blackness on the horizon’ (In Bradbury, 1988, 260). And in his essay, “The Great Ennui”, Steiner looks at the confident, liberal century before the Great War as the source of the inhuman: ‘the crises of our own time that compel a redefinition of culture, are to be found in the long peace of the nineteenth century…at the heart of the complex fabric of civilisation’ (Steiner 1971, 9). And are we not in roughly the same position today after the long period of peace in Europe at least since 1945, lulled into a false sense of security with two generations at least who have not known war first-hand? The storm clouds of the political extremes are gathering again accelerated by the desublimative effects of the (un)social media.
On Being Written Off
The well known Lacanian cliché about the death drive: “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” (Lacan 1959-1960, 314), Lacan tells us that this is a “last judgement” on your life. ‘The only thing that one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire” (ibid, 319). There is ethical purity here – conforming to desire and not compromising or ceding ground at all. Are you ready to die for your desire?
However, this guilt at having given ground to your desire has another older meaning of course – guilt at having given ground, or yielded to desire – being lead astray by desire as sin or temptation to sin. This is clearly not what was intended by Lacan; quite the opposite, but the words remain and thereby they echo the universal myth of the Fall which is stronger than any particular religion, hints at a wrong turn that was taken and today the wrong turns are proliferating.
We are no longer called upon to sacrifice our lives tragically for anything anymore – for God, our country or our own desire. Today’s is a hedonistic ideology – suit yourself; be yourself. Your goal is happiness, grabbing pleasure wherever you can get it. However desire – pure desire – irrupts, interrupts, destroys – you only have one life, one destiny. Ask an old Left-wing politician who has made too many compromises over the years with the status quo in order to stay in power: is this what you fought for in