unimaginably so, on the dark web for instance. Who can now say it is bad or evil? Maybe it is art. A young boy is groomed on the web. He meets the man who groomed him who then kills him. The grieving family are sent videos of the killing at intervals anonymously during the following months. Transgressive art? In 2014, Petr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to the cobbles in Red Square. The year before he had wrapped himself naked in barbed wire, and sewn his lips together. Drill music videos posted online feature hooded and masked gangs threatening each other, with lyrics about drugs, guns and stabbing rivals with knives. The real difficulty seems to be how can you continue to transgress in an already transgressive culture which celebrates and promotes transgression? But there is always more death drive to defuse.
A child is born to a mother on Methadone maintenance treatment. He is taken into the care of his maternal grandparents when his father dies soon after he is born from a suspected drug overdose. By the time he is seven or eight his grandparents can no longer cope with his violent outbursts. And at school he is becoming increasingly violent hitting other children and abusing the teachers.
We are more and more paranoid-schizoid these days than depressive. Is it not true that everyone has a crime hidden within them? We are just waiting to be accused, to be called out. We are guilty before any possible trial, like Herr K. Thought fragments. Random juxtapositions. A fractal universe. All ultimately pointless, lacking points de capiton. This is the death drive unbound. In the Lacanian anti-religion religion, death is free to roam without query. The analogy is with the free radicle coursing through the body damaging cells and tissues as it goes. But just as the free radicals depend upon a healthy body for their disruptive activity, so too does the supremely free (Lacanian) agent depend upon a lawful network of facilitation and protection. Maybe it is strange that the so-called ‘endless phase of decline’ of psychoanalysis is marked by its only truly active principle, the death drive and its celebration!