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” (ibid, 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” (ibid, 48).
Oakley has quite simply misrepresented this book.
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