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)[ii]
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; everythingis 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