#head cases

Kristeva analyzes a level of social depression that affects everyone equally, more or less, yet its root is the same “capitalistic and colonist society” that [Frantz Fanon] identified. Adorno writes in the introduction to Minima Moralia, “What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance as its own. [..] existential psychologist Frantz Fanon, who diagnosed the colonized of the Antilles as suffering from an inferiority complex not on an individual but on a collective level. [..] Fanon argues that for Europe and for “every country characterized as civilized or civilizing,” the family is a miniature version of the nation and that, conversely, the characteristics of the family, in particular its paternal structure of authority, are projected onto the social environment. This ensures, on Fanon’s view, a seamless transition from familial to civic life for any subject who has been raised in a functional family. For black culture, it is almost exactly the opposite. A black child, having grown up in a normal, functional family, “will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.” he will tend to cast his own family structure, which is now identified with what society rejects, back into the “id” and identify his political or subjective state with white culture. This causes profound dissonance at the level of egoic identification. Kristeva imagines the constitution of culture itself, like Freud’s ego, as a string of lost objects, traces of which we can see in the historical chain of memorials to great individuals, official records of world-historical events, and the trauma of war and loss. In the normal process of cultural formation, these monuments memorialize the past, building it up from within through abandoned object cathexes, whereas when a culture is pathologically melancholic, [..] it is in need, just as is the individual who has lost all desire to communicate, of some sort of force of reeroticization. The creative drive can be seen as a move from the death drive to Eros, and Kristeva envisions this possibility primarily through art, through revolution in a very particular sense, and through psychoanalysis.

Feels like one set of insane criminals is packing up while the other set of insane criminals is setting up for the next act of histrionics, shaming, blaming, emotional manipulation, and victimization.