The Anti-Oedipus Complex by Weatherill Rob;

Author:Weatherill, Rob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

No telling?

Notwithstanding the nihilating nihilism in the air we breathe, the revolutionary analyst presses on. She reports a patient’s dream. In the dream the dreamer comes upon people who have died, but are somehow still alive enough to be able to speak and the dreamer asks them: ‘What happens? Tell me how to live?’ And the answer comes: ‘We cannot tell you. Each one must go through this himself’. A suitably existential dream! No associations were reported for this dream; none were sought for. Maybe because the (non) answer given by the others in the dream was also the (non) answer unconsciously wished for by the patient and by the analyst: Wanting to be hung out over nothing with no answers?

We cannot tell you – although we, with our good life and our good education have some answers, we will not help you – no narrow footbridge. Each must go through this himself with only his insomnia, solitude and liberated orphan unconscious for “guidance.”  The dead and living refuse help. Surely, this is much more/much less than the necessary analytic space, the place-holding of the lieutenant of the nothing, a clearing in the forest,55 a transitional space.56 Is it not more of a desert space, a postmodern hyperspace, with no coordinates and zero gravity, pointless and uninviting? Each of us is “free” to re-invent values with all former values de-commissioned. Free! To be hung out over the void, abandoned to the meaningless roar of the “there is”?

Recall the parable of Kant’s dove. It feels the resistance of the wind in its feathers and imagines it could fly much faster in a vacuum! Radical liberation has removed the Real – the resistance of the air – values, trainings, traditions, character, and so on – that alone enables flight and minimally supports being.

At the beginning of the modern period, Pascal also contemplated the immense nothing of the infinite and the immense nothing of the infinitesimal. But, he cautions us to consider what we are in comparison to the void: ‘let him regard himself as lost, and from this little dungeon, in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him learn to take the earth, its realms its cities, its houses and himself at their proper value’.57 The key signifier here is “lost,” which brings minimal order into the chaos of the infinite.

Against vanity, destruction (jouissance), and so on, of the proper value of the earth, its realms its cities, Pascal stresses, ‘the finite is [already] annihilated in the presence of the infinite and becomes pure nothingness’.58 Pascal engages in negative thinking. So it is with our minds before God’s infinity as we can never know God rationally or cognitively.

While heading towards nothingness, without God, indifferent, hung out over the void, unaware of ‘our little dungeon’, until this word “lost” conveys its impact: for Pascal the wretchedness of man without the Other is the result of making himself his own centre. In his famous wager, Pascal invites the unbeliever to

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