The Pale Criminal, part two

“Yes, the sun surely is the symbol of the center of consciousness, it is the principle of consciousness because it is light. When you understand a thing, you say: “I see”—and in order to see you need light. The essence of understanding, of cognition, has always been symbolized by the all-seeing of the sun, the wisdom or omniscience of the sun that moves over the earth and sees everything in its light.”
Carl Jung (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939)

“Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him “by flesh and blood”, so total that they bring to his birth, … the shape of his destiny…”
Jacques Lacan (Ecrits, 1977)

“But the foolish children will have to learn some day that, rebels though they be and riotous from nature, they are too weak to maintain the spirit of mutiny for any length of time.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Grand Inquisitor, Brothers Karamazov)

The question of guilt, and of resentment, are to some extent embedded in a larger metaphysics. I think writers like Dostoyevski and Kafka (although that is almost too obvious to be helpful), or Dante in another register, feel suddenly contemporary. I noted before that Joseph Conrad now does, too.

Lacan wrote (and is quoted by Stephen J. Costello)…

“In the symbolic order the totality is called a universe. The symbolic order from the first takes on its universal character. It isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbolic arrives, there is a universe of symbols.”
Jacques Lacan (Seminar ii, The Ego in Freud·s Theory)

Now, if the quote ended with ‘there is a universe’, you would have something slightly different in meaning. For this feels like the more profound observation. At least if we are speaking of culture and not nature. There is a Universe. The universe as humans imagine it, is not a universe of symbols. The universe of symbols is Lacan. I know this feels oddly pedantic and fetishized, but I think its important to at least firstly contemplate the Universe as civilisation. The universe is, indeed a universe of symbols, but it is, I posit, something a bit more, too. But moving on…

“According to Lacan, the subject has a place in a kinship structure before he was born. From Levi-Strauss and Mauss, Lacan was especially influenced by the idea that the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations, and the exchange of gifts. As a subject, he is situated as an element in an unconscious, complicated network of symbols. Symbols and words envelop the subject and help to constitute him in an unconscious structure.{ } The human subject is blind to his destiny. He can live like another, unaware of his history, or he can discover the truth for himself, the truth for and of the subject. This process of discovery consists in a gradual unravelling and unveiling of the discourse that founded him and the stripping bare of all the illusions that structured his path. The Symbolic order is social, public and intersubjective. What permits it to function and what keeps the subject anchored in it is the Name-of-the-Father, which is absolutely necessary in order to give structure to the symbolic. The N o/ Name- of-the-Father (NonlNom-du-PCre) refers to the prohibitive role of the non-biological, metaphorical “father” who is the bringer and bearerof the law and language and lays down the incest taboo in the Oedipus complex.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

This is pretty key (and sort of introductory) Lacan. What I take away as the key points that will allow us a further discussion or discourse on Nietzsche and Freud. The Symbolic order is predicated on (what Lacan calls) The Name of the Father…which stands for Law itself, but specifically the incest prohibition. The entire symbolic order is set in place with this.

“The Name-of-the-Father is a fundamental signifier which confers identity on the subject in that it names and positions him within the Symbolic order and signifies the Oedipal prohibition.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

In the Lacanian Oedipal narrative, there are subtle differences from Freud. One is the Mother, who is the primary and first object of (narcissistic) desire. This is the mirroring theory, a self love reflected in the image of the Mother. This is not at all clear, I will add, but then I’m not sure it has to be, as the pre-linguistic period ends soon with the Father’s declaration of ‘no’. And the child is thrown into the symbolic. The imaginary was Maternal in a sense, but the symbolic is largely Paternal.

“This renunciation by the childish subject implies a repression of his desire, meaning that the child will substitute other objects of desire, to which he can only have access through the acquisition of language. When the child is learning how to speak, this incestuous desire is displaced onto substitute signifiers of desire. This is what the Oedipus complex accounts for mythically.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

The child’s introduction to language, for Lacan, is also the constitution of his unconscious. This is one of the polorizing ideas in Lacan. The structure of the unconscious is the structure of language. This is a now famous quote of Lacan, but its also misleading. Now there is a LOT written on this idea, especially in terms of language theory, structural linguistics, etc. The salient aspect here, for our purposes, is that the unconscious has no language. There is a great deal written on Lacan vis a vis structural linguistics if one wants to dig into that. The unconscious has no language, except it does, only it is not known and cannot be understood.

The Father is the gateway to culture, to society and social life.

“Needless to say, as a completely resolved Oedipus complex is impossible, so too is a completely nonpathological position.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

My experience, on a personal level, with the idea of transgression and criminality, is that if society allowed the individual to ‘try’ to follow the paths of desire and instinct, he or she would try and discard most of these paths. Eventually arriving at something like the abandonment of desire altogether. Not that the individual stops desiring but that desire is distanced from its irrational core, that the unconscious narratives (Lacan), the mythology of self, would no longer be reactive (or much less so). The obsessive/repetitive would dissipate. But this is not possible because of the Law and by extension guilt. Society is held together by prohibitions and by the unresolved traumas of childhood.

I remember a doctor I knew who dealt with heroin addicts. He was an advocate of legalizing heroin (well, and most drugs). I asked him what he was trying to achieve and he said I am trying to keep these addicts alive long enough for them to mature enough to see the unsatisfactory outcome of all impulses to use drugs.

“However where Freud emphasises the “Oedipus” part of the equation, Lacan stresses the “complex”. According to Lacan, there are structures, organised complexes and triangular systems. So the Oedipus complex is not viewed by Lacan solely in terms of sexual love, jealousy and rivalry, but also in terms of exchange and kinship structures. The family complex can be described as a socio-economic and symbolic structural positioning of the child in a complex constellation of alliance, in which the construction of desire, on the side of the mother and law, on the side of the father, is regulated through a linguistic structure of exchange, repetitive replacement and substitution of symbolic objects of desire.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

There are endless tributaries to these thoughts. And ‘we’ are born into a world of symbols, and symbolic structures. And here the idea of theatre and religion surfaces. For the theatre is always impossible. It is a practice that invariably finds new ways to understand the impossible. But the impossibility is tied to that illusive primal trauma – or perhaps better to call it is primal entry into history, the universe, and the law.

“The unconscious, as we see, is only a metaphorical term to denote the knowledge that only sustains itself by presenting itself as impossible, so that in consequence it is confirmed as being real. ”
Jacques Lacan (Autres écrits)

“When a baby is born we know that it lacks bodily co-ordination to a high degree because its neurological system has not yet developed. According to Lacan, the baby experiences this subjectively [from the inside as it were] as being a body which is in a flux of disintegration. Now since he is his body at this time the baby feels he is disintegrating, that is, his body-ego is fragmenting. As a desperate measure he creates a body image that more than adequately compensates for the lack of integration, an image that has in abundance what this body-ego lacked. There is, however, a high price to be paid for this peace of mind. The created image or ‘double’ is experienced by the baby as being ‘larger than life’ and the fact that the image over completes its lack is experienced as a persecution. It might be compared to the assembly of the Frankenstein monster, which when assembled, took on a life of its own. This then is the price of bodily unity – having a persecutory ‘doppelganger’.”
Ross Skelton (Is the Unconscious Structured like a Language, International Forum of Psychoanalysis 2007)

The Father is there even if he is not there. And here echos of Kafka and Dostoyevski both can be heard.

“Lacan places the function of the father at the heart of the Oedipus complex. The complex has a normative function in the moral structure of the subject, in his relationships and in the assumption of his sex. There are two terms operative here: virility and femination; a man assumes a virile type, a woman a feminine type. Lacan links the Oedipus complex to the function of the ego-ideal. In chapter nine, “The Paternal Metaphor I” of Book V of The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958), Lacan states: “There is no question of an Oedipus complex if there is no father” and “To speak about the Oedipus complex is to introduce as essential the function of the father.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

This week Mark Rutte, the head of NATO (and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands) had a meeting with Trump during which he indirectly referred to Trump as *daddy*. And as the genocide continues in Gaza ( intensifies actually) and with more killing in Lebanon and Syria, the third richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, got married in Venice, in a spectacle costing somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars. The aesthetics were a carnival of the grotesque. Plastic surgeries were prominent, and over 90 private jets flew the rich and famous into the smallish Venice airport. All against the backdrop of starving children and incinerated families.

“In 2002 the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas coined the term junkspace to describe the chaotic and meaningless spaces that have emerged in contemporary society. According to Koolhaas, these spaces lack any sense of identity or purpose and are a by-product of consumerism and globalization { } Twenty years after Koolhaas, I propose that junkspace has become the space of the unconscious within an architectural field best understood as psychotic. Koolhaas initially saw this “delirious” urbanism in environments such as Coney Island, where paranoid fantasies and private mania could thrive. By indirectly referencing an unconscious devoid of the name-of-the-father, junkspace chronicles a continuous process of symbolization and re-symbolization of the unconscious addressed by Lacan as a form of overwriting.The research question of this study—what is junkspace but the very consequence of a shared psychosis.”
John Shannon Hendrix (Lacan and Architecture)

The Venice spectacle marriage of Bezos was an imprint of psychological junkspace. The unresolved Oedipal as worn by Jeff Bezos. But the ugliness and kitsch aesthetics of the Trump White House (of which Bezos is a part) are only an extension, really, of the coke head brothel aesthetics of the Biden family. In Anthony Blinken, for example, was the louche kitsch slouch and soft voice of class superiority. Blinken was the closet Jew who was poster boy for passive/aggressive. A walking billboard for bullied at school but from a family of Zionist wealth and standing. Blinken will spend his life ‘getting even’.

But to return to the unconscious, there is a nagging sense here of not just the political madness that suggests dying empire, but also of some collective psychological failure of the West.

“Regarding death as a godless, “dreamless sleep,” as the other side of a preoccupation with life as this same life, taken to eternity, Nietzsche described the modern, scientifically articulated dream of eternal life as nihilism. And of course, the point of the frenzy vis-à- vis the genome project, the impatient urgency that currently attends awaited innovations in stem cell research, or the enthusiasm for the prospect of human cloning (despite the untoward details of the life and early death of what was probably the most cosseted and surely the most famous ewe the world has ever known) and its selective offshoot technologies (the old National Socialist vision of race science redone in thoroughly self-pleasing capitalist colors for the twenty-first century as Eugenics for the Free Market: from personal genetic re-engineering to selecting your child’s genetic traits) are all about life-everlasting, life eternal, about anything but suffering, sickness, fragment, deficiency, and the death thatNietzsche always regarded as not merely part of but the very essence of the human condition as ineliminably mortal life.”
Babette Babich (Words in Blood Like Flowers Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger)

Here it is interesting to see in early Greek thinking the feminine ideas of Chaos, later finding (scientific/masculine) ideas of origin ( i.e. The Big Bang) and Nietzsche’s Gospel tinged proclamations about universal birth, cosmic beginnings, etc. The point here is that suddenly all the gender reassignment surgeries become acutely allegorical, the plastic cleavage of the Bezos’ girls and consort, and the now popular ‘Mar a Lago face’ seen in D.C. are fairy tales of Oedipal deficit.

“So far from forgetting, we remember that stories that relate original Hesiodic and Orphic accounts of Chaos go on to qualify any emphasis upon the creative attributes of primordial Chaos. This is the story of ambiguity, here as the story of insurgent male power ordered (or else unhinged) by desire or age-old Eros—and this is the point of Plato’s esoteric reminder that Eros, as desire, is both the youngest of the gods and the oldest of the gods, a point exemplified in today’s Viagra-modified times, an emphatic vision not unknown in the days of ancient Greece, as attested by the comic allusion to the supposed effects of oregano and scallions, and all such epithets for Eros, young/old, are inherently ambivalent. In this same way, in the genesis of the Olympian gods, the creative power that is originally female becomes or, better said, is made male. One scholar has traced this same pattern back to the castration of Ouranos, and thus back to Kronos (indeed and quite bodily with the analogue of the belly of Kronos to the womb of Rhea). In this way, like his father, Kronos, with his children before him, son Zeus now having supplanted his father and thus replacing him, engulfs and thus becomes his first wife. Swallowing Metis, Zeus incorporates not only her wisdom— lodged in his belly, her counsel would always be his own—but Zeus also elides her story and her name, he functionally appropriates her feminine nature.”
Babette Babich (Ibid)

Rutte to Trump :”Daddy”.

“The father may possess a lack in the family and not in the complex. What is important for Lacan is the father’s place in the complex. The father must intervene in the family and prohibit, not the child, but the mother. The Name-of-the-Father is linked to the primordial law of incest prohibition. Castration and the law are linked. Castration is linked to the symbolic articulation of the prohibition of incest and manifests itself on the imaginary plane. Because we harbour hatred and hostility towards the father whom we wish to castrate, we fear that he will do that to us. The fear before the father is centrifugal; it has its centre in the subject. The infantile subject imaginarily projects his aggressive intentions into the “father”. The complex is a complicated dialectic of love and identification that remains ambiguous; its dissolution consisting in the subject identifying with the father.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

“In the “inverted” Oedipal position, the subject finds himself not with a healthy identification but in a passive position- he joins the ranks of the women, making himself loved by his father which involves the danger of castration, from which comes the form of unconscious homosexuality which possesses multiple consequences-a return of the homosexual position or its repression due to the castration complex.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

The Father is a metaphor, the castration is metaphor, and the Father stands in for other signifiers or symbols. This story must be told and is told, over and over and over. That is its role, in a sense. This is the ur-rehearsal. On the primal stage the Father is always an Other. The Father is father-as-stranger. And here, notice, there is in all this myth, a presence of absence. There is a lack, there is a missed something. A universe of symbols, but something more. A universe of symbols with something missing, but in its missing it registers its reality. Modern science puts great store in X-Rays, as does quantum physics with photo sensitive plates. The imprint of nothing.

There!! See it, its ‘nothing’. It is that gateway to civilisation. Through that portal pass the criminals and outcasts. The addicts and the psychotics. Let them go, they will return. The return of the same operates in several registers. In one of them, the addict returns to the stage. Deus ex machina. Oedipus narratives as machines for meaning. Desire has repercussions. But we do it again.

Treating drug addiction requires an acceptance by the caregiver or therapist or friend that the addict will go away and return. And do it countless times. The criminal and his guilt. (I can’t think of a good novel on addiction. Burroughs is probably still best, but its not perfect. Drugstore Cowboy is quite decent. Eddie Bunker is perhaps best, even if its not the central theme of any of his books. The problem with most is that they are narcissism stories).

The ritual now for politicians to write on bombs which are soon to be used to kill, is symbolic, but it is also the written-word, the discourse of the Other. Writing messages on bombs meant to murder is to write a message to yourself, to the Law; it is a ‘post-it’ for us to not forget ‘Death’. This is a literal incarnation of the missed appointment.

“It is, thus, the nodal point of the Oedipus complex. The father “castrates” (symbolically separates) not the subject, as we have said, but the mother. The question is: to be or not to be the phallus. In order to have the phallus, it must first be possible not to have it. In that he accepts or does not accept it, the subject is led (man or woman) into being the phallus. At this stage, the father must intervene as promulgator of the law of incest prohibition. He speaks ex cathedra and the young subject is subjected to this law.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

The pale criminal is burdened with an unconscious guilt.

“Freud argued that there was such a thing as a sense of guilt that operates out of the unconscious. This hypothesis still stands. In the Vulgate, Psalm L is dedicated to conscious sins, but Psalm XVIII appears to refer to unconscious sins: “Ab occultis meis mundame”, asks the psalmist. Lewes and Short in their Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1980), translate ab occultis as from my sins: “purify me from my hidden sins”.”
Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca (Guilt)

In a society in which (to be Lacanian) the Name-of-the-Father is weakened, if not nearly absent, then this societal interruption of the maturing individual is also the interruption of a kind of Reason that produced the Enlightenment and science etc.

“ A large number of patients were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the same time as Schreber, thus hallucinating invincible doppelgängers who, half-man and half-machine, half-image and half-speech, make their lives hell simply by demonstrating the inferior status of the original. The counterpart to the nefarious robot of Metropolis, such imaginary doppelgängers incidentally demonstrate the pervasive and overwhelming rise of mass media and its impact on the narrativization of the unconscious. Whether collective or subjective, the unconscious by now bears all of technology’s threats as much as Schreber bears God’s divine rays.”
John Shannon Hendrix (Ibid)

I saw today Yuval Harari pitching some sort of robotic future, an AI Utopia (or if ‘we are not careful’, Dystopia) run by biometric tracking and algorithm. Replete with implants and bracelets and various other digital tech. Twenty first century phrenology in essence. Science has jumped the track, a track already in serious disrepair.

“ I shall deal with another category of patients who can be very difficult to treat: neurotic patients who possess autistic barriers or autistic nuclei (S. Klein, 1980; Tustin, 1986). These patients do not present the severe symptoms of the most serious cases, and their cognitive functions are in some areas usually well preserved. Nonetheless, the challenge they pose is that they suffer from a deficiency in their capacity for thinking, which originates in traumas that are filed in the so-called ‘inaccessible unconscious’. Although limited, this deficiency is significant enough to determine subtle situations of impasse in the analysis.”
Giuseppe Civitarese (Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis)

“The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the “mirror stage”, as theorised by Lacan in his 1949 article in the Ecrits, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”. Identification is, thus, an essential element of the Imaginary order. For Lacan, the ego is an imaginary function, and is constituted as such at the “mirror stage” which takes place somewhere between six and 18 to 22 months in the psycho-sexual development of the subject. In the mirror stage, the ego is constituted by identification with the little other. The ego and the Imaginary order itself are, thus, two sides of a radical alienation.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

Now the mirror is a metaphor, but I fear many Lacanians don’t seem to get this. The point, though, is that the infant comes to feel there is a future of wholeness (like this image in the mirror, or on the Mother’s face etc) and falls in love with it. Narcissism of the primary variety. What Lacan calls a ‘mirage of himself’ — an ideal non fragmented representation of self.

“In today’s world in which the entire visual field is posited as a site of value extraction, it is no secret that pornography represents thirty percent of Internet traffic at minimum.1 If we consider that computer energy usage has expanded to account by some measures for almost ten percent of total energy consumption planet wide, that’s a significant amount of fossil fuel devoted to masturbation.”
Jonathan Beller (The Message is Murder)

Western science today, which in prescribed areas of research, has utility and value. Has meaning. But the cultic turn western science took has met with digital tech, with the prophets of Utopian progress, a progress toward perfection. The climate fear (which obviously enough is just the latest emerging market for a very ill late Capitalism) sees its abilities as God-like. Computer models of the oceans of earth. No problem.

“As Ryogi Okochi has correctly underlined in his comparison of Nietzsche’s conception of nature and Eastern views, “nature”—just so and as such—is not a correlevant object for human comprehension. Regarding the world as will to power to all eternity, that is, naming nature chaos, Nietzsche emphasizes both its distance from our capacity to comprehend nature as it is in itself (this is Nietzsche’s routine Kantianism) and its inherent creativity (again, recalling the archaic Greek conception of chaos). As chaos, nature itself is itself interpretive.”
Babette Babich (Ibid)

Contemporary science can achieve successes, but always only in rather narrowly prescribed roles. The idea of global computer models is simply a psychological statement. But there are psychological aspects to the entirety of AI development. The gap between laboratory testing and real world application is enormous. There is never enough input. How can there be?

“Some models are so brittle that tiny, imperceptible changes in input can completely derail them.
Example: A simple sticker placed on a stop sign can cause a computer vision model in a self-driving car to classify it as a speed limit sign. The implications are serious — and potentially deadly.”
Amrith Niyogi (Why AI Models Fail in the Real World: Escaping the Illusion of the Matrix)

This is just the obvious failure of relatively simple robotics. There is already an extensive history of AI failures (Microsoft Tay, Google Photos, Tesla Vision Driving, et al).

“In recent years, there has been an explosive increase in the use of computer simulation models in fields as diverse as economics, aeronautics, cosmology, epidemiology, and forest ecology. Geology is no exception. From geochemistry to hydrology, paleontology to mantle dynamics, computer simulation models are now a standard part of the tool kit of the earth sciences. One of the driving forces behind the increased use of computer models in the earth sciences is their applicability to systems that are too large, too complex, or too far away to study by other means. The example familiar to most readers is global climate change. Most scientists believe that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is producing an enhanced greenhouse effect and, in the future, the Earth’s average temperature will increase as a result. To predict what these effects will be requires powerful computers that can obtain the solutions to a complex set of differential equations involving large quantities of input data. Other examples include models used to predict the behavior of proposed nuclear waste repository sites, to estimate air pollution emission levels from industrial plants, or to determine the circulation of ocean currents affecting fisheries. These are complex systems that cannot be observed simply nor easily recreated in a laboratory experiment.”
Naomi Oreskes (Why Believe a Computer)

And public policy is often based on the information gathered from these models. Regulators use it, and commissions depend on it for ‘safe’ decisions.

Oreskes adds later: ” An ecosystem cannot be brought into the laboratory; the Earth’s climate cannot be the site of controlled experiments. If you had proposed adding carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere to test its effects, the experiment would have been rejected on ethical grounds. “ (Ibid) And numerical simulation models really do nothing to fix it. There is a LOT of kicking the can down the road in AI research. How can computer models of oceans be trusted at all when new species of fish are discovered almost every week. There is no reasearch for the deeper realms of the oceans because nobody can get down there. Or the simple fact that science still has not identified a majority of species living on earth.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/110824-earths-species-8-7-million-biology-planet-animals-science

There are clear economic incentives to continue pushing the narrative of scientific perfection, but there is also a psychological aspect to it.

“For Nietzsche, beyond our automatic associations coloring our seemingly immediate perception of the world, we do best to challenge the reality of any such pure or direct perception of nature. Such a refusal of unfiltered or direct sense access to the world around us is the point (Kantian as well as psychological) of his teasing assault upon the sobriety of “realist” perception of the “real” world in The Gay Science: “That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that?”. For Nietzsche in a Schopenhauerian modality, “—A thing of this kind we never see as it is in itself, instead we always film it over with a delicate spirit-membrane—that overlay we see instead. Such natural things rouse inherited sensations, our own feelings. We see something of our own self—to this extent, the world itself is our representation.”
Babette Babich (Ibid)

Perception is interpretation. It is also an interpretation mediated by ideology.

“…the effects are somewhat more serious than “mankind” on the verge of psychosis caught in an orgiastic and masturbatory thrall: unless one begins to understand that this thrall is one with necro­-politics. Structural violence, systematically deployed and titrated with highly fungible vectors of racism and sexism, is embedded in the techno-visualization of everything that appears with the express goal of capturing sensual labor and the consequence of liquidating both subjects and the subjectivity of their objects.”
Jonathan Beller (Ibid)

“Yet ours is increasingly an era of demythification. And it is as easy to demythify nature as it is to criticize its appropriation and devastation. This may be the reason such demythifying critiques are so often—and so very paradoxically—deployed on the Left—although this may simply be due to the residual scientism that was characteristic of Engel’s marketing of Marxism. Thus in the sense of “natural” healing alternatives or “natural” health foods, the natural is demystified as a phantasm. “Nature” is as meaningless as the advertising copy “all natural” on a cereal box. { } The critical and rationalist, which is sometimes called the deflationist, critique of the romantic disjunction between nature and science (or technology) has its advocates particularly among those who take an analytic approach to the philosophy of ecology and seek at the same time to sidestep critiques of technology and science. For such readings, what historically minded scholars now speak of as the “invention” of nature works to subvert the very substance of romantic critiques. In this sense, Hölderlin’s “construction” of nature responds to the engineered construction of nature in modern times, a more literal construction that be seen as the invention of nature, scientifically driven, technologized, and industrially capitalized.”
Babette Babich (Ibid)

At this point it is useful to remember the psychoanalytic critique, Freudian and Lacanian. And Kleinian, really, too. For Klein’s envy and projection is almost the blueprint for Zionist violence. Once we have projected everything bad from myself (or even not myself) onto the ‘Other’, and then even good things onto them, I will come to feel persecuted by them. Capitalism does this as well, only this process is distilled in the colonial mind, it is concentrated.

“Lacan’s message is that we will never be able to retrieve or return to the mirror stage. And the aim of a Lacanian analysis is to show up the deceits and falsehoods of the ego in the curse (sic.) of its development, to show that the ego, the “monumental construct of [our] … narcissism” (Lacan, 1953, p. 40), at root, possesses a narcissistic and paranoiac structure whose “mastery” of the world is always illusory.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

“For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter-an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us.”
Jacques Lacan (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)

Also, too, the unconscious was posited in the Gospel of Luke. Rene Girard wrote…

“The sentence that defines the unconscious persecutor lies at the heart of the Passion story in the Gospel of Luke: “Father, for-give them; they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). If we are to restore this sentence to its true savor we must recognize its almost technical role in the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism. It says something precise about the men gathered together by their scapegoat. They do not know what they are doing. That is why they must be pardoned. In this passage we are given the first
definition of the unconscious in human history, that from which all the others originate and develop in weaker form.”
Rene Girard (Job; The Victim of His People)

They do not know what they are doing.

The absence, the lack, the missed appointment or encounter, all of these metaphors are tied at their base with Oedipal narratives. Guilt and resentment are the engines for contemporary life. I have written all stories are crime stories, all stories are about homesickness, and all stories are about exile. Guilt and resentment — the need for punishment. Children often feel guilty even if not understanding the reason. The two great primal crimes: killing the Father (or wanting to) and then having sex with the Mother. Freud said on his death bed that ‘men have always known they possessed a primal Father and that they killed him’. The internet revolution (sic), the rise of AI and the massive propaganda apparatus of Imperialist states today, are all caught up in narratives linked to global fascism. That so many EU leaders have grandparents and even parents who were full fledged Nazis is not happenstance, or coincidence. The crimes of these leaders are projections of their family beliefs, their own sense of being treated unfairly (and of their parents being so treated), and there are massive reservoirs in each of resentment. Kinship.

They are also all what Freud termed ‘moral masochists’.

“In this respect, primal sadism, as a manifestation of the death instinct, can be equated with masochism, which comes in three forms, according to Freud. These are: an erotogenic masochism (a condition imposed on sexual excitation-pleasure in pain), a feminine masochism (for Freud, an expression of the feminine nature) and a moral masochism (a norm of behaviour connected with unconscious guilt). Freud holds that a sense of guilt finds expression in the manifest content of masochistic phantasies. The Lacanian notion of *jouissance*, by which I mean the pleasure inherent in pain, may be encountered in primary erotogenic masochism. Here the subject assumes he has committed some crime that needs to be expiated by a painful procedure. In feminine masochism, the impotent subject’s phantasies terminate in an act of masturbation or alternatively they represent sexual satisfaction in themselves. The performance of those perverts who are also masochistic accords with these phantasies of being gagged, bound, beaten, whipped, derided and debased. The masochist wishes to be treated like a naughty child. Such phantasies place the subject in the female situation and signify being castrated or copulated with. In the case of moral masochism it is suffering itself that matters, but not necessarily inflicted by the loved object or endured at his command.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

The probable holes in Lacanian theory seem less important to me than his insights. The decline in the role of the Father is hugely impactful. Melanie Klein’s ideas on introjection and projection, and her emphasis on the Death Instinct, are highly relevant when discussing the offspring of Nazis. In projection the infant externalizes and exiles the frustrating ‘bad breast’ (which again is both literal and metaphor). Both good and bad breast are already internalized. For Klein as for Lacan, fantasy is of primary importance. The point here is that the exiled bad breast is seen, in paranoid fashion, as wanting to hurt the infant. The worse the mothering and caregiving, the more powerful is the bad breast. Nazis are suckled on nothing but bad breasts. And here is a point that I feel I am often in conflict about. Some will argue that well, Annalena Baerbok’s grandpa Waldemar might well have been a very nice grandfather. Just because he was a Nazi doesn’t mean he couldn’t be a good parent. And I think this is absolutely not true. Nazis do not make for good parenting. Friedrich Merz and his grandfather, who he considers a valuable role model, is the same.

“Greed and envy are the predominant phantasies in the paranoid-schizoid position. In its oral sadistic form, the desire is to deplete the mother’s body of all that is good by introjecting it into the ego. In its anal form, the desire is to fill the mother’s body with the bad parts of the self, which are split off and projected onto her, making her into a refuge and repository of what cannot be accepted or assimilated.”
Stephen J. Costello (Ibid)

The decline of the Law, in Lacanian terms, and the moral masochism (and anal sadistic character) are the badges of advanced capitalism. The trajectory of Capitalist crisis necessitates the weakened Father, the impotent Father, and eventually the weakened brothers– the dysfunctional horde. And a savage and ruthless Super Ego comes out of this. The inevitable resurfacing of Fascism — in many cases a return to actual mid 20th century versions, is the ascendence of this Super Ego, and of the survival instincts of Capitalism itself. The weak Ego, captured by screen technology and ideology, are an offshoot of the rank scientism of Climate activists. (Bezos wedding, a party for the ruling class. That plastic surgery was so prominently and unavoidably present at that wedding speaks to the self mutilation now embedded in the ruling class. Self mutilation and self loathing. And *lack*. The wedding was much like hearing Rutte utter “daddy”. An obscenity set against the backdrop of genocide. Those deeply caring 1% uttered not a single word on Palestine).

“According to Abraham (1924) guilt arises in the overcoming of cannibalistic— i.e. aggressive—impulses during the earlier analsadistic stage (that is, at a much earlier age than Freud assumed); but he did not consider a differentiation between anxiety and guilt. Ferenczi, who was also not concerned with the distinction between anxiety and guilt, suggested that something in the nature of guilt arises during the anal stage. He concluded that there may be a kind of physiological precursor of the superego which he calls ‘sphincter-morality.”
Melanie Klein (Envy and Gratitude )

Klein saw what she described as an internalizing of both good and bad breasts as the foundation of the Super Ego. But the oral and anal sadistic phase, around two years, and the concomitant biting of the Mother’s breast as residual cannibalistic tendencies. As an aside, there is plenty of evidence of sporadic cannibalism among the very earliest homo-sapiens. But it seems to have been relatively rare. The anal sadistic phase brings with it the pleasure of mastery, cruelty, and possession. And this is key. This is the Death Instinct. Entire cultures can privilege cruelty and possession, but finally cannot be sustained. Those societies eventually feed off themselves.

“Listen, judges! There is another lunacy, the one which precedes the deed. You have not dug deep enough into this soul! So spoke the red judge: “Why did this criminal commit murder? He meant to rob.” But I tell you, that his soul wanted blood, not the prize of theft: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife!
But his poor reason understood not this madness, and it persuaded him. “What use is blood to you!” it said; “would you not at least take some plunder in the process? Or take revenge?” And he followed his weak reason: its words pressed upon him like lead—and so he robbed when he murdered. He did not wish to be ashamed of his madness.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

To donate to this blog and to the Aesthetic Resistance podcasts, use the paypal button at the top of the page.
https://aestheticresistance.substack.com/