)

This is a fascinating historical footnote. Also worth quoting is Nazi sympathizer (enthusiast) Martin Heidegger:

“An enemy is each and every person who poses an essential threat to the Dasein [existence] of the people and its individual members. The enemy does not have to be external, and the external enemy is not even always the more dangerous one. And it can seem as if there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to find the enemy, to expose the enemy to the light, or even first to make the enemy, so that this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may not lose its edge.”
Martin Heidegger (Being and Truth; lectures delivered in the winter semester of 1933–1934)

The above quoted by Roland Beiner (Dangerous Minds)

And a nice piece on this same topic as this post: https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/the-lovecraftian-mode-of-politics

Heidegger remains remarkably popular in Universities around the world. Today all is resentment. All relationships (nearly) are tinged with resentment. Desire has been coopted and commodified. Although really, the 21st century has subsumed commodification and replaced it with a deeper more dysfunctional malady of pure existence. I return in my mind again and again to Kafka, and especially to his short piece Before the Law. Kafka wrote in his notebooks “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.” I think another indelible description of contemporary life is Lacan’s idea of ‘the missed encounter’ (I have always seen this as missed appointment)

“The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma. “
Jacques Lacan (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)

“…we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it. For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor.”
Sigmund Freud (Remembering, Repeating and Working Through)

“The animal twists the whip out of its master’s grip and whips itself to become its own master-not knowing that this is only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.”
Franz Kafka (The Zürau Aphorisms)

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