Index, Spring 1990-Summer 2001

By treating conservatism as a style of thought, this essay examines how a flair for abjuring the social contract, social welfare, socialism, indeed, society itself provides pleasure from the pain of violation and lost autonomy. The innovation of Ayn Rand’s writing is to make this victimization sexy. For the Randian conservative who feels abused by the social welfare schemes of the liberal state, masochism restores autonomy by making the individual the sole author of his or her pain. Masochism allows Rand’s readers to wring intense satisfaction from feelings of vulnerability that notions of consent force on individuals. Rand’s penchant for imagining a literally libidinal economy hardly defines the tastes of conservatism tout court. Nevertheless, the masochistic erotic formations in her novels constitute a defining feature of an ideology that views government as a pain.

Ayn Rand’s Vibrator: Masochism as Conservative Style

Beckett’s Murphy grew out of “Lightning Calculation”, a short story about biscuits and the tragic incommutability of preference. Beckett likely borrowed this rare Americanism from Thorstein Veblen, who uses it to describe the “neo-classical” economic subject, a “hedonistic ... lightning calculator of pleasures and pains”. This essay argues that Murphy’s predicament is consistent with Veblen’s “neo-classical” subject and, a fortiori, Foucault’s neoliberal subject in The Birth of Biopolitics. Using Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets”, the essay suggests that, while death might no longer be the prerogative of “sovereign power”, it is still felt as the duress of “utility maximisation” with the ultimate “budget constraint” of the human lifespan.

/pdf/the-theme-of-the-five-biscuits-murphy-foucault-and-beckett-s-2440h3r4dh.pdf

The Theme of the Five Biscuits: Murphy, Foucault, and Beckett’s Critique of Neoliberalism

There is a surprising coherence between the human self-understanding and worldview that underpin the theoretical program of the Austrian marginalist economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), first articulated in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project. Both are grounded in a Hobbesian-Darwinian emphasis on monadic individuals guided by egoistic drives, self-interest, and a competitive struggle for individual advantage (Birken, Consuming Desire 1–39). Both, moreover, are steeped in a kind of Malthusian pessimism that invokes increasing scarcity of resources as the underlying cause of human existential anxiety and as the defining feature of human interactions with the “real” world of commodities (Riesman 3). For the Mengerian marginalist as for the Freudian psychoanalyst, the driving forces behind human life are existential need, the instinct for self-preservation and self-improvement, and the development of successful strategies for managing and satisfying needs.

Accounting for Pleasure: Sigmund Freud, Carl Menger, and the Economically Minded Human Being

This essay aims to expose an inner linkage between the crisis of the human and the crisis of the humanities in our times. Inspired by a variation of Wittgenstein’s famous proposition “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, it is claimed that the humanities refer to the human through a common and singularising experience of limits of the human. However, arguably, it is precisely this experience of limits that is threatened since moder nity has become a process of progressively literalising reality, eliminating ambivalences, and trivialising meaning, with psychoanalytical and political consequences that we can see, for instance, in extreme ways, in today’s fundamentalist actions. Given these crisis aspects, I argue that the post-human experience provided by sci-fi is a rather important source of resistance for the human and the humanities.

pdf/the-limits-of-the-human-mean-the-limits-of-humanities-1oaky4dkmx.pdf

The Limits of the Human Mean the Limits of Humanities

Freud's "Economic Hypothesis": From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Sexualis

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Freud's "Economic Hypothesis": From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Sexualis