What Makes Us so Violent Today?

“Those who prefer fairy tales turn a deaf ear when they are told about man’s native tendency to evil, to aggression, to destruction and also, therefore, to cruelty. And this is not all…” (Lacan, 2007 (1964), p. 230)

The question that this text introduces puts time at stake, something common to “us” and a question around violence. In recent years, it seems that the world has suffered an upsurge in manifestations of violence: wars, violent mass demonstrations, among other things that have injected death and danger into daily life, at least for those of us who were not in frequent contact. with these phenomena.

Is Western society – at least – suffering unprecedented violence that arises from some foreign source (Fremde)? How can we understand the phenomena of violence that we see multiplying in frequency and kind? Are we witnessing a current that will not stop and for which we must prepare?

A world violent by nature?

Before answering the questions above, we will consider an expectation that may be present in some of us before rehearsing a response. It is the following: that it is the duty of each person to eradicate violence from themselves and their environment, in order to reach a coexistence based on respect, peace and harmony, where dialogue is the privileged way to resolve the differences that arise. , without a doubt, they can appear.

If this is not possible, in a society guided by reason, there will be mechanisms to reintegrate those who have committed serious actions against others, after paying a penalty or being “socially rehabilitated.” A rational, peaceful, just and merciful world. However, reality strives to frustrate this expectation. Violence continues to manifest itself in every sphere of society, and, ominously, in each person. Whether we want it or not.

So, it is better to give space to these phenomena to understand what they are about and do something with them. Therefore, one objective of this text is to go through the explanation that psychoanalysis offers us of violence, to from there think about its current presentation, marked on this occasion by that “tan”, an index of excess. To do this, we will not stop at the field that is imposed by the pacifying imperatives of our culture and we will go further to reach a certain truth about this problem.

Let’s start from Totem and Taboo (1986 (1913-1914)), a text in which Freud offers us the least cretinizing myth, as Lacan said, to account for the origin of law and culture. Through recourse to myth, Freud “comes to give symbolic form to that Real that escapes us, and that in this way shows the structure” (Koren, 2013, p. 53). This structural truth places a primordial crime at the origin of the law.

After having been murdered and consumed, the dead Father becomes infinitely more powerful through the prohibition of enjoying the place he left vacant and establishes within the psychic apparatus of the children, who have become members of a community, the feeling of guilt. for having killed him. In this way, law and culture are established on the prohibition of a tendency that was not buried in that original moment, but is presented each time for each speaker according to the coordinates of the Oedipus complex: incestuous desire towards the mother, death wish towards the father.

This order of things implies a paradox: the law is sustained by transgression. The myth of the primitive horde translates the topological, Moebian relationship between culture and violence. Not one without the other. Violence has a structural value for the subject of psychoanalysis.

In The Malaise in Culture (1986 (1927-31)), Freud sinks his finger into the open sore of man’s narcissism, which seeks a harmonious coupling of the individual to culture. The question arises: if relationships between men are within their domain, why does this sometimes mean the greatest source of unhappiness? Thus, Freud invites us to consider that culture can only carry out its function of maintaining increasingly larger groups of individuals thanks to the prohibition of satisfying aggressiveness in others..

Therefore, there is an instinctual renunciation, a cost in flesh that the human puppy must pay to access the set of men. For this reason, culture receives hostility from the subject and spares no effort to appease, divert and repress these hostile tendencies. “You will love your neighbor as yourself”, the “golden rule” is an example that allows us to appreciate the work that culture does to maintain the unity of men. A commandment as absurd as it is impossible to fulfill. Freud spares no ink to list arguments that delegitimize this commandment. In a certain sense, the other, the neighbor, is not worthy of my love, on the contrary, he makes merits to earn my hatred. He can hurt me, I cannot enjoy as I would like because of him, he possesses what I lack, he wants what I have, etc.

Therefore, discomfort in culture is inevitable, it imposes prohibitions and limits the subjects’ ability to enjoy. In return, he provides security, his love, and the goods he produces. Does accepting renunciations in exchange for occupying a place in culture end the conflict between the subject and the culture? Here another paradox appears: when the subject renounces the satisfaction of the drive, the demands of its representative in the emotional apparatus, the superego, are not appeased. On the contrary, renunciation causes a worsening of the feeling of guilt. Every time the subject gives in to the demands of moral conscience in order not to unleash his aggression in the world, the aggression turns against himself..

Therefore, all cultural progress is based on transforming, containing, working on the death drive as an aggression against the other, with the cost for the subject of increasing the obscene violence that the superego exerts on the ego. This is one of the keys to explaining the progressive sensitization, the suffocating moralization that currently dominates Western society. Increasingly persecutory, it imposes a sterilized behavior of aggression and domination, itself conveyed by a violent and oppressive force: “whatever you do, you will be punished and you will have to pay for what you enjoyed or for what you stopped enjoying” (Braunstein , 2013, p. 76).

The manifestation of violence in society

Let us not forget that, as Braunstein says, “the death drive is the drive: plain and simple. Culture is an organization of the symbolic to stop death. Which, of course, does not stop her; it retains it, contains it” (2005, page 227). Culture, therefore, is a spiritualization and a deepening of cruelty, but not raw cruelty and violence, but rather it takes aggressiveness as “fuel” for its progress and implies a turning back on itself of the aggressive tendency. .

Taking these ideas, it can be argued that to explain the function of violence it is not about opposing a peaceful civilization to a brutal one, but rather about recognizing that “culture is struggle, violence, pressure and domination.”. And in front of her, in her, there is an invincible enemy, Death, who will engender a new culture on the ashes of the previous one.

The man of culture suffers from his condition, he suffers from discomfort and, therefore, he is a danger to that culture, a threat of death embedded within him. It’s unheimlich. And culture, the effect of the Unheimliche, can only keep it in the Heim of its norm through tremendous violence.” (Braunstein, 2005, p. 228). In this sense, the death drive, the destruction drive, can be read in the register of its significant and historical function, “will to start from scratch. Will of Something-Other, to the extent that everything can be put into cause from the signifying function (Lacan, 2007 (1964), p. 272).

Having defined from one point of view the structural place of violence for the speaker, let us now consider the way in which it manifests itself today.. To do this, we must take into account man in today’s world, already so different from the one in which Freud and Lacan lived. Braunstein (2013) positions the primitive horde no longer as a myth, but as a sinister prophecy.

It is what designates the relationship between the Urvater and Big Brother, the latter being a reference to the dystopia described with chilling precision by Orwell, Huxley, among others. The work of these authors can be related to Lacan’s theory of discourses, and specifically with the structure of the discourse of markets. This is characterized because the agent is not the S1, as in the classic discourse of the master, nor the $, as in the capitalist discourse, but rather it is the object @, the term that occupies the place of the agent:

“That object is not the law nor is it the one who imposes the law; It is inert and, at the same time, it is the condition of possibility of the operation of the production device (Gestell) that is determined “autonomously” based on a utilitarian calculation carried out by the “network” of self-programmed objects foreign to all “ willpower”. Knowledge (of science) is objectified in the construction of the object as a cybernetic servomechanism.

Faced with the constant obsolescence of technological “computers”, the father (a subject, every subject, according to the ladder of generational succession) is a living anachronism, someone who follows the latest developments of today and, even more, is already dead before the foreseeable developments of tomorrow. The personalized imaginary rivalry theorized as the “Oedipus complex” tends to become an antique today, when parents, rulers and teachers blur their authority and have to upgrade themselves to reach their children, the governed and the students (Braunstein, 2013, p. 80)

Currently, the slogans that organize the social are given by interconnected machines on a global scale, thus reducing the incidence of traditional anthropomorphic figures that represented their role in the process of subjectivation. Everything indicates that the construction of a “hombriguero” is advancing. This last expression belongs to Braunstein, and serves to name a social organization dominated by a binary, cybernetic, unambiguous language, annihilating the signifying function of the word and, therefore, of the subject of the unconscious.

Have we achieved the “insane longing” (Braunstein, 2013, p. 83) of complete knowledge, without failures, or dreams, without desire or ghost? Have we reached God through the Tower of Babel? The father, who for millennia served as a reference so that subjects do not get lost in the desert of enjoyment, the same one that demanded discipline and obedience to the law, -with his Moebian relationship to transgression-, has lost his prerogatives in societies. governed by the web and binary language. What effects does this mode of production have on subjectivities? Is current violence a result of radical economic, political and technological transformations?

To talk about the current manifestations in the clinic, Koren (2013) refers to the presence of a wide range of emotional disturbances: asocial behaviors, difficulties in integrating into society and work, disturbances in sexual and love life, a important ambiguity in sexual identifications, dependent and addictive relationships with all kinds of objects, or in other words, “symbolic disinheritance, rejection of social authority, sexual indifference, inconsistency of the body, pregnancy of modes of relationship narcissist

Let us add to this a completely unprecedented relationship with language, communication and knowledge and a relationship with time oriented in the sense of a continuous acceleration indexed on that of numerical devices (with the counterpart of an increased intolerance to latency times). or waiting” (Koren, 2013, p. 59).

From Koren’s point of view, this phenomenological variety is a garment that comes to cover a fate that was sealed in another scene. They would be formal modifications based on structural stability. In other words, it is not the symbolic function of the father that is in decline, but the historical figure of the father. There is a transformation of the function but not a declension.

The dilution of the Oedipus complex seems to be advancing rapidly and culture requires other myths that account for the process of subjectivation. For this reason, a subjective catastrophe could not be expected due to the transformation of the paternal function by itself and the analyst’s duty is to adjust his listening based on the discourses that the subjects involved in the current plots address to him.

Conclusions

What position should we take, from psychoanalysis, in the face of this complexity? It could be said, neither harmony nor barbarism. Lacan stated that the limit of the ethics of psychoanalysis is its practice, and Freud stated that the future of his new science should be safe from doctors and priests (Plá I., 2005). In this way, a fundamental difference can be read between the practice and the effects of analysis with any other practice that is organized according to a moral or pre-formed knowledge about the subject.

In congruence with these ideas, we know that Lacan maintained that analytical healing goes well as long as there is no attempt to cure, as long as a desire-not-to-cure is sustained. And the ethics of psychoanalysis lead to the anteroom of a moral action, it is not proposed as a device that produces the happiness of the subject. It takes their demand for happiness and transports it beyond, to the field of the tragic opposition between the sovereign Good and desire, towards the Real.

In this way, it can be said that psychoanalysis is there to support the path of desire, the subject and its foundation of emptiness, not to adapt or pacify it. In the dimension of aggression and violence, psychoanalysis allows us to understand and work on its linguistic foundation, that is, the detour of the Real, overcoming the imaginary stagnation in brute violence. And this is a poetic dimension.

In addition to that, why not mention the epistemological function of psychoanalysis to account for the social phenomena that affect us? Emphasizing this point seems relevant to me in the face of the confusion that can be caused by the search for an explanation of the relationship between the subjective and social, exclusively supported by numbers and symbolic representations, without giving rise to the word of the subject. It should be remembered that any enterprise of capturing the being of the subject can be represented as the chase of the rabbit that always escapes through the legs. It should also be mentioned that knowledge applied to the subject and the social is not sterilized from a conception of the world, from a morality, and from a pre-conceived idea of ​​what is expected of someone. To that extent, it fulfills a social order related to the mode of production of a certain society, which can overshadow the place of the subject. Psychoanalysis does not neglect these relationships.