Politics

      We must re-imagine Marx by rethinking the entire problematic of questions and disciplinary relationships that he established.  To rethink Marx by freeing him, that is, of all the dogmas that have become the blinders that the liberal left wears on all occasions so that we can gallop quickly around the track, and always to certain victory, but without ever seeing anything.  That’s the main ideological problem—the massive body of ideological assumptions and guarantees that we refuse to question, let alone acknowledge.  That is why each new problem can be no more than the occasion for the reiteration of fixed “articles of faith,” the outdated commonplaces of a reified left trotted forth as eternal verities.  For example: the continued assertion of classical Marxists that economics determines everything, with culture relegated to a relatively minor position in what is only the superstructure; or, to give a current variant, the search of sociobiologists such as Dennett and Pinker for the memes that determine history, thought, and culture; or, at an opposite and equally religious extreme, the current effort to bring back Religion as central to our program or the claim that ushers in Tom Hayden’s “New Port Huron Statement” that My Name Is Rachel Corrie signals a rebirth of “the spirit of the 60’s” when all this claim really amounts to is a desperate nostalgia for something that never was what we thought it was.[3]

      Politically, what’s needed, in short, is a thorough housecleaning.  Practically, such rethinking must result, moreover, in a transformation of praxis.  So often the premature cry for praxis, for practical programs, silences new ideas.  We thus forget the basic lesson: that new ways of acting are precisely what new thoughts create and old dogmas retard.  If, that is, new thoughts are allowed to see their way through to new programs of action rather than  being constantly shipwrecked on the rock of ages: the belief that we must find some way to make our ideas function within the titanic limitations of the Democratic Party.  But in order to see and pursue new directions the first step must be the painful recognition of how lost we are and how none of the old faiths can save us.  The sixties had one thing right: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  What we didn’t know then was how deeply that principle would cut into every one of us.  Which is why the diagnosis of our ideological paralysis is the primary project we must undertake in order to evolve a new politics.

Psychoanalysis

      On this subject, overcoming ideology faces a more immediate task.  For what is Freud today, to both the right and the left --in rare agreement on this at least-- but a figure of ridicule with everything he explored  conveniently reduced to commonplaces so stupid that they can be readily dismissed as non-scientific claptrap. Thereby the actual threat that Freud poses finds the intellectualizing defense suited to a mass audience.  Something we all know intuitively that Freud could help us know much better and deeper is thus lost. Namely, what everyone seems to acknowledge: that we live in a very sick society, with Dubya and Co. merely symptoms of a larger disorder.  (One that won’t be magically resolved if we can just get Hillary Clinton or Ralph Nader or whomever in the Oval Office.)  Never before perhaps have we been more in need of a psychological diagnosis of our society.  Nor ever further alienated from that possibility by the control that the ideology of science and the reductive psychological explanations it offers has over us. I suspect that most of us know intuitively, for example, that Sam Harris’ endless fulminations about the scientific irrationality of religion don’t really offer us much in the way of understanding the psychological hold that religion continues to enjoy, not only on the fundamentalist “center” but among sophisticated and enlightened believers.  But because we’ve lost Freud we have no way to reclaim and develop the directions he charted for understanding religion as a “collective neurosis.”  [4] As a result we have no way (1) to offer an alternative to the reductive schemes that Pinker, Dennett and others offer us for understanding consciousness, emotion,  poetry, the psyche, ethics, etc., nor (2) to understand why narcissism, panic-boredom before the void of commodification, an accelerating violence, fundamentalist frenzy, and a pervading pedophilia define contemporary American society.  Or, in terms of the essential problem: because we don’t know how to think psychoanalytically there is no way  we can comprehend or address those events that mark turning points in our history.  No way, to give a brief example, that a diagnosis such as the following can enter mainstream political consciousness.  Projective identification: the war in Iraq as a psychotic response to the trauma of 9-11 through an act of surplus aggression meant to cleanse the national psyche of all inner doubts and fears about ourselves and our right to impose our will upon the world.  Traumatic events lay bare the deep psychological conflicts of individuals.  They  do the  same for the collective psyche.  But having lost psychoanalysis there is no way we can know or speak of this. To gain an adequate understanding of our world and the actions it requires one of our priorities must be to recover what is most radical in Freud and those few followers who retained the radical dimensions of his thought. [5]