that grows larger as it loses its substance’ (Bruchner 2006, 190). A self-lacerating guilt lives side by side with ‘living the life’ – living the pure life, or as people declare, ‘this is my life’. There are deadly side-effects (as rights conflict) as we abandon any real notion of the social good. As Miller says in almost a Thatcherite moment, ‘The collective is nothing but the subject of the individual’.4 ((http://iclo-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/Pdf/Turin.pdf.)) And even the social good conceals the death drive, ‘as we wait for it to drag us to our destruction’ (Lacan 1959-1960, 232), and especially when we raise the question: ‘for the good of whom?’ (319). There is no such thing as society!
The deeper reason for the alleged ‘endless phase of decline’ of psychoanalysis, beyond the complexities of the academic language and terminology, beyond scientism and reductive materialism, beyond pharmacology and so on, is the anti-Christian, anti-humanist orientation of the new atheistic religion to which politicised psychoanalysis now belongs almost by default, which knows no evil, or to be more precise, knows evil only as out there – in capitalism, the Symbolic, the white man, religion and so on.
Instead of the burden of responsibility and realistic personal guilt we have inherited from earlier centuries following the Socratic injunction know thyself – gaining insight, becoming reflective, forming therapeutic alliances, renouncing impulses, improving relations and so on, Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely dispensed with all that emotional ‘work on the self’, in exchange for a return to the pre-Christian Greco-Roman polytheism and the heroic affirmation of the death drive. Here there was / is no real question of good and evil.
It is no longer just elites, artists, and so on that really know this kind of freedom. It is now available for all. The silent masses, still mired in the old ethics, are rapidly catching up but becoming worried about what real freedom without scruples and total openness actually entails. Even the new BBC app “Sounds” is advertised as “without limit”. Maybe, we should heed Baudrillard’s claim (2005a, 163): ‘If you don’t like reality, don’t ruin it for everyone else’.
Meantime, in the fractal universe there are thoughts without a thinker, maybe unthinkable terrifying thoughts whose depths have not yet been plumbed. This must be the web: thinking without thinking, thinking free of thinking – obscene, sometimes