‘wrenching from 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”,