December 1st, 2018
Translated by Florencia F.C.
Shanahan
AIDS was probably the first
postmodern event to inaugurate the definitive consolidation of biopolitics and
the appropriation of the concept of risk by the State with the aim of
introducing a regulation, an ordering, and even a prophylaxis of subjectivity.
Threatened by a pandemic of proportions unprecedented since the era of the
great European plagues, and following a first period of perplexity and dread,
the Western subject learned to add a new concern to the shadows that hovered
over him from the political realm.
When, twenty years later, the
Al Qaeda operation against the Twin Towers was broadcast live by all
audiovisual media on the planet, the subject (who in the meantime had mutated,
his Western identity dissolving into the undefined and euphemistic magma of
“global society”) came to realize that from then on risk (his eternal
and not always visible traveling companion) had become converted into the only
dogma of faith to which he could cling.
In losing in an almost
definitive manner its political function, the State has become administrator,
manager and supervisor of the fabulous risk industry, driven by the
alliance between techno-science and capital, a compact that consists in turning
fear into an object of consumption, into a justification for obedience and into
a good argument for organizing new crusades of salvation.
At this point, one cannot help
perceiving the inversion of the sublimatory process that, according to Jacques
Lacan, constituted one of the most extraordinary creations of culture: the fear
of God, capable of “replacing innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being
[…] It was necessary that someone invent it and propose to men, as a remedy for
a world made up of manifold terrors […]” [1].
The “risk society“, in
contrast, returns the contemporary subject to the most primitive feeling of
helplessness in the face of a multiplication of dangers and fears that in turn
are carefully promoted and disseminated, to the point that the demand for
security has become an imperious claim and a new market value. Risk will have
to be measured, predicted, assessed, even mathematicized in commercial figures,
in order to finally become the fundamental rationale of economic, military,
policing, sanitary and judicial strategies.
The subject must train himself
in the recognition and acceptance that his life is definitively besieged by
innumerable real dangers from which he must be protected by policies that –
unfortunately, but for his own good… – will require a progressive loss of
rights and freedoms. Beyond what is supposed by this treatment of castration in
terms of the perverse instrumentalization of the political function, it implies
a radical distance from the ethics of psychoanalysis.
If for Lacan desire is what
justifies the effort to live “when life does not turn someone into a coward”[2], existence conceived as the
minimization, prevention and management of risk entails the enthronement of
solitude and isolation as ways of access to a jouissance which one tries to
purge of all connotation of loss. In the end, war by remote-control and love
via WhatsApp are based on a common logic: to eradicate presence.
[1] Lacan,
J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, “The Psychoses”, W. W. Norton &
Company, London; New York, 1997, p. 267.
[2] Lacan,
Jacques, Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English, Norton & Co.,
London; New York, 2005, p. 660.
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