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1. 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 …
2. provides [the promise of] comforting protection from the Monstrous Mother lurking in the shadows, threatening terrifying existential dissolution ) and this …
3. 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.  
4. 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. 
5. 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.  
6. The perfect soldier is an incel.

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. 

Others (Palermo 2016) argue that:

‘He uses the gesture to challenge the Church, and he uses the gesture to challenge a tradition of representational painting.’ 

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. 

“Indeed,  at 19, …  he slept with the love interest of his impotent friend Carlos Casagemas, causing his subsequent suicide”

“Picasso appropriated both Casagemas’s space and his unfulfilled sexual desires. Picasso’s exorcism of the black spell of the suicide of Casagemas had begun … “ 

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. 

REFERENCES

Picasso’s Women:

Creation and Destruction: A Psychoanalysis of Picasso

By Kelly Cappello & Dr. Cem Zeytinoglu CMST 363 11 May 2015

See 1932 essay by Carl Jung.

http://jungcurrents.com/carl-jung-takes-on-picasso-in-1932

 

THE DEATH OF CASAGEMAS: EARLY PICASSO, THE BLUE PERIOD, MORTALITY, AND REDEMPTION

Chalif, DJ. Neurosurgery 61:404–417, 2007

17/01/2025

Have just watched journalist Owen Jones’s interview with Mouin Rabanni, Dutch/Palestinian activist, on ceasefire agreement just announced:

 

1. Ceasefire agreement very fragile as deal not worked out after phase 1, so doubtful, 
2. Gaza uninhabitable, so in time, despite Palestinian resourcefulness, a forced evacuation (crimes) on ‘humanitarian grounds’ is still on the cards. Plus,
3. 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.
4. This is Tragic and there is more man made ISRAELI AND Western Zionist and USA  manufactured tragedy to come 
5. 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.

Delighted to speak to him 👇https://t.co/RIlgrDzTEd pic.twitter.com/iDd5oU1U50

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) January 16, 2025

“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’.

Introduction

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

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0191453714552210?download=true

Doick suggests:

“… 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 “ :

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/fate/ch01.htm

“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.

Thus, for example:

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2007/06/pillar-of-salt-vs-salt-of-earth.html?m=1

“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.

https://twitter.com/thepsychclinic/status/1605847332762812416?s=46&t=9Lt3A0ZtI0BwyCB-8SXZug

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.”

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2007/06/pillar-of-salt-vs-salt-of-earth.html?m=1

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.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0191453714552210?journalCode=pscb

As an aside to the debate over Shared Decision Making (SDM) vs so-called Quality Improvement (QI). which is focused on methods of decision making at a patient and population level respectively, another (and perhaps less intellectually accessible) problem may well be the question of the decision itself.

INTRODUCTION

One specialism within Evidence Based Medicine is Shared Decision Making. There is much debate and research on the ‘best’ ways to share decision about healthcare with patients. This work usually assumes that a patient can be empowered to make a rational and free choice so long as she or he is provided with all the relevant information in an unbiased way.

My problem with this, the psychology and praxis of SDM, is that people and soon-to-be-patients, and health professionals are always caught up in the moral imperatives imposed by cultural norms so that even the presentation of the option of a health care intervention becomes performative. And that is to say it persuades. The health scientists are driven by a utopian vision of ‘the cure’, the ‘final solution’ of medicine; and patients made fearful and driven to desire more, that is, more of everything (possessions, wealth. Life, security, meaning). These concerns have led me to argue that for anticipatory diagnostic health care aimed at the currently asymptomatic that presenting ‘screening’ enforces a decision and that this undermines autonomy and risks harm in ways that patients and most health professionals are unable to evaluate objectively. There comes a point therefore when, just because a technology is available, it becomes reasonable to withhold the offer of such interventions. In this wildy neoliberal and pragmatic world the very idea of not offering screening interventions must sound ultra-idealistic and utopian. Nonetheless as an idea it has power and such ideas once germinated can grow.

It is clear that approaches to SDM are worth pursuing as decisions often cannot be avoided.

However, crucially, for important sectors of care, decisions could be avoided. And this may be especially true for a major arena of care – population-based anticipatory diagnostic screening programmes. These programmes arguably cause more harm than good, and impose an emotional debt on a public made to feel fearful and duty bound to comply.

I believe too little attention has been given to how, in these modes of care, values and meaning are produced through the power relations between the medical-industrial complex, medical scientist-practitioners, and the public, by:

a) cultivating totalising fantasies of perfect solutions, cures and preventions;

b) inciting excessive implementation of interventions by demands for

c) increasing consumption by an anxious public made fearful.

These relationships, of power, lead to two problems:

First, as with the science-industrial complex in general the fantasy or assumption of a final solution, or cure, incites a perverse fanaticism in the professions that demands always more, more science, more cure, more screening uptake, more fire-power, regardless of the consequences.

This fanaticism takes the form of a self-instrumentalisation in the service of (medical) science – a radical disavowal of the harmful consequences – and what I have called a juridicistic perversion. The psyche of the medical scientist in pursuit of Cure – can only lives with the harms by rejection of socially acceptable conscious norms and becomes an embodiment of the lethal Law that demands more intervention, more innovation and more decisions.

See:

‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’: science, perversion, psychoanalysis, Journal for Cultural Research, 24:4, 315-333, DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2020.1861811

https://myownprivatemedicine.com/2022/12/11/nedohs-paper-in-the-context-of-the-science-industrial-complex-and-the-invention-of-the-atomic-bomb/

Below is a copy of Nedoh’s paper, in the context of the science-industrial complex and the invention of the atomic bomb. This illustrates the deformation of the scientific psyche by the totalising ideology of a Totalitarian Law that demands more knowledge regardless of the consequences inciting a kind of bureaucratic or juridical perversion in which the Science for more intervention in the name of absoluteness is fetishized and becomes the fetish object.

Second, the effect of this demand for (always) more has been to unleash hyperbolic levels of anticipatory or curative technologies, and their harmful consequences.

APPENDIX – Nedoh’s paper of the science-industrial complex and self-instrumentalisation.

‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’: science, perversion, psychoanalysis, Journal for Cultural Research, 24:4, 315-333, DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2020.1861811

ABSTRACT
This article offers a critical examination of the contemporary imperative to ‘trust science’ from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It begins by putting contemporary scientific research in the twentieth-century historical context of the ‘military- industrial complex’ (D. Eisenhower) in which science and technol- ogy become symbiotically connected to the military. It then exam- ines the psychic structure driving the military-industrial complex in which science (perversely) instrumentalises itself for military pur- poses. This structure is crystalized in two statements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal investigator of the Manhattan Project. In these two statements, Oppenheimer describes this singular invention in terms of being ‘good’ and having ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, which is then bound to an identification with ‘death’ and total destruction in his famous citation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The article then proposes that the psychic structure underpinning this claim corresponds to the Kantian notion of diabolic evil, and then goes on to further conceptualise structure under the concept of ‘bureaucratic science’. The article concludes by showing how such a self-instrumentalization of science does not correspond to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, as is usually implied, but rather to the superego defined by Lacan as the ‘imperative to enjoy’.
“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” (Bhagavad-Gita, cited by J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945, in Marzec, 2015)
“I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists. I want you to unite behind science and I want you to take a real action.” (Greta Thunberg, 2019, in Volcovici, 2019)

Introduction
On 18 September 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed US Congress in a now historic speech, begging US lawmakers to ‘listen to the scientists’ and to ‘unite behind science’ in order to counteract climate change and the global environmental crisis. Following the growing concern about the catastrophic impact of climate change amongst progressive political groups in Western countries, as well as the persistent climate scepti- cism on the conservative side of the political spectrum, it is no coincidence that the imperative to ‘trust science’ has already become the unquestionable imperative of today’s mainstream Western progressive orientations.

Yet, despite its noble appearance, such an imperative raises multiple concerns for the critical gaze. At first glance, the imperative is already symptomatic insofar as it is actually the supplement for the missing political programme of the Left, which (follow- ing Žižek’s repetition of Benjamin’s insight that, historically, fascism is a sign of a failed revolution) has created the space for the rise of reactionary populism over the last decade. In other words, after a decades-long series of defeats in the ideological battle against the – then neoliberal and today authoritarian – political paradigms, the political Left is now having recourse to science as an a-political mode of mobilisation in order to simultaneously cover over and supplement its impotency to mobilise the masses with its own political programme. In this respect, it is reductive to restrict such an imperative exclusively to the issue of climate change. The imperative to ‘trust science’ is often taken by progressivists in an almost Kantian sense of the term: as a universal, that is, all- encompassing imperative that operates as a leading principle in all areas of the decision-making process. What is disavowed, here, is that such an imperative is clearly a form of depoliticisation, and as such does not solve the problem, but rather to reinforce it.1
Now, on a much more fundamental level, such an imperative to ‘trust science’ none- theless raises even more important questions, that go well beyond the bare symptomatic revelation of the absence of a political programme. To introduce the subject of this article, I want to argue that the apparently unconditional imperative to ‘trust science’ raises the following question: To what kind of ‘science’ does such an imperative refer? Put differ- ently, what is the science that, in its logic and structure, suits such an imperative to ‘trust science’? Without asking such tough, yet necessary questions, the imperative to ‘trust science’ or to ‘unite behind science’ may end up being much more ambiguous, even dangerous, than first appears. Not only might such an imperative remain very abstract and empty, but, in so doing, it would neglect the concrete historical context and social structure in which science operates.
This structure is, as many scholars have documented, far from being neutral. As Marzec (2015) is only the latest critic to show, contemporary mainstream science and technology, including climate science, are not abstract and detached from society and politics, but are actually very concrete structures that belong to a longstanding historical context, stretch- ing back to the first half of the twentieth century, that President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the ‘military-industrial complex’.2 Such a ‘militarised science’ was, for instance, capable of inventing not only creative and emancipatory solutions for humanity and the world, but also very destructive innovations, such as, for instance, the atomic bomb – a weapon that has the potential to terminate all life on Earth. Moreover, the invention of this weapon of mass destruction was done in the name of protecting the world, which ultimately led not only to the conflation of security and insecurity, as Marzec notes, or of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, but also of scientific creation and destruction. As Robert Oppenheimer’s alleged reference to an ancient Hindu verse on 16 July 1945, upon witnessing the first successful detonation of nuclear weapon in the desert of New Mexico, proposed: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds.’ Today still, climate change is one of the primary concerns of US military institutions, from the Department of Defence to the US Army.
This article offers a critical examination of the contemporary imperative to ‘trust science’ from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It begins by putting con- temporary scientific research in the twentieth-century historical context of the ‘military- industrial complex’ (D. Eisenhower) in which science and technology become symbioti- cally connected to the military. It then examines the psychic structure driving the military- industrial complex in which science (perversely) instrumentalises itself for military pur- poses. This structure is crystalized in two statements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal investigator of the Manhattan Project which led to the invention of the atomic bomb. In these two statements, Oppenheimer describes this singular invention in terms of being ‘good’ and having ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, which is then bound to an identi- fication with ‘death’ and total destruction in his famous citation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The article then proposes that the psychic structure underpinning this claim corresponds to the Kantian notion of diabolic evil, and then goes on to further conceptualise structure under the concept of ‘bureaucratic science’. In the last section, drawing on Lacan’s sharp distinction between the death drive and the superego, the article concludes by showing how such a self-instrumentalization of science, which completes itself only in the real possibility of the total destruction of the world, does not correspond to the concept of the death drive, as is usually implied, but rather to the teleological dynamics of desire, the ‘jouissance of transgression’, and to the corresponding concept of superego as defined by Lacan as the ‘imperative of jouissance’ (Lacan, 1998a, p. 3).
So, my contention will be that the scientific and technological inventions with the widest destructive potential which emerged out of the convergence between science and technology in the military-industrial complex – a convergence that still persists today – would not be possible without the surplus ‘systemic enjoyment’ (Tomšič, 2019; Zupančič, 2020) imposed by the superego – a surplus enjoyment which emerges from the very renunciation of direct subjective enjoyment. Such a systemic enjoyment should not be misunderstood as necessarily related to any kind of individual excessive behaviour, but as operating in the seemingly smooth functioning of the system itself. In short, systemic enjoyment is the effect of the ontological structure, and as such exists even in circum- stances where nobody seemingly enjoys subjectively. Contemporary science and tech- nology are, therefore, the modes of participating in the contradictions that are generated by this ontological surplus, albeit without solving them.
Science between the teleology of desire and the jouissance of transgression: the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer

In any discussion of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project leader of the atomic bomb programme, his reaction to the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon is invari- ably recalled. As he famously put it on 16 July 1945: ‘Now I have become death, destroyer of worlds.’ However, far less known and discussed is another of his statements, also from 1945, in which he describes the reasons that led him and his team to take and eventually to complete the job of inventing the atomic bomb:

The reason we did this job is because it is an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are . . . It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences. (Oppenheimer, cited in Marzec, 2015, p. 33)
This statement alone brings up several different issues. First, as Marzec rightly pointed out, it is a paradigmatic example of a ‘unidirectional’, ‘teleological’ mode of thinking, which is one of the main characteristics of the twentieth century ‘militarizing scientific and technological research from the ground up’. (Marzec, 2015, p. 32.) On the one hand, the teleology at stake obviously consists in the binding together of the essence of science with the ‘organic necessity’ of inventing the atomic bomb. In other words, when it came to the need to invent the nuclear weapon, Oppenheimer claims, scientists as such could not do otherwise than fully identifying this specific task with the whole idea of science itself. This reduction of science to the ‘organic necessity’ to fulfil the task of inventing the atomic bomb corresponds to a peculiar reversal of the temporality of existence, which is taken here as entirely autonomous of any scientific subjective involvement in the con- stitution of this very same reality itself. By disavowing any role for the subject in the discovery of objective reality, Oppenheimer actually turns the relation between subject and object upside down: the scientist thus become not just an instrument, but an automatic instrument, a tool in the process of discovering a seemingly pre-existing reality (the atomic bomb/weapon of mass destruction). In Marzec’s own words: ‘the scientist true to his or her own profession will assume the mandate of unveiling the secret nature of reality (preforming hard science by confronting hard reality without prejudice) – as if the reality of releasing a force of mass destruction preexisted its own constitution in and through the intellectual activity of a wartime-motivated inquirer.’ (Marzec, 2015, p. 33.) However, there is more at stake here, since Oppenheimer characterises such an ‘organic necessity’ of inventing the nuclear weapon as unequivocally ‘good’. Even more, he claims that such an invention has ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, which implies its universal ethical validity. Finally, if we take this claim together with Oppenheimer’s more famous citation of the old Hindu text, we get the following logical formulation: the supreme universal good (or invention of atomic bomb), which has an ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, is looped back into its own opposite, that is, the ‘death’ and total ‘destruction of the world’.
This kind of teleological thinking and self-instrumentalization of science for military purposes (the invention of weapon of mass destruction), which is moreover ‘good’ and has ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, immediately evokes Kant’s well-known idea of evil and the inversion of the moral law, even though the latter was usually applied to the US’s chief enemy during WW II: Nazi Germany, and especially the bureaucratic logic of power during the Holocaust. To recall very briefly, Kant’s revolution in ethics in his Critique of Practical Reason (Kant, 2015), consist in inverting the ancient hierarchy between ‘good’ and ‘the law’ upside down. If, for the Ancients, the supreme good was a cornerstone of ethics, and the law was subordinated to it in the form of its external expression/ emanation, Kant inverted this relationship so that the ‘highest good’ is now directly the law as the empty form, devoid of any positive content, and judged only following the criterion of its universal validity. In other words, the Kantian ‘moral law is THE LAW, the form of the law and as such cannot be grounded in a higher principle’. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 83)
Therefore, the moral law as an empty form is a self-standing, unconditional entity, which is grounded in the pure will alone, and not in any external (natural) causality or subjective pleasure. The unconditional of the moral law is also the reason why Kant considered so- conceived ethical acts as acts of freedom (see Zupančič, 2000). Following this, Kant’s categorical imperative is a formal determination of an act, which is not only in accordance with the moral law as an empty form, but is also motivated entirely and exclusively by the latter – an act of duty from respect of the law. It requires no positive prescription, but only the universal validity of the maxim of the action. As Kant famously puts it: ‘There is, therefore, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.’ (Kant, 1998, p. 31) On the opposite end of this schema stands what Kant considers the ‘pathological’, or ‘evil’, which is defined negatively with regard to the moral law, that is, as non-self-grounded – an action that derives from and is motivated by the self-interest of the subject (by sensible impulses and subjective pleasure), which is by definition not universal, but particular.
In the very last session of his Seminar VII, famously entitled by Jacques-Alain Miller as ‘Paradoxes of ethics, or, have you acted in conformity with your desire?’ (Lacan, 1997, pp. 311–325), Lacan returns to Kant’s moral law once again in order to show how this corner- stone of Kant’s ethics opens up a psychoanalytic insight into the dynamics and topology of desire. In contrast to the classical Aristotelian ethic ‘of the possible’, Kant’s moral law as an empty form introduces the ‘void’ at the core of moral experience, which is ‘blind’ to the possible and impossible, so to speak. As we already mentioned, the only demand of the moral law is to act from the duty of the moral law itself – this is the essence of Kantian ‘Thou shalt’. However, as Lacan does not fail to stress, for Kant, it is impossible for human mortals to fully achieve this so-conceived ethical experience in this world (‘nothing on earth satisfies the demands of moral action’, p. 316), rather, they can only infinitely approach the moral law – this is why Kant postulates the ‘immortality of the soul’. Against this background, Lacan then shows how the moral law qua void, and the subject infinitely approaching the moral experience without ever completely reaching it in its totality, correspond precisely to the relation between subject and desire (as desire of the Other). What triggers the meto- nymic sliding of desire from one empirical object to another is not any positive content in the Other, but the object-cause-of-desire, that is, the constitutively lacking object which embodies the void. In line with Kant’s moral law, and in contrast with the ancient ‘ethics of the possible’, Lacan thus posits desire as the ‘incommensurable measure, an infinite measure’ (p. 316), which cannot ever be fully satisfied – desire is always ‘the desire for something else’ (Lacan, 2006d, p. 431). So conceived, desire is not repetitive, but slides from one object to another, which makes it essentially ‘perverse’ and ‘teleological’ – it is ‘tele- ology-without-repetition’, as opposed to the death drive, which is ‘repetition-without- teleology’ (Johnston, 2017, p. 186). Desire is fixed on and oriented towards the point of the ‘beyond’ (object-cause-of-desire) that cannot ever be reached – if one reaches it, one at the same time traverses the limits of desire and enters the domain of Das Ding, which, at the level of Seminar VII, is foreign to the ‘service of the goods’ and ‘responds only to enjoyment, the death drive and to waste’ (De Kesel, 2009, p. 266). This is also the reason why the Law actually imposes the repression of desire (‘law and repressed desire are one and the same thing’, Lacan, 2006a, p. 660), while, with this same gesture, also sets up its own obscene ‘other side’, which consists of the imperative of transgression.

This imperative to transgress the law fits the double-sided instance of the superego, which Lacan associates with, on the one hand, the (sadistic) sense of guilt (Seminar VII), and, on the other, the imperative of jouissance (Seminar XX). The more the subject attempts to act in conformity with her desire and transgresses the law and enjoys, the more she feels guilty, since the law (symbolic authority) imposes precisely the repression of desire. This is why, later on, alongside the shifts in the ‘paradigms of jouissance’ (Miller, 2000) from the inaccessible jouissance of Das Ding to surplus enjoyment (enjoyment gained from the very renunciation of enjoyment), whereby modern scientific-capitalist knowledge becomes the apparatus of jouissance (see Lacan, 2006c), Lacan also opens up guilt itself as the source of (surplus) enjoyment (see McGowan, 2020).
Such a self-instrumentalization for the purposes of transgressing the law by ‘obeying orders’ famously attracted the interest of Hannah Arendt when she attended Adolf Eichmann’s trail in 1963 in Israel, and eventually led her to develop her classic thesis on the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 2006 [1964]). For Arendt, there was nothing demoniac in Eichmann, nothing hidden under the surface: Eichmann was not at all a ‘sadistic pervert’. On the contrary, Eichmann was a ‘superficial’, ‘thoughtless’ professional bureaucrat, who only executed the orders of his superiors. He was, in short, a completely ordinary profes- sional employee in a supposedly bureaucratic machine, one that can also be found in the ‘normal’ functioning of power in capitalist democracies. However, although Arendt rightly rejects the idea of any demonic ‘depth’ in Eichmann, and developing instead the concept of the ‘banality of the evil’ (that is, absurdity or superficiality), this thesis requires another shift in perspective. As Žižek has pointed out in his commentary on Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and the transgression of the law by obeying orders of Nazi bureaucratic power, her analysis does not include one specific and yet a key element of this transgression, which is exactly the element of the obscene systemic enjoyment, related to the super- ego’s injunction to transgress and to enjoy, driving Nazi atrocities (Žižek, 1997, pp. 231–232).3 By rejecting any direct, immediate pleasure in torturing and killing, limiting themselves to only ‘executing orders’ as cold automata, the agents of the Nazi bureau- cratic machine gained an excessive, surplus enjoyment, which Lacan defined precisely as the paradoxical enjoyment that derives from the rejection of immediate enjoyment itself. According to Todd McGowan, the most extreme and clear example of the logic of gaining (surplus) enjoyment from the very renunciation of (direct) enjoyment, is, perhaps, the famous Heinrich Himmler speech to a group of SS officers on 4 October 1943, at the dawn of the ‘Final Solution’. There, Himmler made clear the imperative of duty to sacrifice the material enjoyment for the enjoyment of the ‘cause’: ‘We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything.’ (Himmler, as cited in McGowan, 2020, p. 148). In further commenting upon this passage, McGowan rightly points out how this logic of surplus enjoyment corresponds precisely to the superego’s injunction to transgress (the law) and to enjoy:
Himmler exposes perfectly how the superego functions in politics. It directs subjects to do what they know violates the law in the name of a higher morality.

Because the superego enjoins them to transgress the law for a higher cause, it creates enjoyment for them through the burden of guilt that it offers. The strength that Himmler praises is the strength to live with the guilt of the superego and to benefit from the license that it gives the subject to transgress the law. [. . .] Through the superegoic imperative, one can promise followers unrestrained enjoyment while assuring them that one is restoring law and order. The logic of the superego makes this paradoxical politics realizable. (McGowan, 2020, p. 148)

Ultimately, this omission of the superego’s injunction to transgress and to enjoy is, perhaps, the reason which led Arendt to (wrongly) conclude that Eichmann was not any kind of ‘sadistic pervert’. As Žižek notes, in doing so, she refers to the ‘pre-theoretical’ popular image of perversion, which can be found even in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002), according to which there is a demonic dimension in sadism. Eichmann was indeed a pervert, yet not according to the popular image of perversion, which depicts the pervert as a subject obsessed with total domination, but precisely according to the Freudian-Lacanian concept of perversion which refers to nothing but the perverse ‘systemic’ (objective) enjoyment generated by the supposedly pure, cold, instrumental ‘execution of orders’ or the professional workings of power. In other words, the pervert is the one who ‘determines himself as object’ (Lacan, 1998b, p. 185; see also Lacan, 2006a), and self-instrumentalises himself for the purposes of the Other’s ‘total’ enjoyment (enjoyment of God). However, regarding the Nazi atrocities, we are still on the level of what Kant considered radical evil, which is by definition not universal, but particular. In fact, the transgression of law and the ‘sacrifice’ for the ‘cause’ related to it must, in any case, remain publicly hidden, which only multiplies the phantas- matic ‘burden’ on the executioners (see, again, McGowan, 2020, p. 148). As Himmler phrases it in the same speech: ‘Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses – to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.’ (Himmler, as cited in McGowan, 2020, p. 148).
Contrary to this disposition, in which the obscene transgression of the law should remain hidden from the public gaze, Lacan points out that Sade’s politics and philosophy take a step further by elevating the (hidden) transgression of the law (and the superego’s injunction to enjoy and to transgress) at the level of the moral law itself, that is, by universalising transgression so that it becomes indistinguishable from the categorical imperative itself – even at the price of the subject’s own death: ‘I showed you one can easily substitute for Kant’s “Thou shalt” the Sadean phantasm of jouissance elevated to the level of imperative – it is, of course, a pure and almost derisory fantasm, but it doesn’t exclude the possibility of its being elevated to a universal law.’ (Lacan, 1997, p. 316) This is why, as Lacan puts it elsewhere, ‘Sade is the truth of Kant’ (Lacan, 2006a). The elevation of the obscene superego’s injunction to transgress and to enjoy at the level of the catego- rical imperative itself, for which the pervert is even ready to sacrifice himself, however, implies the shift from radical evil (banality of evil) to diabolic evil, which Kant develops in his ‘Religion within the boundaries of mere reason’ (Kant, 2005). In fact, ‘diabolical evil’, as Zupančič puts it,
would occur if we were to elevate opposition to the moral law to the level of the maxim. In this case the maxim would be opposed to the moral law not just ‘negatively’ (as it is in the case of radical evil), but directly. This would imply, for instance, that we would be ready to act contrary to the moral law even if this meant acting contrary to our self-interest and our well- being. We would make it a principle to act against the moral law, and we would stick to this principle no matter what (that is, even if it meant our own death). (Zupančič, 2000, p. 90.)

In this respect, Sade’s politics is indeed the purest example of diabolical evil precisely in the sense that it elevates transgression and the jouissance related to it to the level of principle. Not surprisingly, Lacan articulated this Sadean jouissance of transgression also in terms of a ‘jouissance of destruction’ (Lacan, 1997, p. 197) insofar as jouissance is by definition harmful to the subject. Jelica Šumič-Riha was thus right to point out that Sadean politics is actually a ‘tyranny of jouissance’ (Šimič-Riha, 2018) – it universalises the injunction to transgress (and to destroy) by elevating it to the level of a moral principle.

Bureaucratic science as diabolical evil? Jouissance of destruction as moral law
In the last pages of Seminar VII, Lacan makes it clear that the contemporary social practice that embodies this so-conceived superegoic injunction to transgress and the teleology of desire, is science (twentieth century physics), particularly that which, because of the financial support it receives from political and economic power, implies a ‘payback’, in the form of the technological invention of ‘machines, gadgets, and contraptions’ (Lacan, 1997, p. 325) in the service of that same power. As he puts it: ‘The universal order has to deal with the problem of science in which something is going on whose nature escapes it. Science, which occupies the place of desire, can only be a science of desire in the form of an enormous question mark; and this is doubtless not without a structural cause.’ (p. 325) On the one hand, the ‘question mark’ driving science qua desire, here, corresponds to precisely to the Kantian ‘void’ we discussed above, which makes desire ‘infinite’ or an ‘immeasurable measure’. In other words, science is, here, driven by the desire qua desire of the Other, the void in the Other qua ‘structural cause’, which scientists try to satisfy with the invention of ‘machines, gadgets, and contraptions’ – the atomic bomb which deto- nated in the desert of New Mexico was indeed called a ‘gadget’. In short, science tries to discover/invent precisely object a – the object-cause-of-desire, a constitutively lacking object, which is also the materialisation of the void in the Other (structural cause) (see also Zwart, 2017). As De Kesel points out with regard to the ‘science of desire’, this is the historical place of psychoanalysis, whereby the task of analytic interpretation of desire aims precisely at creating a new knowledge that symbolises excessive unconscious desire (De Kesel, 2009, p. 268).

Yet, on the other hand, science (physics) tries precisely to repress and avoid at all cost desire as such, thereby neglecting the void in the Other, that is, the structural cause driving its inventions. This is why Lacan stresses in ‘Science and Truth’ ‘that science, if one looks at it closely, has no memory’ (Lacan, 2006b, p. 738), which refers precisely to the foreclosing of this constitutive point of truth (as structural cause). Differently put, science wants know nothing about the truth as the ‘objective dimension of discourse’ (Zupančič, 2011), which implies that the discourse (of science) has also the consequences in the real in the sense of producing its own object (after modern science, nature is no longer considered to be a matter qua substance, but the effect of discourse; see on this also

Milner, 2020; and, Chiesa, 2016). However, science is ‘blind’ not only for its subjective involvement in co-creating the reality that supposedly pre-exists its discovery/invention, but, most importantly, for structural/discursive causes driving its own ‘desire to know’. As De Kesel pointed out: ‘Any science – and culture in general – that denies desire runs the risk of becoming victim of that “immeasurable measure”.’ (De Kesel, 2009, p. 267) For Lacan, one of the primary victims – with all the consequential burden of ‘guilt’ – of science driven by desire as an ‘immeasurable measure’, about which it wants know nothing, is precisely Robert Oppenheimer (Lacan, 1997, p. 325). To recall Oppenheimer’s longer statement, which we already cited above, it is clear that he understood his own mission in a way that perfectly fits the teleological dynamics of desire, namely, as attached to the object-cause-of-desire (the bomb) as a materialisation of the ‘void’ which is located beyond the existing symbolic framework (‘If you are a scientist you cannot stop such thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are . . . ’). However, he remained ‘blind’, so to speak, to the fact that the desire ‘to know’ driving the invention of the bomb was actually the desire of the Other (US political power, and, more precisely, the military-industrial com- plex), which he and his team tried to satisfy with the invention of the ‘gadget’, as if the invention of the bomb were a reality pre-existing any subjective involvement (through desire) in the creation/preservation of this reality itself. For Lacan, in fact, desire’s ten- dency to transgress the law in the direction of jouissance and destruction is operative only within the law itself – one cannot transgress the law outside it. Importantly, we here encounter the role of unconscious fantasy (the relation of simultaneous alienation and conjunction – represented by the lozenge sign – between the split subject of the signifier and the object-cause-of-desire – $<>a) as a support for the teleological sliding of unconscious desire. If Zwart (2017) points out that Oppenheimer’s structural position should be grasped – within Lacan’s university discourse (see Lacan, 2006c) – as knowledge in the position of agent, oriented towards object a (bomb) in the position of the other (S2 →a), we should thus add to this consideration that this relation involves also the ‘desire to know’ in the place of knowledge itself. In other words, the relation is driven by the teleological dynamics (not statics) of desire, oriented towards object a as a materialisation of the void. For Lacan, Oppenheimer’s sense of guilt refers precisely to the acknowledgement of the excessive character of desire (and the pleasure related to it), which led him to invent something whose consequences go well beyond his own intention – a weapon that could terminate the entire life on Earth.

Lacan’s estimation of Oppenheimer’s guilt, here, allegedly refers only to Oppenheimer’s citation of Bhagavad-Gita at the moment of detonation (‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’). However, if we also take into account the latter’s longer statement cited above, the one in which he thinks the invention of the atomic bomb is an ‘organic necessity’ for science, which is, moreover, ‘good’ and has an ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, and we read this claim together with his Bhagavad-Gita quote, we get a more complex picture of science, which shows its closer proximity not simply to Kant’s radical evil, embodied in Nazi bureaucratic machine, but rather to diabolical evil, embo- died in Sade’s elevation of transgression to the level of a categorical imperative. To be sure, Oppenheimer’s statements indeed suggest that the self-instrumentalizing structure driving the invention of the atomic bomb was very similar to the one operating in the Nazi bureaucratic-military machine: the transgression of all symbolic coordinates (existing knowledge) is motivated by a ‘higher cause’ (the invention of the nuclear weapon), which is one and the same with the essence of science, an ‘organic necessity’.
However, the parallel with Oppenheimer’s case does not stop here, since there are two additional elements which escape the complete convergence between his logic and the logic of the Nazi bureaucratic-military machine. On the one hand, Oppenheimer believes that the invention of the bomb is not only scientifically ‘good’, but has also ‘intrinsic value to humanity’. With this gesture, he does nothing but elevate the invention of the bomb to the level of a universal categorical imperative. On the other hand, however, in a purely Sadean manner, he also acknowledges the very real possibility that this universalisation can be one and the same with the complete annihilation of this very same humanity. This is suggested by his citation of the Bhagavad-Gita at the moment of detonation of the ‘gadget’: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ This claim actually binds together the idea of the invention of the atomic bomb (an ‘organic necessity’ for science), considered to be universally ‘good’ and of an ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, with its own opposite, that is, the ‘death’ and destruction of the worlds. Put differently, the invention of the atomic weapon is ‘good’ for science and has ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, even or especially if this means the total destruction of the planet Earth, including the scientific inventors of the weapon. The highest good of science (the bomb) is looped back into the total annihilation of all and everything. In this respect, again, the total destruction and annihilation is elevated to the level of a maxim – it is not negatively, but directly, opposed to the moral law as an empty form, that is, it has the form of the maxim and hence of the categorical imperative, so that the highest good (the moral law) and absolute (diabolical) evil actually becomes indistinguishable. In this respect, it seems justified to call such a blend of bureaucratic logic and scientific research, induced by the military-industrial complex, a bureaucratic science: a science that elevates the invention of atomic bomb, which can terminate the entire life on Earth, to the level of universal value (‘intrinsic value to humanity’) and becomes indistinguishable from the formal requests of the categorical imperative. Most importantly, and slightly differently with respect to Lacan’s reading of this episode proposed at the end of Seminar VII, Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad-Gita at the moment of detonation might suggest the reversal (by progression) of ‘guilt’ into the purely perverse identification with the object of jouissance (the bomb) and its consequences (‘you are willing to take the consequences’), which can only bring death to the world. In order to achieve the highest good, the subject now establishes himself as the object, which may fulfil the void in the Other by satisfying its desire, even if this means to ‘become death, the destroyer of words’. It is here that the shift from the ordinary perverse metonymic sliding of desire, supported by the unconscious fantasy ($<>a), to perversion proper is achieved, whereby the latter consists mainly in reversing the position of subject and object in ordinary, neurotic fantasy: ‘Next time, I shall come back to what I have called the structure of perversion. Strictly speaking, it is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity.’ (Lacan, 1998b, p. 185; see on this also, Lacan, 2006a).
In this respect, it is critical to mention Zwart’s observation that the Manhattan Project was a technological project in the first place (Zwart, 2017, p. 89), which, however, was led by a theoretical physicist (Oppenheimer). In other words, the Manhattan project brought together modern scientific knowledge, which Lacan calls savoir, and empirical/technolo- gical know-how, which he calls savoir-faire and associates with the pre-modern practical knowledge of Aristotelian slave. Not surprisingly, in Seminar XX, Lacan associates this difference between knowledge and technological/empirical savoir-faire precisely with the structure of perversion. In fact, he makes clear that perversion is nothing other than this subversion of knowledge itself: ‘People then [after they have observed the not-yet-true perversion in neurotics, related to the perverse, teleological sliding of desire] began to meet perverts – they’re the ones Aristotle didn’t want to see at all costs. There is in them a subversion of behaviour based on savoir-faire, which is linked to knowledge (savoir), knowledge of the nature of things [i.e., empirical, practical knowledge] – there is a direct connection between sexual behaviour and its truth, namely, amorality [referring to Sade as the truth of Kant].’ (Lacan, 1998a, p. 87) In this passage, Lacan makes it clear that the pervert’s fantasy about the knowledge of enjoyment (and consequently the self- instrumentalization of the pervert as the instrument of Other’s enjoyment), and the scientific truth of the knowledge are one and the same thing.

So, again, in order to grasp the essence of so-conceived bureaucratic science, the idea of radical evil does not suffice – one needs to shift from radical to diabolical evil as an embodiment of Sadean perversion, in which the jouissance of transgression qua (total) destruction is elevated to the level of the moral law itself. Not surprisingly, Arendt herself noted in an overwhelmingly cited passage from Eichmann in Jerusalem that the invention of the nuclear weapon, coupled with the excessive population induced by the growing automaton of production (both of which are direct outcomes of scientific and technolo- gical inventions), the gas chamber would ultimately appear a primitive child’s toy by comparison: ‘The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population “superfluous” even in terms of labour, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler’s gassing installations look like an evil child’s fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 273)
However, as Arthur Bradley has recently shown in his highly original reading of Lacan’s Seminar II alongside the history of automation, the machine and the invention of the atomic bomb, the self-destructive teleology set up by the invention of the atomic bomb stretches back-and-forth across the historical continuum: it originates in the idea of the machine and automation, which goes back to Aristotle’s figure of the slave (a living tool), passes through modern philosophy and the political theory of the machine (Descartes, Hobbes, La Mettrie), and finally ends up in the twentieth-century war machine complex (Bradley, 2019b; 2018). Such a self-destructive teleology reaches its apex in the twentieth century during the Cold War with the invention of a Secure Second Strike Retaliatory System (SSRS) that ‘has the capacity to meet a first or “surprise” strike that destroys its command and control structures with a retaliatory second strike of its own,’ (Bradley, 2019b, p. 106) and thus ensuring the ‘mutually assured destruction of the human race’ (p. 107). In this sense, it seems that the SSRS achieves the ideal of self-destructive diabolical evil by folding its own destruction together with the total destruction of the world, insofar as the system, even when it is already destroyed, nevertheless has the capacity to keep destroying beyond its own death in a kind of Lacanian ‘un-deadly’ manner.

Ethics (of science) beyond the superego: from science of desire to science as death drive

In this context, it is also crucial to not conflate this structure of perversion, which relies on identification with the object and the superego’s injunction to enjoy, with the structure of the death drive, which substantially differs from any teleology and self- instrumentalization of the subject for purposes of Other’s jouissance. Lacan himself puts a huge question-mark around Jacques-Alain Miller’s claim in his canonical essay ‘On Perversion’ that we should acknowledge that ‘the drive is by its very nature perverse, and that perversion is the norm of the drive’ (Miller, 1996, p. 313) by arguing that ‘the drive is not perversion. What constitutes the enigmatic character of Freud’s presentation derives precisely from the fact that he wishes to give us a radical structure – in which the subject is not yet placed. On the contrary, what defines perversion is precisely the way in which the subject is placed in it.’ (Lacan, 1998b, pp. 181–182). Far from suggesting we grasp the drive in terms of an a-subjective free-floating energy, in other words, Lacan here relies on Freud’s own theory of the drive from his ‘Drives and Their Vicissitudes’ (Freud, 2001a). Here, Freud indeed develops the concept of the drive as an impersonal constant pressure or force (konstante Kraft), which is, however, structured by passive and active grammatical oppositions (watch/being watched; hear/being heard etc.) and related to the activities of the so-called anatomical erogenous zones on the surface of the body (mouth, eyes, anus and ears). This seems to imply that the drive is indeed structured as an a-subjective, impersonal pressure, yet it is not ‘raw’ material, but rather a very well- composed mechanism – Lacan will call it in the Seminar XI a ‘montage’ (Lacan, 1998b, p. 169). The key for understanding how the drive achieves the shape of a vector repeti- tively circulating around grammatical oppositions is Freud’s original articulation of repres- sion and the point of negativity (castration) at work in it. In fact, as Alenka Zupančič boldly emphasises in her last book What Is Sex? (Zupančič, 2017), there is a persistence of an underlying ontological structure, necessary for the emergence of something like jouis- sance (as different from pleasure), regardless of its changing paradigms. At the core of this structure is what she proposes to call ‘ontological negativity’, which consists of what Freud articulated as the hypothesis of primal repression (Urverdrängung), which fixes the drive:

We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the drive [die psychische (Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz des Tribes] being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the drive remains attached to it. (Freud, 2001b, p. 148)
In my view, the greatest attention needs to be paid to this crucial formulation in Freud’s psychoanalysis. Unlike the standard understanding, Freud here clearly says that what is repressed is not the drive itself, but rather its ‘(ideational) representative [(Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz]’ or the ‘subject’s marker of this representation’ (Zupančič, 2007, p. 39). Importantly, this point of primal repression – that is, the repression of the primal signifier, which was never conscious, because, to the contrary, the very conscious/unconscious distinction emerges on the basis of primal repression – is one and the same as what Lacan formulates in Seminar XI as the ‘necessary fall of one signifier’ (Lacan, 1998b, p. 218) for the emergence of the symbolic order of language, which starts running according to the ‘logic of signifier’ (that is, the (unary) signifier starts representing the subject for other signifiers) only when one signifier is ‘gone missing’ or with ‘one-signifier-less’ (Zupančič, 2017, p. 47). In short, ontological negativity (primal repression) shapes both the drive (circulation around the hole of primal repression) and language (the logic of signifier begins with ‘one-signifier-less’).

In this respect, Lacan’s death drive amounts not simply to every single partial drive, but to partial drives and the mechanism of repression which shapes drives as partial (Zupančič, 2017, pp. 94–106). This reading has indeed far-reaching consequences, insofar as it reverses Freud’s first articulation of the death drive from his 1921 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. There, Freud famously defined the death drive as the tendency towards the lowering of tension in the human organism to the point of homoeostasis, which finds its final expression in the idea of the return of the subject into inorganic state (see Freud, 2001c, Ch. II). Contrary to this definition, but at the same time following the aforementioned Freudian theory of repression, Lacan’s point is that the death drive has no object outside its circulation, the goal of the drive is precisely the repetitive circulation itself. So, the death drive cannot be grasped in terms of teleology; rather, as Johnston points out, the death drive is a ‘repetition-without-teleology’ – as opposed to desire as ‘teleology-without-repetition’ (Johnston, 2017, p. 186). In this way, the death drive is rather a repetitive excess set up by the structure which involves ontological negativity, an excess which persists beyond life and death, because it is actually indifferent to them.
So, to sum up what we have just shown, primal repression fixes the drives, and, at the same time, also triggers the whole mechanism of (secondary) repressions of all represen- tations that are by association connected with primal repression. Secondary repressions are ordinary, everyday repressions, and as such are essentially ‘after- pressions’. Most importantly, in Seminar XX, Lacan highlights the exact temporal moment in which repression (based on primal repression) occurs: ‘From the moment he [a baby] begins to speak, from that exact moment onward and not before, I can understand that there is [such a thing] as repression.’ (Lacan, 1998a, p. 56) In short, when the baby becomes a speaking being in a strict sense by speaking its first words, the whole mechanism of repression (including the point of primal repression) is there – not earlier, not later, but simultaneously with the beginning of the speech. This structural primacy of (primal) repression also reaffirms Lacan’s early statement from Seminar XI, according to which ‘with regard to the agency of sexuality, all subjects are equal, from the child to the adult’ (Lacan, 1998b, pp. 176–7). So, the drive is shaped by the mechanism of repression, and revolves around the point of negativity or primal repression, while the mechanism of repression starts running at the moment when the child subject starts speaking its first words. The drive is therefore essentially pre-Oedipal (although not pre-linguistic or preceding castration, as Miller rightly stresses), insofar as the Oedipus complex, which is grounded on the acknowledged difference between the sexes (via the gaze on mother’s genitals lacking penis), emerges later on in the development of the psychic-libidinal life of the child.
Conversely, the superego (in all its variations) is essentially post-Oedipal, insofar as it is set up as a ‘decline’ from the Oedipus complex with the emergence of the symbolic law (the symbolic father), conceived as an instance of symbolic prohibition/repression of desire of the mother. More precisely, following Freud’s most complex articulation of the superego in the third chapter ‘The Ego and the Super-ego (Ego Ideal)’ of his essay ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) (Freud, 2001d, Ch. III, pp. 28–39), the Oedipus complex can be solved in two different ways: ‘either an identification with his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father.’ (Freud, 2001d, p. 32) However, the ‘means’ for solving the Oedipus complex is the constitution of a fully developed superego, which derives from early unconscious libidinal investments and consists not only in the symbolic law/ideal as the agency of identification (the image of the father), but also in the prohibition (of the mother as the object of child’s satisfaction, that is, his object-cathexis). As Freud puts it:
The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choice of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father) – that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’ This double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence. (Freud, 2001d, p. 34)
The main point is therefore that the superego emerges out of the Oedipus complex and constitutes itself as the agency that represses this very same complex. And it does this by binding the libidinal investments of the drives, which are already shaped by negativity (primal repression), with the symbolic agency of the father (symbolic law). However, this binding is itself contradictory and sadistic towards the subject insofar as it imposes upon it two contradictory injunctions: be like him, and do not be like him. The prohibition at stake indeed refers to the prohibition of the mother as the object of satisfaction, which is, in turn, also the exclusive object of the father’s libidinal satisfaction. This means that the symbolic law itself is perverted, yet, to borrow Andreja Zevnik’s formulation, this ‘perver- sion of law is complete only in the face of the superego’ (Zevnik, 2016, p. 222; see also, 2013). The essential trait of the superego (as the obscene other side of symbolic law) thus lies, as Joan Copjec remarks, in prohibiting something (and in imposing the transgression of this prohibition), but also in never saying what this prohibited object is (the mother’s desire as desire of the Other is essentially enigmatic, just as the Kantian ‘void’ we discussed above): ‘The prohibition proper to the superego renders something unsayable and undoable, to be sure, but it does not say what we should not say or do; it merely imposes a limit that makes everything we do and say seem as nought compared to what we cannot.’ (Copjec, 2015, p. 236) So, the superego does not say what lies beyond the prohibition because the prohibited constitutively defies symbolisation and exists only by being permanently (phantasmatically) displaced into infinity. As Lacan does not fail to add in this regard: ‘That is why the superego, which I qualified earlier as based on the (imperative) “Enjoy!”, is a correlative of castration, the latter being the sign with which an avowal dresses itself up (se pare), the avowal that jouissance of the Other, of the body of the Other, is promoted only on the basis of infinity (de l’infinitude).’ (Lacan, 1998a, pp. 7–8) If castration (ontological negativity qua primal repression) fixes the drive and frames it as partial in relation to the fulfilment of sexuality, one should note that the drive, by circulating around the constitutively missing signifier, is actually indifferent to this very same fulfilment – the goal of the drive is not satisfaction, but repetition/circulation itself (Zupančič, 2017, p. 104). Satisfaction/enjoyment is only an (essential) by-product of circulation. The phenomenon that is attached to this missing object of full satisfaction is therefore not the drive, but desire – the object of the drive is, for Lacan, also the object-cause-of-desire, since the lack of total satisfaction triggers the metonymic (teleological) sliding of desire from one empirical object to another. Being a ‘correlative of castration’, the superego binds up the constitutively missing object with the symbolic prohibition, and – most importantly – replaces the ontological impossibility of full satisfaction with the subject’s impotency of reaching the indefinite object that the superego prohibits – which indeed generates in the subject its sense of guilt, while at the same time imposes the injunction to transgress.

To sum up, the death drive as an ethical category does not impose the commandment to enjoy over the subject. On the contrary, the death drive in its silent repetitive circula- tion is rather indifferent towards enjoyment – it can kill the subject, even if the subject enjoys this self-annihilation. This is also the reason why Lacan in Seminar XX clearly rejects the reduction of the drive to the level of any kind of knowledge-oriented force. More specifically, the Freudian idea of the ‘drive to know’ is directly contradicted by the self- referential structure of the drive, which, according to Lacan, is never the drive towards something. Lacan makes this clear in Seminar XX by rejecting the Freudian idea of ‘drive [trieb] for knowledge’, claiming that ‘“there’s no such thing as a desire to know,” that famous Wissentrieb Freud points to somewhere.’ (Lacan, 1998a, p. 105) In any case, the ‘killing of the subject’ at stake in the death drive aims at the subject’s symbolic identity, not its physical annihilation, while the superego and teleology of desire would rather turn this picture upside down: the superego’s injunction to transgress and to enjoy may even physically kill the subject in order to preserve his or her symbolic identity, which is always given by the Other. Thus, the difference between the superego and the death drive corresponds to the difference between the demand (of the drive), which emerges on the very place of structural impossibility of total enjoyment as a surplus/excess, and the imperative (of the superego), whereby the latter actually replaces the structural impossi- bility of total enjoyment with subject’s impotency to achieve this phantasmatic totality of jouissance.
Conclusion
In drawing this article to a close, I would like to refer the difference between the death drive and the superego, as well as the perverse self-instrumentalization of the subject corresponding to the latter, to Lacan’s inversion of the question ‘Is psychoanalysis a science?’ (that is, is there a homology between psychoanalytic discourse and the discourse of science) into the more accurate and far-reaching question ‘What would a science be that included psychoanalysis?’ (Lacan, 2001, p. 187; on this see Johnston, 2013, pp. 39sq; and, Johnston, 2019a, Ch. 13–15), which suggests a non-homology between psychoanalytic discourse and the discourse of science in the first place. So, rather than implying a scientific status for the psychoanalytic clinic, the question ‘what would a science be that included psychoanalysis?’ points in the direction of the psycho- analytic clinic of science itself. As we have seen, at the level of Seminar VII, Lacan’s answer to this question is a ‘science of desire’, that is, a science that takes as its object of analysis its own unconscious desire, about which it otherwise wants know nothing. This implies a ‘de-teleologization’ of desire and its detachment from the superego’s injunction to transgress by creating a new knowledge (via analytic interpretation) that would bring desire into the picture (De Kesel). However, following Lacan, the latter can occur only through the hysterization of the subject of science so to speak, which would move the science from university discourse, in which the science qua technology is in ‘the service of goods’, to something like ‘hysterical scientific discourse’ as a precondition for the sub- jective destitution of the subject of science. At the end of his teaching, following the changes in ‘paradigms of jouissance’ (Miller) and the shift in psychoanalytic ethics from desire to the death drive, this attempt to detach science from the superego appears in the form of Lacan’s equation of science with the death drive, which, as Johnston notes (Johnston, 2019b, p. 167), occurs in Lacan’s (final) Seminar XXV Le moment du conclure (Lacan, 1977–1978, session of 20 December 1977) in the context of his criticism of the mathematisation of psychoanalytic knowledge that he advocated during previous period of his teaching. Just as in Seminar VII desire is something unconscious, which needs to be interpreted and symbolised, but modern science wants to know nothing about, so are the death drive and jouissance in Lacan’s final seminars (see, again, Johnston, 2019b) some- thing that need to be psychoanalytically ‘deduced’ through interpretation (Miller), but modern science wants to know nothing about. In both cases, we are dealing with the attempt to articulate the ‘truth as cause’ (Lacan, 2006b, p. 738), whereby the latter means the material/structural cause as different from formal cause that science usually deals with, and is coextensive with the separation between jouissance and superego as one of the primary goals of psychoanalytic clinic. This separation is precisely the place of the death drive as pre-Oedipal, yet not pre-linguistic (since it is shaped by castration, that is, by the ‘hole’ in the Other).

In this respect, it could be said that if modern science represses its own desire and remains ‘blind’ for the fact that the ‘truth’ is the consequence of the discourse and does not pre-exists the latter, the majority of contemporary science under the rule of the military-industrial complex does not simply repress its own desire and disavows the consequences of the scientific discourse. As Oppenheimer says, ‘you are willing to take consequences’, even if this consequence means total destruction of the world. This statement alone, however, should not be understood in terms of subjective destitution, but rather as a properly perverse self-instrumentalization for the purposes of the Other’s jouissance. If Freud famously defined the goal of psychoanalytic practice with the formula Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (‘where the Id was, there the Ego shall be’), Oppenheimer actually turns this formula upside down: now the ego instrumen- talises itself by way of embodying the object of jouissance of destruction and, simultaneously, starts speaking on behalf of the truth, whereby the latter, for Lacan, can only speak half-way in the first person (‘I, truth, am speaking’; see Zupančič, 2011). In other words, contemporary science forecloses the truth not simply by repressing it, but precisely by (perversely) speaking directly on its behalf – it disavows the con- sequences of the discourse of science in the real by way of talking about the real all the time. So, the question is not should we trust scientists or not, but, rather, does science trust truth as the effect of discourse or not.

Notes

1. I owe this insight to Arthur Bradley. Moreover, as Bradley himself suggested recently in his brilliant Unbearable Life, Robespierre and the Jacobins’ conception of politics was exactly the opposite of contemporary depoliticisation, namely, they conceived politics as a kind of

groundless decision, taken in a void, that is, in a space devoid of any external principles or
‘guarantees’ (Bradley, 2019a, pp. 136–139).

2. To be sure, although there is indeed a tectonic change in scientific research represented by
   the emergence of the ‘scientific-military complex’, some germs of this ‘militarization of science’ can be found already in the late nineteenth century paradigmatic shift in physics, where modern physics (relativity, radiation, the subatomic realm etc.) replaced a classical (Newtonian) paradigm that had been in force until that point. I owe this point to Adrian Johnston.
3. To the best of my knowledge, Cory Han-yu Huang’s contribution (Han-yu Huang, 2009) is one of the rare attempts to systematically conceptualise Arendt’s insights on the banality of evil not by directly referring to Kant’s concept of radical evil, but instead along psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the structure of perversion, including the concept of superego, as conceptualised by Lacan and then Žižek – that is, as an imperative of jouissance.
   Acknowledgments
   I am deeply grateful to Arthur Bradley and Adrian Johnston for their invaluable comments and suggestions on early versions of this article, as well as for many discussions on this theme. I am also grateful to JCR editors Mick Dillon and Scott Wilson for considering this article. I am particularly indebted to Scott Wilson and two anonymous reviewers for their pointed comments and sugges- tions on an earlier draft of this paper. A special thanks goes also to Giovanni Bettini, Peter Klepec, Alenka Zupančič, and my wife Jerneja Brumen for many discussions on topics closely related to this article.
   Disclosure statement
   No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
   Funding
   This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 ‘Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’, the research project J6-9392 ‘The Problem of Objectivity and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy’, the research project J5-1794 ‘The Break in Tradition: Hannah Arendt and Conceptual Change’, and the research project J6-2589 ‘Structure and Genealogy of Perversion in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Art’, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.
   Notes on contributors
   Boštjan Nedoh is a Research Fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy. He works at the intersection between contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, biopolitical theory, and political theology. He is a co-editor (with Andreja Zevnik) of the volume Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and author of the book Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019).
   

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