Capitalism & Schizophrenia Part V: Thanatos in the Age of Pandemics
The libidinal economy of self-destruction, or: why your uncle burned down his life to own the libs
In my last outing in this series (which I promised, improvidently, to be the last, against my prolix nature), I argued that we have crossed a Babel Horizon: the left and right superstructures in American political life have become mutually unintelligible, each importing an entire catalogue of signs and signifieds that render communication across the divide functionally impossible. In a companion piece, The Mother’s Mask and the Father’s Fist, I examined the gendered topology of this unintelligibility — the way conservatives selectively code government authority as tyrannical or legitimate based on whether it wears the face of the mother or the fist of the father. Because these disparate strains of thought occurred to me at different times, I did not see how they might be melded, but in doing so, I felt I had to revive my series on Capitalism & Schizophrenia for a new part… of what I am sure will be many more to come, because I am nothing if not incessant.
Today, I want to go deeper into the engine room, because neither piece fully explains the mechanism — the force that carries people across the Babel Horizon in the first place. To do that, we need to return to Freud and psychoanalysis one more time, not to the Oedipal drama we examined in the Mother’s Mask, but to his darkest, most speculative, and most terrifyingly prescient concept: Thanatos, the death drive, which we touched on in Part IV.
