In my prospective novel: EMASCULATION: ALBION’s CURE, I describe the rise of the SlavJuros. The zombie ‘miracles’ that emerge from the dehumanized psyches of the modern male, toxic masculine sexuality incapable of a ‘viable temperate relationship with a woman.’
The SlavJuros are a miracle (in Santner’s sense) because they are the result of a deanimation of the undead that exposes and destabilizes the creature and its ‘drive’, (as opposed to animals with instincts) with a radical dehumanization.
As western pseudo democratic norms visibly collapse and shatter in front of our eyes, many, from positions of relative comfort and stability, are hopelessly disengaged bystanders, more or less rendered anxious but, mostly, really, turning a blind eye.
Today’s rise of the Obscene and the breakdown of law and order and of democracy (Israel, UK, USA, etc) is, I suggest, having a polymorphic impact on the human psyche – and alongside resistance and compassion we also see unleashed a monstrous racist ‘othering’, the rise of the far right stormtroopers in the various religiose and völkisch apparitions of nationalism and fascisms. The collective human psyche is being destabilized by the breakdown of law and order and by the rise of despots (with seemingly limitless power and above any law). This destabilization wreaks most harm in the form of ‘toxic masculinity’: the Obscene Father wannabe control freaks, or, less dramatically, in the form of the dehumanized automaton followers, zombies, prepared to, quite unemotionally, but ruthlessly rampage, even if only on social media platforms), to regurgitate racist bile, to ensure the continued destruction of the ‘other’, the ‘other’ that provides a necessary enemy to slake the unquenchable thirst of the Obscene Father that commands us, through its client media, to “Enjoy! without limit”.
The psyche of toxic masculine sexuality – as in film noir (q.v. Zizek), in modernity, is being cultivated by the overt manifestation of the Obscene Father(s) in full public view, in full rein, destabilizes the symbolic father function, and renders masculine sexuality oppressive and power hungry – and makes any viable temperate relation with woman impossible. In fact woman becomes feared, a phobic object, the Thing, the embodiment of the unbearable emptiness within masculine sexuality, the sexual absence sensed as loss. This psyche of modern masculine sexuality may then be ripe for a kind of ‘psychotic’ response to ‘Other jouissance’ (the enjoyment of the subject by the Big Other as Obscene Father) that forecloses access to an imaginary reality altogether, (Selivanov. Trump, Israel, Neoliberal Capitalism) by becoming radically deanimated switching toxic masculine sexuality into the de-sexualised non-libidinal undead zombie of the soldier with a totalitarian psyche – a monster drone with a rapacious and unquenchable appetite for destruction of the ‘other’ – (however the ‘other’ is identified by the Big Other). This totalitarian psychotisisation in thrall to fascism and without imagination is itself a kind of miracle, but one that opens a door to horror.
Perhaps this is partly the result of a desire, or need for, a homosocial brotherhood, a form of tribal collectivism, [in a process that may be facilitated by both the internet in combination with a frustrated testosterone tormented male adolescence], that …
provides [the promise of] comforting protection from the Monstrous Mother lurking in the shadows, threatening terrifying existential dissolution ) and this …
allows inevitable and incipient narcissism to flourish without the need for the protective fetish-object to mask the fear of the phobic object – ‘Woman’ or The Monstrous Mother – unleashing the will to destroy Her.
This may be, in part at least, a consequence of digitalised capitalism that ‘allows’ and makes visible all consumption – including that of the female’s, [Woman’s], life, without restraint.
Just like western Imperial ‘Forever War’, which providing a home for the the homosocial military ‘band of brothers’, the military family, esteem, and identity, emerges from the joint mission to hate, seek and destroy the enemy, without any need for an intermediate fetishistic substitute. The military become an unfiltered all consuming hate machine, providing identity and meaning, binding men, especially, together in their destructive enterprise.
Picasso’s narcissism and the meaning of La Vie – a Lacanian analysis
La Vie by Picasso
INTRODUCTION
The fortuitous purchase of a print of Picasso’s La Vie in a charity shop led to this hunt for plausible explanation. This is a tentative interpretation of the art work based on a particular psychoanalytic (Lacanian) theory and Picasso’s documented history as a womanizing misogynistic narcissist.
Before I begin I provide a psychoanalytic preamble to try to provide the reader with a grasp of the theory behind my interpretation. This section can be avoided or returned to later. It aims to answer the question: “Why would a narcissist be terrified by his own mother?” To answer this we need to think about the way our identities (as eg neurotic or narcissist) are produced and formed.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND – the origins of narcissism
In general I think we (that is to say most people in the West) tend to assume each person has an essential particular individuality, and that this autonomous and independent individuality constitutes our own personal identity: it is who ‘I’ am, so that ‘my’ own views and values etc. or my particular ‘personality’ is the product of and, in a sense, owned by ‘me’, my body and especially my brain. This is the philosophy of the ‘mind’ underpinning what is known as cognitive psychology and the neurosciences.
But here I want to challenge this assumption with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. I believe this can provide us with at least a partial and better plausible explanation for the observed human condition: its destructiveness, its paranoia, its apparent gullibility and willingness to do ‘bad things’ – as well of course its capacity for love.
What we like to think of as our autonomous and essential individuality is, instead, the product of our attempts to conform to a set of cultural norms that we perceive as having been ratified as ‘the way I should be’ by some Big Other. For each of us this Big Brother stands in for, for example, the idea of He Who Knows, and a striving to ‘be like him/her’, or the idea that ‘There are things to be known’ and so a striving for this knowledge, and a striving to be accepted and to ‘belong’.
The point being that our sense of self is useful but an illusion, something we only imagine, as either how I like to see myself or how I would like others to see me. Our identity isn’t something innate, it is something based on an imaginary relation to the culture we live in and the norms that have come to exercise power over us and society over time. And of course, over time these norms and the ‘way we are’, the things we value, how we value them, could (and should) change.
Consider a psychoanalytic version of an infant’s perspective.
At the very beginning of a child’s life, the baby or infant, the argument goes, is at first at one with the mother and has no identity. But then a trauma – the baby has to separate from the mother. The child’s sense of self or identity must now emerge somehow after this separation.
After separation from the mother the child begins to try to learn to speak and learns that there are cultural rules to be obeyed and prohibitions. And, in order to develop a culturally functional identity the infant internalizes these cultural rules or norms but, crucially, in order to do so has to give up some imagined autonomy in deference to an imagined rule-maker (referred to symbolically as The Law of the Father, or The Name of the Father). If this happens successfully the child is said to be psychically castrated – this is called a subjectivisation: the subject participates in his/her own subjugation by ‘the state’.
In other words:
“the individual is objectivised in the constitution of her subjectivity and is thereby subjugated by her objectivisation to become an object of culture.”
In Foucault’s essay ‘the Subject and Power’. Subjectification refers to the procedures by which the subject is led to observe herself, analyze herself, interpret herself, and recognize herself as a domain of possible knowledge.
If this process goes smoothly then this creates a common or garden neurotic subject, like most of us, a person who has found ‘a culture’ to follow – no matter how dysfunctional or cult-like that may be and a person who is always more or less anxious about whether he or she is obeying the cultural norms adequately and continually strives to do so, always feeling a failure. He or she is effectively a slave to a cultural set of values that most of the time he or she is not even aware of (for example in the west this might be an attitude of bigoted and racist white supremacy – not to put too fine a point on it).
However, this process doesn’t always run smoothly. Sometimes there is a glitch and a truly narcissistic subjectivity can emerge. In common parlance: the narcissistic psychopath.
I’d now like to turn to how this particular version of subjectivity, known as perverse narcissism, emerges. This is of interest here because this is the mode of subjectivity consistent with features of Picasso’s behaviours, for example his destructive and sadistic misogyny outlined by Francoise Gilot and others.
With true narcissism the usual neurotic mode of subjectivity described above fails to materialize. Instead of the subject forming an identity in relation to some cultural Law Maker (The Name of the Father or Big Other), the subject rejects this law, or the law maker appears to weak to provide a template for identity formation. The subject fears not having an identity or struggles without one because without one it is impossibly to function in society. Without a Big Other the subject is confronted with what amounts to a terrifying existential void “There is no ‘I’, ‘I’ do not exist” – the theory has it that this is intolerable – it is made more intolerable because this fear of not existing is associated with the being part of an unified with the mother. The subject is terrified they are going to be swallowed up by the mother again. The mother is perceived as a monstrous mouth about to swallow the subject up.
To avoid this the subject attempts to become his own Name of the Father and in doing so becomes an emotionally unstable narcissist with a pathological terror of the mother-figure which terror is ‘managed’ by its transformation into obsessive destructive and controlling fetishes and associated phobias. But the attempt to be his own Law or Big Other is necessarily doomed to failure. The Law is always weakened by its origins in a known lack of power and knowledge. And so the the narcissist ends up trying to prop up an unstable identity by symbolically consuming or exercising fetishized possessions or destructions. But each attempt only makes this identity more unstable inciting fresh attempts. The narcissist’s life becomes a series of destructive and oppressive fetishisations acted out on and against others and designed to keep the monstrous mother and her gaping mouth at bay.
INTERPRETATIONS OF PICASSO’S
PAINTING ‘LA VIE’
A caution: psychobiography – the attempt to interpret a psyche through an artist’s work – is always capable of socially pathologising an individual. Here I argue Picasso’s narcissistic psyche can provide an alternative explanation for a notoriously inscrutable and famous artwork in order to enrich or at least enhance or expand the experience of the art and possibly of Picasso too.
The painting is from Picasso’s blue period and has long been regarded as enigmatic and the hand gesture of the male character as somehow ‘inscrutable’.
The image is though to be of Casamagas, Picasso’s very close friend who was impotent, obsessed with one of their crowd a woman called Germaine who rejected him leading to Casamagas’s suicide when he tried but failed to shoot Germaine in a restaurant and then turned the gun on himself and died. It is thought that Picasso had possibly already cuckolded Casamagas with Germaine and that this may have been a factor in Casamagas’s suicide.
Chalif (see article below), argues that La Vie symbolizes Picasso’s disapproval of maternal authority, and the that the gesture of the male figure in the “Noli mi tangere’ is directed by Casamagas who actually represents Picasso himself as a kind of alter-ego, at the mother (Noli mi tangere is a well known phrase in the Bible meaning ‘do not touch me’, the words spoken by Christ to Mary Magdalene (Vulgate, John 20:17). The phrase noli me tangere is thought by some to be a reminder to not cling to anything, as nothing physical is permanent and is depicted in several art works of scenes of Mary Magdalene with Christ after the resurrection. (See the example by Antonio Allegri da Correggio’s from the 1500s below.)
Chalif claims the ‘noli mi tangere’ gesture is directed at Picasso’s mother to symbolize his break with traditional forms of art.
Chalif also suggests Picasso’s art through his life reflected his ‘pain’ and his grief at his own mortality. However in my view, given Picasso’s narcissistic traits, it is more feasible that Picasso’s art was a product of his ‘enjoyment’ but a particular type of enjoyment associated with existential angst called jouissance (jouissance in Lacanian terms is an pleasureable but also intensely painful libidinal orgasmic-like release / the product of his narcissistic psychic instability).
Chalif suggests (p413)
“is he indirectly jailing his own psyche after a guilty verdict in the shooting of Casagemas?”
In La Vie: with the portrait of Germain, Chalif asks:
“Picasso’s lover had assumed the role as a mirror of universal suffering and angst”
Instead, I argue below that through La Vie Picasso may be vicariously ‘enjoying’, experiencing a libidinal thrill, at Germaine’s expense, through his cuckolding of Casamagas and at the same time protecting his fragile narcissistic ego from its potential nemesis, his own (m)other).
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung has famously critiqued Picasso’s (cubism), though the same critique may not apply to his blue period when La Cie was painted.
On Cubism Jung wrote:
“At any rate they communicate no unified, harmonious feeling-tone but, rather, contradictory feelings or even a complete lack of feeling. From a purely formal point of view, the main characteristic is one of fragmentation, which expresses itself in the so called ‘lines of fracture’ – that is, a series of psychic ‘faults’ (in the geological sense) which run right through the picture. The picture leaves one cold, or disturbs one by its paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder. This is the group to which Picasso belongs*.”
I suggest that Jung’s analysis presents what appear to be echoes of the artist’s narcissistic perverse psyche, for example, the lack of ‘feeling’ for the onlooker and the ‘fragmentation’ in the images: both consistent with non-libidinal destructive tendencies, at least. But Jung sees this as potentially hopeful for Picasso’s emergence after his descent into ‘hel’. He sees these as schizoid tendencies (not, he adds, the clinical condition known as schizophrenia) unable to express what is in the unconscious directly but only symbolically and indirectly.
Antonio Allegri da Correggio’s “Noli me tangere 1500s
Mary Magdalene with Christ after the resurrection.
To illustrate Germaine’s experience with Picasso there was an occasion when he brought a woman to see the ‘fallen’ old, ill, poor Germaine ostensibly to be ‘kind’ to give her some money – but was this to gloat and to use Germaine as a prophecy or warning:
“This is what I can do to you too!”
[Whilst blaming Germaine for Casamegas’ suicide over 40 years earlier]
“We made our way up the hill…we went into a small house. (Picasso) knocked on the door and then walked inside without waiting for an answer. We saw a little old lady, toothless and sick, lying in bed… Pablo talked quietly with her. After a few minutes he laid some money on the night table. I asked him why he had brought me to see the woman. “I want you to learn about life,” he said quietly. “That woman’s name is Germaine Pichot. She is old and…poor and unfor- tunate now . . . but when she was young she was very pretty and made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide. She was a young laundress when I first came to Paris….(In those days,) she turned a lot of heads. Now look at her.” (Gilot cited by Chalif)
(Chalif 5, p 82)
A readers’s comment appended to Chalif’s paper suggests the paper is overly simplistic, and that :
“It is likely that Germaine shared Picasso’s bed from the first and that his sense of guilt over the death of Casagemas was heightened by this fact. Picasso’s misogyny is well known, but his treatment of the men closest to him was often no better.”
See also:
In Capello:
“Picasso dropped his father’s surname Ruiz and became simply Picasso.”
So, this may represent the rejection by Picasso of The Name of the Father or Le Non and Le Nom du Père, consistent with rejection of the paternal psychic castration and therefore effectively preventing the development of a culturally functional (non-narcissistic) neurotic identity formation. This leaves his without a functional identity or even existence, which exposes him to the full force of the death drive represented by his non-existence as an individual in danger of being swallowed up by the terrifying mother.
The (m)other is now a source of existential threat to him, a source of terror and this leads to a radical and narcissistically generated perverse Ego in thrall to it own Law: “Enjoy this little as much as possible!”: the perverse totalitarian psyche.
This condemns Picasso to an unfettered and limitlessly compulsive drive (the death drive) to attempt to find strategies for subjective stability and calm the distressing excess of provocative jouissance – through attempts to destroy the (m)other by destroying those that most closely represent her in Picasso’s life. The women, three of whom committed suicide.
Cappelo et al argue (wrongly I think) that:
“During the phallic stage, Picasso developed an insatiable sexual attraction to his mother repressed by fear of his father and society.”
This is describing a Freudian theory of development. However, I suggest a Lacanian might say instead that his failure of symbolic castration by The Name of the Father brings him face to face with his unbearable and terrifying own (m)other triggering thereby setting the death drive to work.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter if Picasso cuckolded the impotent Casamagas before or after his death … Picasso had in any case probably already cuckolded C, in his mind at least, and then Casamegas killed himself. Did Picasso feel guilt at all, ever? Did Picasso’s possession of Germaine obey or stimulate a psychic unconscious demand to destroy others, thereby partially stabilizing his unstable sadistic narcissism. ‘La Vie’ may be psycho-autobiographical (Picasso’s image lies under Casamagas on the canvas, depicting the moment of his rejection of castration (the absent Father, already out-mastered), and the terror/irresistibility of this confrontation with the impossible Real – the void of his subjectivity – represented by his (m)other and exposure to the death drive. “Noli Mi Tangere”
So, perhaps Picasso’s art isn’t an exorcism of a black spell of guilt, but rather a manifestation of a perverse and unbearable jouissance, a demand to release ever more jouissance through repetition of the acts of destruction of the (m) other, a jouissance released in one instance by his own perception of his part in the destruction of his close friend Casamagas, seemingly driven to death by suicide, and consummated through sex with the fateful and voracious love (Germaine) of his impotent friend. To be impotent, a dependent slave, and a companion (if not friend) of Picasso’s must have been torture and potentially a source of illicit pleasure for the perverse and sadistic Picasso.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion then, one interpretation of La Vie, the painting with its inscrutable noli mi tangere gesture, isn’t the product of guilt or grief , but is more likely to be symbolic of his solidifying narcissism, a representation of how he took Casamagas’s place to possess and subject Germaine to his sexual will as one act keeping his terrifying mother at bay.
Have just watched journalist Owen Jones’s interview with Mouin Rabanni, Dutch/Palestinian activist, on ceasefire agreement just announced:
Ceasefire agreement very fragile as deal not worked out after phase 1, so doubtful,
Gaza uninhabitable, so in time, despite Palestinian resourcefulness, a forced evacuation (crimes) on ‘humanitarian grounds’ is still on the cards. Plus,
If Hamas have maintained a force as even ultra Zionist Blinken (USA sec of State) has stated, Israel may very soon go in hard on Gaza again (crimes) supported by USA/UK/Europe. International Law fatally wounded so no holds barred. There are no rules, and there is no accountability in law.
This is Tragic and there is more man made ISRAELI AND Western Zionist and USA manufactured tragedy to come
Biden has always been an always an ultra Zionist and so probably worse for Palestinians than Trump (who cares for nobody but himself)
It seems to me, today, that all things (climate/social justice, poverty, peace) will get worse as UN powerless and ICJ toothless and humanity enters another cycle of extreme war mongering. The threats includes especially energy security as nuclear power stations degrade dangerously, and oil supply chain liable to disruption by war. Longer run. USA hegemony likely to fail and BRICS to rise but then …. am still pessimistic.
Orwellian times, as the media and in the UK especially state media: the Pro Israel, Pro USA, Pro NATO BBC propagandises and manipulates public sentiment so thoroughly.
You'll get no better analyst of the ceasefire announcement than the brilliant @MouinRabbani.
“The UK is three years into a carcinomic plague caused by a massive explosion at Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant, possibly a false-flag cyber attack by a western superpower to incite conflict with China. The UK has become a pariah state, desolated by irradiation and has been universally trade- and travel-embargoed.
Near the Spider Mother’s cave in Peru there is an ancient Cupisnique temple wall with a fading ochre mural of a decapitator Spider Goddess wielding a knife next to a Catholic shrine to Saint Felix. This wall becomes covered in a web-like material and, at the shrine, peasants seeking intercession for cancers see an apparition of a spider with wings covered in an image of the Virgin Mary and discover the webbed wall miraculously cures even terminal cancer. This comes to the attention of the parish priest and the Vatican initiates an investigation into this miracle (ultimately condemning the wall as demonic because of the side effect of sexual impotence).
Valentina, in Argentina, a transwoman artist has been hearing a new voice, the voice of Spider Mother, and to begin with is sceptical, attributing this voice to her past experience of auditory hallucinations, but the Spider’s story of cancer cures at the wall is confirmed by her brother, a parish priest in a village near the Cupisnique temple, so Valentina responds and goes to Peru to retrieve the spider and take her back to Argentina.
Valentina’s mentor and artistic sponsor, a Tasmanian entrepreneur, goes to Argentina to see this spider and has his terminal lung cancer cured by Spider Mother’s web (and at the same time loses both his sexual potency and capacity for emotional empathy). He agrees to help Valentina to obey Spider Mother’s command to go to the UK to strike a deal with the UK government with a view to developing a universal cancer vaccine/therapy based on her web.
The UK government are persuaded and agree to instruct the SAS who abduct Spider Mother from Argentina and take her to VDEC, Porton Down, in the UK.
The vaccine is successfully developed using a combination of advanced gene editing technology and AI algorithms, and takes the form of a viral plasmid which combines DNA code for the unique hyper-conductive half-metallic web protein SpirionX with code for the coronavirus identified by AI as having DNA compatible with the DNA for SpirionX.
Johnson, PM, and his government, is struggling to maintain control over a disintegrating social infrastructure when he hears news of a potential scientific breakthrough – a cure for cancer. The beleaguered Johnson announces a moonshot cancer cure, but shortly afterwards is suspended from parliament on charges of corruption.
The cancer vaccine-treatment, CanVx, is rolled out but has an unanticipated side effect, it also extracts sexual desire from nearly all biological males, creating psychopathic monsters, known as the Nullos.
The Nullos are unified by a desire to destroy the feminine in a ruthless lustmord, a self-styled ‘war on the vulva’, forming armed units intent on seeking out and castrating all those with persistent sexual desire, the Viragos, mostly biological women.
Predictably, a civil war, involving mass castrations and indiscriminate slaughter of the Viragos breaks out. The Viragos flee the cities heading northwards.
Johnson, who had been suspended just after the vaccine was rolled out, is now, in the light of emergent worsening violent anarchy, appointed President pro tempore by the King, and parliament is prorogued.
A few individuals, called Reactor-MasterNarcs, mostly powerful narcissistic elites, have a paradoxical reaction to the vaccine and become hyper-sexualised, disinhibited and hyper-neotrophic, developing a form of Satyriasis, Proteus and Quantal Squander syndrome.
In response to the predicted fall in birth rate due to the vaccine induced impotence the government sets up a eugenic breeding programme using genetically screened and Anglist Reactor-MasterNarcs to impregnate genetically screened women in birthing camps in order to generate a pure Anglist offspring.
A religious castrati cult, the Skoptsys, with members in elite circles, believes the genitals are a mark of sin and proselytise castration for men and women. They already hold positions of power and take advantage of the sexual side effects of the vaccine to create a moral and existential panic to take increasing control of government. The Skoptsys are against procreation and laws are passed cancelling the eugenics programs the arrest and execution of the Reactor-MasterNarcs, passing laws mandating castration and clitocision of the Viragos.
It turns out, after the vaccine has been rolled out that the genetic code of the cancer vaccine/cure is corrupted with a delayed action transmissible slow Prion virus, possibly as an act of intentional bio-terrorism, or as an AI ‘algorithm accident’. This takes three years to evoke the first symptoms in the male population, which it preferentially attacks.
The slow Prion virus, three years after the vaccine roll out began, then starts to show its neurodegenerative effects and a slow viral plague commences, especially affecting the mostly biologically male Nullos.
The Skoptsys, who being Christs on Earth have declined vaccinations, are immune to the slow virus. They close down the birthing camps, and, to appease Spider Mother, start a programme of sacrifice of the Reactor-MasterNarcs with castration and decapitation in public in chapels called Christ Faith Ships,.
All the time Spider Mother has been in telepathic contact with two transwomen, one an artist, Valentina, who finds and brings her to the UK, and another, Ms Shuttleworth, Grand Mistress of the UK Rosicrucian Crotona Society in the UK, helps ensure Spider Mother and a coterie of Virago resistance activists escape the UK.
Martha, a psychiatrist in a gender dysphoria clinic and a feminist researching conspiracy theories and Christian premillennialist fundamentalism, forms a relationship with a much younger woman, Victoria. Victoria has been a victim of sexual abuse by a preacher at a Brethen Fraternity in Kent and well known breast cancer surgeon Professor Prichard (who has a cleavage fetish). Martha rescues, but is then controlled by, Victoria and eventually, when she finds a breast lump, Victoria abandons Martha and returns to Prichard.
Prichard performs trials on the effects of the web using an OncoBra using Victoria as a guinea pig. Victoria becomes a psychopathic Nullo after her vaccination with CanVx. Prichard becomes a Reactor-MasterNarc after his vaccination and eventually has to be incarcerated. Victoria rises in the Skoptsy ranks and becomes known as Archangel Akulina, first assistant and to Selivanov, Son of God.
Akulina makes sure Prichard is the first Reactor-MasterNarc to be sacrificed, biting off his genitals and drinking his blood at a mystical radenie dance gathering where believers go into a trance and speak in tongues.
Martha is genetically screened and abducted to a birthing camp and impregnated by Johnson, but she is rescued by an underground feminist resistance, Spider Mother is also ‘rescued’ and they escape in a private jet to join a feminist movement in Argentina.
In the UK a mostly female rebel army, has adopted the name Viragos and they receive the tonsure as a symbol of resistance. They are being assembled, trained and armed on the Welsh borders.
In combat, over time the Viragos, led by Ms Shuttleworth (a latter day Joan of Arc) begin to exhibit superior tactical skills to the Nullo army in the south. The Nullo army is fearless and utterly ruthless but so focused on the compulsion to destroy the ‘sexuals’, the women and a few men, (in a kind of frenzied ‘lustmord’), at all costs, that they lack military finesse and begin to suffer defeats. Ms Shuttleworth the Virago leader is being helped by Spider Mother through telepathic message and accurate predictions of Nullo plans.
In the UK Johnson, a Reactor-MasterNarc is deposed by the Skoptsy as the slow viral pandemic takes a grip and is castrated and sacrificed live on TV and dumped in the Thames. Shakespeare-Morris (SM), a well known religious (Catholic) right wing MP and Skoptsy sympathizer, with several children , becomes self-styled President pro tempore and Lord Protector.
Selivanov, Christ on Earth, the Son of God and leader of the Skoptsys see Shakespeare-Morris as a threat to Skoptsy doctrine and power and tell Shakespeare-Morris that redemption is at hand but requires mass suicide of the believers and he is persuaded to die by his own hand, by drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide, on the basis of a false belief that his death will heralds revolutionary mass suicide (Jim Jones style) and the heavenly rapture.
Selivanov appoints two acolytes, (oneof whom is Akulina) as heads of state, setting up a Skoptsy government, of which he is the sole commander.
After their escape from the UK, Spider Mother is taken back to where she was first discovered in a cave in Peru. The shrine and temple have been cordoned off, deemed a place of evil by the Church and military because of the desexualising effects of the web. The Virago members of the resistance, with Spider Mother, find an alternative route to the cave via a man-made tunnels system leading to an ancient Moche burial chamber with skeletons of a high priestess, sacrificed guards and Moche sex pots. At her command they leave Spider Mother there on her own to spawn.
A spider expert from Tasmania Octavius is convinced Spider Mother is an ancestor of the Australian Peacock Spider (discovered by his great uncle and shown to Darwin and Octavius Pickard-Cambridge in 1874), and a hermaphrodite given her apparently virgin pregnancy. He ponders on the benefits of the evolutionary pathway followed by Spider Mother compared to humanity’s path through sexual dimorphism and sexual desire. Spider Mother, as symbolically two-souled, has an affinity with the transwomen, maybe why she chose them to facilitate her task. The nature of her task, or ultimate intentions, remains obscure.
Addendum
There is hope in the sense that the apparent eradication of a male form of sexual energy by the web results in the isolation of an oppressed group, woman mostly, with a female form of sexual energy, forced into an armed resistance, the outcome of which is unknown. The Reactor-MasterNarcs are authentic narcissistic psychopaths, a psychoanalytic aberration and the web leads to a hyperbolic increase in their sexual energy and life force leading to their final destruction. The Nullos embody a totalitarian psyche instrumentalising fascist outcomes where woman and sexual desire is the enemy. The emergent Skoptic theocracy rules but for how long? In the background lies an idea that sexuality can be male or female and determines a person’s relation to power and is not bound by biology. Most women and a few men have a feminine sexuality and these are the ones immune to the web. Most men and a few women have a masculine sexuality and are desexualised by the web losing desire and transforming into unthinking myrmidon-like troops in the service of the Skoptsys hunting down Sexuals to destroy.
Bio:
Owen Dempsey has had a career as a family physician, and a specialist in addiction and asylum seeker medicine, and has spent time in the occupied Palestinian Territories as a humanitarian activist with Community Peacemaker Teams (Chicago). He has a Masters in Health Sciences and a PhD in psychoanalysis and politics. He has published academic papers on critical theory and xenophobia, and has authored a published academic book using Marx and Lacan to critique anticipatory medicine. His debut fiction is a story of totalitarianism, patriarchy and sexuality through the lens of a dystopian future in a UK riddled with irradiation and a carcinomic plague, embroiled in a genderised genocide, the emergent political power of a Skoptsy castrati-cult, a cancer vaccination-cure derived from the hyper-conductive half metallic protein Spirion* in the web of Spider Mother, a Peruvian hermaphrodite ancestor of the Australian Peacock Spider, a cure that also extracts sexual desire from men, creating psychopathic monsters engaging in a frenzied lustmord against the Viragos, and a eugenics breeding programme using the sperm of narcissists, deranged and hypersexualised by the cancer cure, the Reactor-MasterNarcs.
The Skoptsys are a religious sect who believe that the genitals were implanted by the devil in the Garden of Eden after God had created man and woman, and they represent sin, and genital nullification – castration – is the path to divine grace (and of course there are other less extreme forms of symbolic castration, think celibate religious folk). They appear to think they have eradicated or at least conquered desire but… they may fail to see that desire is psychic, and unconscious, and not biological or something to be conquered.
And to be fully human is to desire, to desire implies your humanity, for good and bad.
Desire, at base, is a quest for meaning through identity. It is associated with uncertainty and anxiety. It can result in a selfish will to have power to subjugate, or a (still ultimately selfish), will to be the power that liberates.
But, if one has lost desire one has become a monstrous and insatiable obsessive robot embodying a Law.
One can lose desire seemingly only too easily, through a psychic castration rather than a physical one
It doesn’t take much. Think of: the jobs-worth bureaucrats, the killing soldiers, the white collared administrators of genocide. They can all be such robots. Banal, in a way, but also relentlessly, if dispassionately, obsessed with the Law they embody – always a fascist law in kind. A law that takes no account of the value of human life destroyed in the name of that law. Repressive pursuit of zero risk through Health and Safety edicts, progressive pursuit of zero disease through medical screening for asymptomatic disease , progressive pursuit of destruction of the enemy through ethnic cleansing through genocide. From the sublime to the ridiculous, these are all fascist activities performed by totalitarian mindsets. One interesting thing is that the psychic castration can be, in a sense, partial. It has its psychic impact, the loss of desire to be replaced with a monstrous demand to obey a law, in a particular social context or cultural environment, say, an office, or a political or professional role, where others or certain behaviours trigger a destructive response. The other may be, eg, behaviours in relation to health and safety (keeping fire doors shut), for medical screening enthusiasts (the behaviour might be deaths from a certain cancer), for the soldier and genocidaire (it’s simply the existence of the enemy). They must be eradicated, all of them: those open fire doors, those cancer deaths, those ‘others’.
This should raise some questions for us. If the Skoptsys castrate themselves – physically, yet remain psychically desirous (of an elusive identity at least, and when they’re not being unthinking or psychopathically totalitarian), this suggests they remain psychically castrated. Our psychic castration refers to our ongoing attempts, (ever since we first became aware of our reflection without an identity we can say we really ‘own’), to behave and feel in a way that meets with the approval of some phantasmic Big Other, one who knows how things should be, knows what we would love to know but can never know, sometimes embodied in an actual human being endowed with imaginary super powers, by us.
We can all think of such a person or many such persons, unless we’re in a temporary totalitarian unthinking state, (as described above) eg dropping 2000 lb bombs on refugee camps in Gaza, hounding people for trivial health and safety rule violations, or persuading healthy individuals to be screened for cancer.
The state of Israel is accusing peace activist organisations such as EAPPI, BtSelem, and CPT, of ‘harming the state of Israel and its citizens’. The opposite is true: these organisations are helping those suffering persecution by The state of Israel to resist and transform the violence imposed by a fascist regime that is itself bringing down disaster on Israel’s own citizens. The state of Israel is the biggest enemy of the citizens of Israel. So, here, I look at some features of Israeli State ideology and practices to see if they justify describing Israel as a fascist state breeding xenophobia and self-destruction.
For Umberto Eco, there are several aspects that are not individually pathogonomic of fascism but each of them is a characteristic around which fascism can congeal.
According to Umberto Eco’s essay there are 14 features that should alert us to the presence of ur- fascism (or eternal fascism).
In this essay I identify two of these 14 features that should alert us to the presence of fascism or proto-fascism in Israeli state policy in 2020. There are other features present, especially relating to a ‘lack of a clear social identity’ leading to an excessive and xenophobic fear of the enemy producing excessive displays of force (bombing Gaza and murdering youths at protests or throwing stones), and an exaggeration of the power of the enemy to hit back (the so-called rockets from Gaza).
However, here I want to focus on just two features that are highlighted by Trump’s recent 2020so-called deal in alliance with the Israeli State (see below for more detail), these two features of the Israeli state are:
a) the cult of tradition, where, for Israel, the worship of (military technology) obscures an ideology based upon biblical historical myths about homelands, ancestors, roots, as well as about future destiny:
” The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism … dream of a revelation received at the dawn of human history”.
and b) elitism, both within the state, and in relation to the rest of the world:
Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world
I suggest we can detect both of these proto-fascist features in Israel’s current structures, and behaviours.
To demonstrate this here is an excerpt from Alastair Crooke writing on the 2020 Trump ‘deal’: as a ‘deal’ that is trying to impose the de-facto legalisation (ignoring international legal norms) of settlement/colonies, in order to accelerate colonialism free from international sanctions, and to end the refugees rights of return.
Crooke relates Netanyahu’s use of the ‘destiny’ in terms of, first, both a political concept – what is a good thing for our people ; as well as, second, a mythical origin concept – fulfilling both a sacred biblical prophesy and imperialist expansionist ambitions . This is an underlying ideology of tradition, an abstract idea of preordained entitlement and destiny – attachment to the land of Israel or as the Nation State Law (see below) calls it Eretz Y’Israel. An idea of Israel that limitlessly extends Israel‘s current geographic boundaries.
[needs quote]
He then reveals Ben Gurion’s elitist ideology (the state of Israel’s first leader) for Israel:
That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).
Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).
Israel’s policies outlined in the Nation State Law of 2019 ; see appendix) includes a national duty to extend Israel’s boundaries to create Y’Israel or greater Israel. This is a policy that requires colonisation and ethnic cleansing, or the incremental (slow) genocide of Palestinians. This is portrayed as a civilising a world in its own image. Trump’s policies backed by Judaeo-Christian evangelists also sees this as consistent with USA’s own civilisation of the world in its own supremacist image. And, together with Sunni Arab alliance, the USA and Israel hope to achieve dominance over the Middle East and especially Shia Iran.
Netanyahu uses the rhetoric of destiny, an impoverished rhetoric that functions as a kind of Orwellian newspeak (another one of Eco’s features of ur-fascism).
Appendix:
Nation State Law:
•Only Jews have a right to ‘self-determination’ in Israel (the right to decide state policies)
•Establishes an exclusive Israeli Jewish: flag, anthem, language, effective access to purchase land, right of entry, and
•The National Duty to colonise oPt.
•Applies to ‘Eretz Ysrael’ – the ‘Land of Israel’ and so legitmises annexation of the West Bank
Commentary from Adalah (Palestinian legal authority)/
By providing for Jewish settlement (only) as a national value throughout Eretz Israel (when read with Article 1), the law institutes racial, ethnic and religious segregation as a new legal norm. In the OPT, it gives legal justification to the establishment and retroactive legalization of the settlements, and gives existing annexations and laws constitutional backing; indeed the annexation of the West Bank was a major purpose behind the law.”
Brief thoughts on the film Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal:
This is billed as loosely based on Saramago’s novel The Double, but strays quite a long way from it.
The film loses impact by being too short and over-edited so that potentially fertile ideas weren’t given time to germinate.
On reflection and with effort after the event it is possible to lay a loose interpretation over it.
The film is about perversion, that is, authentic psychoanalytic perversion, one theory for this, and there are other ideas out there, loosely based on Freud and Lacan, would suggest that the true pervert is the person who fails to go through phallic castration as a way of solving (up to a point) the Oedipal complex, in other words, the person who fails to establish a sense of self by adopting an identity provided to him by culture (The Father Figure), and who, as a result, is condemned to remain in an anguished state of no-identity, forced to confront his meaningless, an unbearable horror which is represented symbollically and psychoanalytically by the gaping mouth of the Mother Figure from whence he came, seeking to swallow him up whole. This horror is too great to bear, and so the person replaces the Mother Figure with a phobic object and a fetish, a displacement of the horror and a replacement with an object to obsess over and to soak up sexual instincts, without love.
Back to the film then, early scenes indicate, the sexual energy of a scene observed by an entranced male audience, in who a pregnant women masturbates, and a spider is crushed, [the Mother Figure, destroys the men’s phobic object for them (the spider0, as they satisfy sexual instincts by fetishising her masturbation. A scene of Toronto shows the huge spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, (1999) known for her spider sculptures which she says represent Maman, her mother, and famous for her use of art to depict for example, bisexuality and sexual ambiguity.
The sculpture is over 30ft high and one 33ft wide, and includes a sac containing 32 marble eggs and its thorax and abdomen are made of rubbed bronze. It is on display at the National Gallery of Ottawa, Canada.
Adam, the diffident college professor, teaches on fascist control. hegel’s ideas on repetition of historical events and quotes marx, first as tragedy then as farce, and is under the overly critical eye of his mother who mocks him, as if he has ‘dreams’ of being a wealthy actor. he appears to rape his partner in one scene, displaying his inability to love and his objectification of womanhood.
Daniel in a typically Saramago touch of magical realism represents his impossible psychic alter ego, the fully psychically castrated male, who tries to have power over his partner, his pregnant wife, who finds and threatens Adam aggressively, riding his penile extension the motorbike wearing a super macho helmet, and who then ’steals’ Adams wife, to ‘have’ her as well.
The film ends when the alter ego kills himself and Adam’s partner in a rage induced car crash, as his sexuality fails him, (the patriarchal castrated male is a flawed being and has to go), and when Adam is taken back into the womb, and left to deal with the world go phobic/fetish object, his ‘partner’ the Spider, and what will be the horrible pleasure of the prohibited incest with the Mother Figure, and the fetishstic voyeuristic voiding of sexual energies, of watching her masturbate alongside other selected perverts, that he as King Pervert, selects.
A longer and deeper film could have wrung out these ideas a little more explicitly, maybe a director like David lynch, ‘well known for his films blending psychological horror with film noir’.
Here I am interested in two things, first individual behaviors and a psychoanalytic explanation looking at narcissistic perversion and something I call juridical perversion, and second, the way juridical perversion is an essential psychic structure enabling the effective implementation of fascist or totalitarian polities.
I look at the way the film Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlaas (2013) is used by Doick as an example of the pathologies of juridicism addressed by the young Hegel. I provide an alternative psychoanalytic argument suggesting a) Kohlaas displays a narcissism that does not explain the pathologies of juridicism; and b) I describe a psychic structure for juridical perversion that does provide a plausible explanation for Hegel’s account.
The film is based on the 1810 novella by Hans von Kleist.
However first to set the scene, a brief and simplified recap to provide context: I am interested in two main things:
First, the idea, phenomenon or concept of perversion, both at an individual level and from a (Lacanian) psychoanalytic perspective.
Second, I consider the relationship between individual perversion and more recent global political totalitarian trends.
In general my argument is that population sentiment can be wildly swayed by charismatic and fanatical xenophobic discourse utilizing extreme language of nationalism, racism and existential crisis due to poorly specified others (immigrants, scroungees, foreigners etc). In addition, whilst this cultivates a population of fanatic racists, it also cultivates a population of individuals who literally identify with the totalitarian law itself in a form of juridical perversion (see below).
By the by, note that juridical perversion is different from narcissistic perversion.
Narcissistic perversion involves an individual’s attempt for find a sense of self or identity through an auto-generated (from within the individual’s own psyche) Law as opposed to any Law generated culturally or socio-politically. This is described further below, see a). On the other hand Juridical perversion doesn’t seek identity through any imagined authority or Law, auto- or culturally generated, but instead, radically surrenders any sense of self-identity in favor of identifying with the Law itself, he literally becomes a monstrous unfeeling embodiment of The Law, sacrificing subjectivity and the capacity for libidinal emotions of love or hate see b) below.
Here is a very brief psychoanalytic account of perversion following some Lacanian accounts (see Fink).
A ‘usual’ neurotic psychic structure is said to emerge as an identity constituted through the desire for an original sense of self, which finds a solution of sorts in social norms – more specifically what is taken to be the authoritative voice of a cultural power. In psychoanalytic terms this involves a psychic castration, in which the individual is left constantly attempting and failing to affirm his sense of self through attempts to obey imaginary socially constituted edicts.
In perversion, in general, there is a rejection of such socially enforced castration / the desire to be the perfect servant of an imaginary big (cultural) Other.
First note that there are two type of perversion – the narcissistic and the juridical.
In perversion in general, instead of accepting socially constituted castration and the neurotic identity and desire to conform that produces, instead the individual seeks to either:
a) find a sense of self (identity) through his or her own created Law – an ultimately self destructive narcissistic perversion in which the individual is confronted with the emptiness of his identity – and psychically, with the image of his or mother as the original source of his/her identity crisis. To counter the anxiety this causes he/she finds a phobic object to fear and destroy (a metaphor for the mother) and a fetish object, a metaphor for the phallus, the missing object stolen by the rejected social castration, in which to seek something to consume to affirm his/her identity.
Or,
b) another rejection of social castration but this time achieved through a radical rejection of any castration, any role as agens of a social Law, a radical rejection of the unconscious (in one sense this is the social symbolic network of meaningful signifiers), which involves a rejection of self identity or subjectivity, and instead a literal corporeal and psychic identification with the Law itself. This produces an unemotional banal monster intent on seeing the law is obeyed in its smallest detail as much as possible. The classic example is Adolf Eichmann intent on pursuing Nazism’s Final Solution. This type of perversion I have called a juridical perversion – this is formed via the same psychic structure as the Totalitarian Psyche described by Vadolas and produces, I suggest, important bureaucratic enablers of totalitarian regimes of all kinds.
In this essay, I use the film and critique Doick’s account of how the film relates to the early Hegel’s thoughts on the pathologies of juridicism. I limit myself to a critique of juridicism rather than continuing to critique the idea of love as it’s antidote.
First, on Doick’s use of the film to illustrate the young Hegel’s explication of the pathologies of juridicism in his ‘Spirit of Christianity’.
Second, a corrective providing a different verdict on the eponymous ‘hero’s motives and an alternative explanation for Hegel’s pathologies of juridicism.
Finally a few words on the social implications for society today and the global trend toward neo fascism.
This blog references the following paper by Doick, which is an interesting read:
Terribly upright: The young Hegel’s critique of juridicism By Doick
“… juridicism is defined clearly and criticized as to its effects on (inter-) subjectivity. In considering this phenomenon, which he calls the spirit of Judaism…” (p3)
And, referring to Hegel’s “The spirit of Christianity and its fate “ :
“Because he deems the Jews incapable of legislation, their slavish subjectivity, he claims, attaches to the form of the law itself. It is not empty because it did not have content, but, because the submissive subject is necessarily indifferent to content, since it does not orient his action to the demands or requirements of a concrete other, but rather, in light of conformity to law.” (p5)
This speaks to what I suggest can be called a radical juridical perversion.
This is identical in psychic structure to Vadolas’ Totalitarian psyche with its radical disavowal of the unconscious, resulting in a loss of libidinal possibilities for both love and hate (so banal, unemotional, psychopathic in pathological and normative mainstream terms). Think Eichmann.
Though, with juridical perversion there is content – eradication of the other – or at least a negative content, a world ‘without’, like the absence of idols …. such an absence gives the individual no positivity to attach subjectivity to, no hope for love or hate, only a felt maximal imperative command to be the tool of obedient destruction, eradication, expulsion.
“The juridicist searches out laws new or old to justify personal positions or ideologies in the Church. Especially they like to focus on liturgical practices. They incline to creating unnecessary hoops for people to jump through. The Church, of course, needs law to insure good order. But the purpose of all laws in the Church is the same as for all the works of the Church: “propter homines and propter nostram salutem” – for us, for our good and for our salvation.”
Pathologies of juridicism:
For Doick the pathology implies both being a) non-normative; and b) de-subjectivised.
On the first, his definition of social pathology requires behaviour to be socially non normative – there is a problem with this: the description of behaviour as pathological is of limited value, even unhelpful or harmful since we are all (and society is) pathological as in unhappy and anxious and prone to perverse fantasies, at least. Or put another way, even social norms are already increasingly pathological – as in devoid of love.
On the second the phenomenon of de-subjectivisation: the loss of a ‘self’ or any capacity to make sense of a self as a subjectivity or identity, then yes: a juridicism is a perversion that can result in a destabilized subjectivity in two ways: a) a self-centered ‘juridicism’ & a radically destabilized subjectivity for the narcissist; and b) identification with a Master’s juridical edict resulting in a total foreclosure of subjectivity for the juridicist.
Narcissistic Perversion:
The film Michael Kohlass – Age of Uprising:
Briefly, Kohlass is an expert horse trader with a proud reputation but he is cheated out of two beautiful black horses and publicly humiliated by a young (and somewhat effete) wealthy baron, who forcibly takes the horses in lieu of an (illegal) toll, and who subsequently allows the horses to be severely mistreated and physically disfigured. Kohlass is appalled and obsessed with the return of the horses and their return to their former beauty by the hands of the baron himself. He fails to get this ‘justice’ in the court as his claim is thrown out and he is characterized as willfully mischievous adding insult to injury. He then raises an army by mortgaging the family home, effectively abandoning his wife and daughter, and finally being caught and beheaded at the command of the King for murderously ransacking the countryside and towns.
Doick suggests the eponymous ‘hero’ is consumed by the need for justice as an example of juridicism.
However I suggest, on the contrary, Michael Kohlass displays more features of narcissism than juridicism, he is consumed not by justice per se, but by the need to be superior to, or to redeem his superiority over, those who have effectively demeaned and mocked him. His subordination is intolerable to him , it is all about him and his need to be top dog in the end. He is a narcissistic pervert with a fetish for horses and a phobia of personal indebtedness or of being in any way indentured.
So, contrary to Doick it appears that (the early) Hegel’s thoughts in ‘The Spirit of Christianity’ which describes, inter-alia, Abraham’s narcissism, actually fails to ‘diagnose’ Michael Kohlass (as Doick claims) as such since he does not provide a plausible psychic explanation – only a grim and clear description of the phenomenon: the effect of juridicism on the destruction of social bonds and the capacity to love.
In my view the film illustrates an example of (fictional) narcissistic psychopathy, which by the way is all that traditional psychiatric diagnosis (using the DSM criteria) does – this only describes a ‘mental disorder’ (that is to say socially pathological) using the DSM, a label, it provides no plausible explanation and therefore no hope of increasing our grasp of the phenomenon, or, most importantly, if it’s potential to have socio-political impacts such as burgeoning neo-fascism.
In addition whilst the film provides an example of narcissistic perversion, rather than a over-simplified version of juridicism and a search for justice as suggested by Doick, nonetheless Doick’s paper also omits any explanation for the phenomenon of juridical psychopathy as illustrated famously by Eichmann as described by Arendt.
Juridical Perversion:
Not only does Doick a) fail to see Kohlass as essentially narcissistic and perverse – wrongly attributing his motive as the need for ‘justice’; but b) he also fails to provide a plausible explanation for the phenomenon described by Hegel’s whereby excessive identification with the ideal of a strict law destroys social bonds, which I suggest lies in the psychoanalytic structure of juridical (as opposed to narcissistic) perversion.
Doick fails to address the plausible psychoanalytic mechanism for Hegel’s account of the pathologies of juridicism, a mechanism that is also behind the rise of fascism in an increasingly nationalist capitalist neoliberal pragmatist world. This mechanism is not just about narcissistic psychopathy as illustrated by Kohlass (whose behaviour is wrongly attributed to an obsession with justice when it is about an obsession with is own narcissistic need to be in the right at the expense of all others), but also about juridical psychopathy – the Eichmann phenomenon – the bureaucratic banal and radical evil committed not in pathological self-interest but in a literally self-less programmed performance ‘as’ the Law itself. It (the juridicist psychopath) ‘is’ the unfeeling Law and this Law commands exclusivity for a Master Race and a Final Solution – more or less explicit and public. This fascist or totalitarian Law demands the extirpation of the other that poses the (alibi as imagined) existential threat to the Master Race.
Note that mass juridical perversion require an essentially narcissistic nationalistic world view promulgated by political and media propaganda. For example Hitler’s effective demand (and tacit support at least) for the Final Solution to extirpate the Jews and others – provided the Law with which mass juridical perversion identified. At least, with which a sufficient mass identified so that the policy was tragically enabled successfully in Hitler’s Nazism’s terms.
One of the fascinating and terrifying aspects of humanity that manifests most grotesquely in fascist states committing genocidal crimes against humanity is the apparent willingness of so many to at least go along with these crimes if not actively to promote and to carry them out.
The totalitarian psyche described by Vadolas in his book “Perversions of Fascism” is described as the result of a radical disavowal of the unconscious leading to an identification with the Law itself – and with excessive obedience to a command to “Enjoy this little as much as possible!”
A radical disavowal implies more than just disavowal. To disavow in psychoanalytic terms is to consciously not know something that still has effects via the unconscious. For example I may consciously identify as a socialist whilst living the life of a bourgeoisie with the unconscious of a capitalist – such contradictions are part and parcel of everyday psychic life, and are one cause of quite normal and common doubt and neurotic anxiety. To radically disavow the unconscious is to lose all doubt and to become a fanatic in the cause of a consciousness that is taken over by The Law!
In this short essay I consider a possible case of the totalitarian psyche as displayed by the main character in Scorsese’s film The Irishman, and I describe this in terms of a juridicisstic perversion.
Frank Sheeran, The Irishman and monster henchman uses extreme violence to protect his daughters, he has been traumatized by war time experiences making him fatalistic and emotionally burnt out but destructive – I suggest here that he doesn’t find an identity so much as lose his-self through a self-instrumentalised obedience to the violence and murderous demands of the mob, to kill on demand, to ‘paint the house’ red – a lifestyle disingenuously justified by him as the only way he had to ‘protect his daughters.
Sheeran, played by De Niro, the mobster’s assassin in the film, exhibits the juridicistic perversion of an Eichmann: the product of PTSD, burnout and a turn to The Law of his all-powerful protector: (Fuhrer) Russell Buffalino the mobster. Juridicistic because he is transformed and becomes a monstrous robotic thing, and as the painter embodies the instrument of the mob’s Law as decreed by Russell Buffalino.
His actions are consistent with what I have called a juridicistic perversion – not a perversion ‘of’ the law (which would be juridical) but a perversion in the form of a pervert – a pervert ‘structured as’ Law, a juridicisstic perversion.
In the context of this film then this Law refers to the Law of the mob and especially the Law as laid down by monster Russell Buffalino. Russ becomes Frank’s mentor after magically ‘fixing’ his broken down truck and eventually turning him into a self-instrumentalised slave to Russ’s every desire. Frank is not obsessive, not excited, but murders cooly, methodically, on demand: banal, and radically evil.
Tellingly Frank, even in the decrepitude of advanced years couldn’t tell his confessor, the Catholic priest, that he was ‘sorry’ or even felt sorry for his actions. He exhibited little emotion of any kind at any time, even over his daughter’s refusal to have contact with him because if his life as assassin and especially as assumed assassin of ‘family friend’ Union chief Jimmy Hoffa. Frank was banal, conflicted but apparently unemotional even when told to kill this close family ‘friend’ Jimmy Hoffa – whose family he did know.
Frank seems to be radically evil in the Kantian sense that his transformation which involved losing his ‘self’ (ironically) is in his self-interest. His self found the demands of war, experiences of near death and killing intolerable and, I suggest, in his case may have involved a radical disavowal (see above) of the value of the ‘lives of others’ – the victims nominated by the mobster Russ. This involves a radical alienation from his unconscious and a de-castration and loss of subjectivity – according to a non-narcissistic Law – the Law of the Final Solution of the Master – the mobster Russ, who says to Frank that him and his family are ‘with me’ and so safe (from the other monsters). Russ provides ‘protection’ as long as Frank effectively sells his soul.
Note: the juridicistic perversion described here is to be distinguished from a narcissistic perversion. Both kinds of perversion involve a rejection of the formation of a sense of self (subjectivity) via socially acceptable norms (or symbolic Laws) and instead turn to either a) a futile attempt to self-castrate (narcissism) and a need to destroy the (m)other; or b) a turn away from subjectivity and castration altogether via self-instrumentalisation and identification with, or better, objectified embodiment of, The Law Itself – the murderous but unemotional weapon that is the Law of the Gun itself. Eichmann and Sheeran’s monstrous and pitiable banality of evil.
Eichmann is the killing machine of the Holocaust as the embodiment of Hitler’s Final Solution and Frank Sheeran the killing machine who ‘painted houses’ on demand for Buffalino’s Mob rule.
Discussion
David Ferraro psychoanalyst tweeted:
If, as some analysts say, social conditions are deteriorating, then logically this might not lead so much to ‘ordinary psychosis’ (i.e. stabilised, or discreet, or hybrid, or ultimately attenuated psychoses) so much as really crippling neuroses, as attenuators disappear.
It is at least possible then to postulate that the origins of Frank’s actions and apparent juridicistic perversion lie somewhere within both his own personal relationships and family dynamics (with its Oedipal conflicts) as well as in the breakdown of social relations experienced as a combatant in war. In other words, as Ferraro put it, Frank ended up with a crippling neurosis.
If we extend this argument in two ways then: first, a crippling neurosis may be the origins of the psychic structure of the juridicistic pervert, and second contemporary social breakdowns and political shifts, globally, to the right and authoritarianism may be providing the fertile ground for a more widespread transformation of the psyche of populations into juridicistic perverts.
Such a transformation would only need to reach a certain level in the opposition to ensure that fascist or totalitarian governments were able to sustain their power through terror – as happened in Europe in Germany through the Nazi Holocaust. the transformation achieves or produces an army of monstrous slaves programmed to total obedience to the orders of their Masters. These are the banal unemotional myrmidons – Achilles army of ruthless killing ants – carrying out orders.
If there is any lesson here at a social level – it is to beware of the myrmidon in our midst, to beware of social breakdown causing us to become neurotic asocial cripples incapable of love or hate or emotional relationships on any level, causing us to turn into the monstrous killing foot soldiers of fascist masters. Indeed blind obedience to The Law of a master may be found in a variety of dogmatic social arena, political, religious, scientific-industrial, stoked by the fantasies of capitalism. I
In my own area of professional experience I detect juridicistic perversion at social and individual levels in the promotion and selling of ever more innovative technologies aimed at asymptomatic diagnostic anticipatory screening. The cure for cancer, and the search for the atom bomb have their parallels in the mindset of the scientists wedded to the ultimately murderous science-industrial complex, amidst the social breakdown accompanying widespread capitalist structures.
Appendix
JURIDICISM – an example from the Church – the JURIDICISTIC pervert attaches his de-subjectivised actions to a Law so that his actions no longer require justification or any sense of moral personal responsibility. There is no longer any ‘personal’ to be responsible, only the Law which is its own justification since it is made by ‘god’ or any other all-powerful Master – “for our good and our salvation” by destroying the enemy within and without. Here we have a view of juridicism provided by a priest’s sermon at an ordination:
“The juridicist searches out laws new or old to justify personal positions or ideologies in the Church. Especially they like to focus on liturgical practices. They incline to creating unnecessary hoops for people to jump through. The Church, of course, needs law to insure good order. But the purpose of all laws in the Church is the same as for all the works of the Church: “propter homines and propter nostram salutem” – for us, for our good and for our salvation.”
In addition it looks as if Hegel also considered juridicism as corruptive of subjectivity – at least in some way.
So, according to the author, Loick, D. in Terribly upright: The young Hegel’s critique of juridicism, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol 40, issue 10
Hegel is one of the few philosophers to devote systematic attention to phenomena that can be called pathologies of juridicism. Hegel claims that the law fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others and to the world so that our (inter-) subjectivity becomes ethically deformed, distorted, or deficient.
"My OwnPrivateMedicine" by Owen Dempsey 