DIARY December 30th 2009 Do children know their place? A caller to BBC tells an illustrative story: I was on a crowded bus. There were many people standing on the bus, including many elderly people. The little girl who was no more than 3 years old asked her mother why so many people were standing and her mother replied that it was because there were not enough seats on the bus. The child replied, I have a seat, don't I mummy, and the mother replied, yes dear, and you deserve one just as much as they do, because you are a person too.  The current generation of parents in the West are the oldest in history and have the fewest children. They have the greatest difficulty conceiving those children, they work harder and longer than previous generations, and with both parents working, are often understandably too tired when they get home to discipline their children. And their children, for their part, are spoken to by more strangers than ever before, electronically through the media, through advertising and product placement, often while they are alone with their screens. There are more single parents than ever before. Today's parents are reacting against their own "repressive" parents and want to be more "democratic", more equal to their own children and be their friend. On top of that these children are told each day, 'You are the most important people in the world'. Hence you deserve your seat on the bus, it's your right, even when there are old people standing. The Child has become the Master. December 27th 2009 Worried about the so-called under-reporting of "hate crimes" in Britain, the Crown Prosecution Service's network of 42 “hate crime scrutiny panels” is to sift through successful and unsuccessful hate crime prosecutions to see if any lessons can be learned. This is the language equivalent of ambulance chasing by solicitors to generate business for themselves by seeking out negligence cases. Since New Labour came to power, ministers have increased categories of hate crimes from simply covering racism to include religious aggravation, homophobia and so-called 'transphobic’ offences. The result has been a seven-fold increase in prosecutions for hate crimes over the past decade, from 1,602 crimes in 1998/9 to 11,624 in 2008/9. But how much real protection does such scrutiny offer minorities? Does not this language policing create an enormous counter-reaction, rather like the other government targets that provoke ways to beat the system. How much can you police ethical behaviour, top-down, as it were, while at the same time eroding the old value system that at one time was internalised by every child during its formation. How can ideological repetition replace, in any adequate way, the formation of a child's very being at an unconscious and conscious level? All that happens is that people may talk the correct talk without changing their subject position, which is now increasingly formed in a dog-eat-dog atomistic society - the subject-supposed-to-hate. December 24th 2009 Will Norman (Young Foundation) and psychologist and writer Oliver James debate loneliness on the Today programme. Half a million people will be on their own this Christmas, a further one million say they feel lonely much of the time. We lead more transient lives than ever, with families widely separated geographically. Less and less people know us intimately. Oliver James puts this down to the explosion of divorce during the 1960s leading to what he calls a "divorce epidemic". Then came the phenomena of "Thatcherism" and "Blatcherism" and the rise of the Market with the belief that it could satisfy all human needs. James complains about what he calls the 'outsourcing of our children and our elderly'. Will Norman suggests that the Welfare State is another form of outsourcing which means that we are cared for increasingly by strangers rather than members of our own families. No one disputes that the social bond has changed and that we are now known superficially by many more people than ever, but known "deeply" by less and less people than in the past. To some degree, the therapeutic relationship covers the hole that has opened in the Other. Therapy is what Jacques-Alain Miller calls the 'compassionate cushion'. More ominously, the gaze of the electronic Other "protects" us. Not only the loss of the other, but the fear of the other preoccupies us - the other as toxic. We are constantly warned that our closest relationships could be the most toxic, as if social planners are wanting to proof us against the other altogether. Keep away from real people, but contact them virtually - the purest form of relation.   December 22nd 2009 Young people aged 16 or 17 should have access to contraception and be entitled to confidentiality, according to the Law Reform Commission. The age of consent for sex is 17. In a consultation paper to be launched tonight by Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews, the commission proposes that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to consent to and refuse medical treatment subject to certain conditions. Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness, President of the Law Reform Commission, speaking on RTE this morning sounds slightly amused that David Quinn from the Iona Institute should, 'rather predictably', suggest that these provisions further weaken the authority of parents and represent, 'an appalling increase in the power of the State'. With her finger very definitely on the contemporary pulse, Justice McGuinness respectfully replies, 'Some parents and the Iona Institute may be a little unaware of what is happening on the ground. To think that all children come from happy families is a little unreal. We consulted the young people and we sought their opinions. The 14 and 16-year-olds were certain that they wanted to be treated as adults'. Yes of course, they are entitled to their very own jouissance, free from any of the old value systems and taboos that once sustained something approximating to the notion "childhood". The only limit that is recognised now is that posed by health concerns - the line that may be drawn by a doctor or a nurse. The Law is reforming itself out of existence, having thrown in its lot with youth who are now the only judges of their own wellbeing. December 17th 2009 Speaking this morning, Castlegregory parish priest Fr Seán Sheehy said he had 'no regrets' in supplying the character reference to Dan Foley (35) who was jailed yesterday for five years for sexually assaulting a woman in Listowel. Foley's victim was discovered by a Garda patrol. She was in a semi-conscious state and naked from the waist down alongside a skip in a car park early on June 15th, 2008. Foley, who had been celebrating his 34th birthday on the night of the offence, had at first denied the charge. He told gardaí, 'I came around here for a slash and I saw your wan lying on the ground. No one arrived. I tried to get her standing'. However CCTV footage showed him carrying her to the skip area. It also emerged he had met her earlier in a nightclub. But what has annoyed many was that before sentencing, as many as fifty people, mostly middle-aged and elderly men, queued inside the courthouse to shake hands and sympathise with Foley, while the victim of the assualt was asked by people she knew if she was sorry for bringing Dan Foley to court. It is clear from this story, reported by The Irish Times, that the populist ideology of the rural working class is diametrically opposed to the liberal orthodoxy of the ruling elites and the gulf between these ideologies is growing, despite the latter's best efforts at "education". Last month, it was revealed that traveller women were 'shocked' to discover emotional abuse and rape within marriage constituted domestic violence. They see violence as just hitting and that was the only violence they see. They thought husbands couldn’t rape their wives. December 14th 2009 Obama says, at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, 'the hard truth is that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified'. He continues, 'I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones”'. Obama continues, 'make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason'. Evil exists! Most of his (holistic) supporters would not agree of course, unless the term is reserved for the action of the West. Again, Obama disagrees. 'The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms'. Will he follow through on this thinking?  December 11th 2009 When, Accord, the Catholic marriage and relationship agency in Ireland, aware of recessionary times, warns that, 'you should protect your most precious investment', i.e. your relatioship or marriage (by going for couple-counselling), it implicitly concedes that the language of economics and "exchange value" extends all the way to Catholic marriage itself. You protect your marriage like you protect your pension, your house or your car. And as investment analysts warn, 'the value of your investments can rise as well as fall', implying that this investment of marriage is not for life, but is negotiable and indeed may lose its value altogether. The logic of the Market has reached the heart of Catholic values; not just cohabiting couples "negotiate" their "terms and conditions", but married couples as well. December 10th 2009 Mark Steyn: 'Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they’re powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West “a pluralist society” has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the “secularist and liberal defense” is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated'. Oliver Kamm replies with the standard secularist answer: 'I'm in favour of a vast gaping nullity. That's the type of arrangement where citizens can choose the good for themselves rather than be regimented into other people's conception of it. Secularism is the best defence against absolutist religious claims, because it relegates religion to the private sphere'. Firstly, let us say, that secularists usually ignore, do not see, for sound ideological reasons, the "vast gaping nullity", the "hole in the big Other", the "crack in Being". Instead, their preference is rational choice, relying, rather hypocritically, on some lingering vestiges of Judeo-Christian values to carry us through. They ignore the gaping nihilism at the heart of secularism, even as its symptomatology is everywhere in urban life, in what the religious call "fallen" creation. They ignore the pitiless effects of this gaping hole on the old, the vulnerable and the young. Secularist views are advocated by the mentally "gated" middle classes and their fetishistic disavowal: I know but I don't want to know or assume the full consequences of my knowing. I know but I choose not to realise. The secularists don't know it but they are coming to the end of the line of their own complacency in relation to the void. Religious fundamentalism and (Asian style) State authoritarianism - New Labour is the soft beginning of this in the West - will be the reward for this denial and the sustaining fantasy of relegating religion to the "private sphere". Such smugness will reap its bitter reward. There is a properly brutal logic at work here: ignore the truth of the void at the heart of reality and either way the consequences will be devastating. December 7th 2009 Can one detect a note of envy for the wealth of the Catholic Church when the TD, Mary O'Rourke, never one to miss an opportunity to be in the limelight, joins the critics with this last week? 'Consider the discourtesy of it, and the discourtesy of the head of the Vatican, parading around Ireland in his wonderful glitzy clothes, but not replying to letters and not seeing fit to talk to his counterpart'. (emphasis added). December 6th 2009 The White Ribbon,  is Michael Haneke's vision of pre-first world war Germany. The setting is a remote Protestant village in northern Germany, in 1913. This is no pastoral idyll, but an almost uniformly dark place plagued by acts of malice and brutal justice and a demand for obedience. Strange incidents occur, crimes of vandalism and violence, which assume the character of a ritual punishments. The film opens with the local doctor (Rainer Bock) thrown from his horse by a trip-wire strung between two trees and removed by people unknown. The infant son of the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) is abducted and found in a local woodland, badly beaten. A boy with Down's syndrome is almost blinded. There are other unsolved crimes. A local farmer hangs himself. The midwife (Susanne Lothar) and mother of the child with Down's syndrome, is having an unhappy affair with the doctor, who treats her with contempt, and she has evidence that he is abusing his 14-year-old daughter Anna. The baroness leaves the Baron, taking their children with her, to go and live with an Italian man. The movie is narrated by the village teacher (Christian Friedel), now an old man. We assume he wants to communicate something important by his witness. At the heart of the village is the pastor (Burghart Klaussner). He rules his household with cold severe discipline, and part of the family tradition is the shameful "white ribbon" for wrongdoers. His children have to wear the ribbon until they are deemed cleansed. The black and white darkness in this film is all the more ominous as we know what horrors are to come in Germany and Europe. There are only a few moments where life survives.  The teacher is conducting a difficult courtship of a local young woman. Anna's little brother has the existence of death explained to him in a way that is tragic and amusing. The pastor's little son asks if he can keep a wounded bird until it is well, which later he gives to his father. According to Haneke, himself, the film is about 'the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature'. It was 10 years in the making. December 4th 2009 For very many decades one has heard little but the most virulent criticism of the Catholic Church in private. The hatred of priests and nuns and the church's attitude to women and sex, the violence of some teachers, and so on, was widespread but secret. Mass attendance remained over 90%. At the same time radio and television programmes would regularly feature a priest to make the defining commentary on what had been going on and what has been said during the programme. In the 1960s, for instance, Gay Byrne regularly had a priest on the panel who would have the final word on the famous Saturday night Late Late Show. 'Now Father', Byrne  would bleetingly ask, 'what is your opinion on what you have been hearing Father...'? etc. And Byrne would follow up with his own cringeing support for the Father, 'We must all agree with you Father, and follow your good counsel Father..', and so on. And during those times of mass obedience and mass attendance in public, were here and there a few very courageous parents who, on hearing that their child had been beaten by a priest in school, would go straight to the priest concerned and threaten him for what he had done, and the child would not be harmed again. Now, when the tables are completely turned around, priest-hating is out in the open, when there is no risk to expressing one's opinion. On the contrary you are lauded as courageous if you speak your mind now against the Church. Where were these angry voices in earlier decades? Many more children would have been saved if these armchair critics had spoken in public as they were only willing to do in prvate. November 30th 2009 The long term aims of the progressive consensus in Ireland, deliberately and proudly spear-headed by The Irish Times over recent decades, towards "a more rational, fairer, equal, more transparent society, radically secular, pluralist", and so on, must logically have its "disavowed secret obscene supplement", if we are to believe the well-worn Žižekian take on Lacanian psychoanalysis (every power structure has its hidden violent unconscious inauguration). In the last year(s) this has become more and more apparent in conservative Ireland. Think about the recent catastrophic collapse of everything this progressive ethos loathes and despises! Fianna Fail, now at its lowest since the foundation of the State. The Catholic church imploding from within. The "capitalist" financial system requiring major support from State sources after the property bubble burst. The traditional Irish family to be subsumed within a "multiplicity" of "alternative families". Suddenly, it seems, all these doors towards radical change are opening without even needing to be pushed any longer! Internal "walls" are falling. Now the standard public line is "concern" and "caution", but you can also detect barely concealed excitement and celebration as commentator after commentator pushes at the open doors salivating at the destruction of the old. Ireland's quiet revolution - quiet so far - is underway. All the old "fathers" are toppling over. The Master lies exposed as obscene and fraudulent, going right up to the Pope himself. But didn't Lacan rather ominously warn the Paris students, 'As hysterics you demand a new master. You will get it'! November 27th 2009 You often hear it said that the only morality the Catholic Church knows is "sexual" morality; sin is always sexual sin, and so on. This is what happens with the attempt at the wholesale repression of sexuality: it contaminates everything! And now we have it with the Murphy Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. The sequence is roughly as follows: sexual repression via celibacy, then the "return of the repressed" via child sexual abuse, then the secondary repression via the cover-up by the institutional Church and the State. The Church's ideological cracks have been forced wide open and the poison is seeping out everywhere. This phenomenon conforms to Michel Foucault's “repressive hypothesis”, whereby the attempt to control and violently punish sexuality leads not so much to repression of sexuality but the endless preoccupation with sexuality and its perversion. Consequently, the most "holy" priests were on occasion the same men who violated young children in secret. The victims are therefore subject to the most extreme version of Bateson's "double bind": the worship and devotional trust for the spiritual holy man to be impossibly contrasted with his obscene enjoyment.   November 26th 2009 The suddenness with which top bankers are willing to pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses again, after the financial meltdown which we could be forgiven for thinking might have given pause for thought and restraint, reveals the libidinal persistence of greed that knows no bounds. Žižek, in his latest book, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, (Verso, 2009), which takes as its starting point the global financial crisis, highlights the increasing seclusion of the super-rich, who aim to insulate themselves more and more from contact with real people. Now of course there are good security reasons for this - diseases, the risk of crime, kidnap and terrorism, and so on. In their gated technologically secure "communities", these ultrahigh-net-worth individuals have private theatres, cinemas, bars, restaurants and pools for "members only". But privacy extends further and further - to banking, invitation only health clinics, private concerts, fashion shows and art exhibitions. Their friends and neighbours are vetted for class and cash. Transport will be by helicopter or private jet to avoid chaotic traffic systems. Holidays will be set in pristine nature, swimming in the translucent waters of some private island, trekking in remote mountains, or sailing in massive yachts. Their only contact with the outside world will be limited to business contacts and humanitarianism - saving the planet, supporting the arts and so on. With greed of such proportions comes nightmarish, persecutory fear that equally knows no bounds, threatening as it does to burst through at any moment. The super-rich exemplify what has become commonplace in our towns and cities, namely, generalised fear of the Other.    November 24th 2009 'Thinking is not an illness in itself, but it can make some people ill'. (My Teaching. J. Lacan, p101). Lacan was referring to the relative autonomy of thought itself. There are those who are greatly disturbed by "their" thoughts - the obsessional who repeatedly and without any control has troubling thoughts about harming others. Or, consider the insomniac who cannot stop thinking, or the hypomanic who cannot stop his thoughts racing, or the depressive whose cannot stop his negative thoughts, and so on. (See 21/10/09 also). November 21st 2009 This peculiar defence of "denial" or "disavowal" (verleugnung) involves a double consciousness or a splitting of consciousness, where the subject refuses to recognise the reality of a traumatic perception. Freud saw this mechanism as the first stage of psychosis because it tended towards the denial of a (traumatic) segment of external reality, prototypically the little child's horror of castration - the gaping hole at the heart of reality. On the global level, it is the West's refusal to recognise the horrific real of the spreading Jihad, via what André Glucksmann refers to as Europe's 'the sleep of reason'. This is beautifully invoked, for instance, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, where the protagonists all live together on an old estate. They know the end is coming but nobody appears to care at all about what might happen, even as they hear the trees falling. In the modern context, Major Nidal Hasan, shouted out "Allahu Akbar" before he shot 13 US soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded many more on November 6th. He had put "SOA" (Soldier of Allah) on his business card. He had been in regular email contact with with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born,Yemeni-based cleric, imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supporter of all-out holy war. Yet commentators call it a "tragedy" rather than a "crime". Here the gaping hole of America's vulnerability is covered by such politically correct disavowing "thoughts", that he was a lone gunman like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech, a psychotic, was suffering from PTSD, and so on. As Mark Steyn says, '"diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them'. The consensus generally was and always will be, "there's no terrorism angle". Steyn suggests, we are willing 'to trade core Western values for a quiet life'. However, even this apparent compromise is incorrect: we have already lost our core Western values and we have, as a consequence, long since lost our quiet life. November 20th 2009 An Education: Nick Hornby adapted the bestselling memoir by Lynn Barber, telling the story of how, in the early 1960s, she was seduced as a 16-year-old schoolgirl by a man, twice her age. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) a very bright girl on the cusp of her 17th birthday, walking home in heavy rain after cello practice is offered a lift home by David (Peter Sarsgaard), in his sports car. Prior to meeting David, Jenny was working hard at secondary school to ensure getting to Oxford. David works his deceptive charm on Jenny needing also to win round her rather dull parents (Cara Seymour, Alfred Molina), who allow themselves to be caught up in his deceit. Jenny is willingly swept into the adult world of the newly "swinging 'sixties", and diverted from her desire to read English at Oxford, ignoring the danger signs coming from the other side of David's life - his stealing, his Rachmanism and more, which eventually bring Jenny to an abrupt and painful realisation. The film evokes a time of youth, innocence and coming of age, before the nightmare of what comes after in terms of the revelations of sexual abuse, terrorism and our whole new world of risk and security. November 17th 2009 It is a pity that someone of John Banville's eminence should be asked to review A Dream of Undying Fame: How Freud Betrayed his Mentor and Invented Psychoanalysis, by Louis Breger (The Irish Times, Saturday November 14th), and therefore have cause to comment on a central clinical concern of psychoanalysis criticised by Breger, namely the Oedipus Complex. For Breger, like many revisionist psychotherapists, downplays the radicality of Freud's discoveries, and therefore it is not surprising that Breger should claim that, 'It is one of the tragedies of psychoanalysis that Freud insisted on the centrality of the Oedipus Complex despite the lack of supporting evidence'. Although Banville quotes with approval Breger's view that the Oedipus Complex 'isn't much of a factor in anyone's neurosis', he will also be aware of a very different analysis offered by, for instance, the well known critical theorist Slavoj Žižek, who suggests the myth of the Oedipus Complex should be raised to the level of an ontological structure. That is, it has to do with the structure of Being itself. For Oedipus is opposd to the self-love of Narcissus; the "failed" Oedipus is linked to psychosis, perversion, borderline and schizoid states and our current preoccupation with sexual abuse and incest. And the Oedipus complex undersores the importance of the father or father figure, as instigator of the authority of the law, a factor that for too long has been ignored by psychologists and sociologists when considering social breakdown.  November 16th 2009 According to an article in The Irish Times on Saturday, 'The wall has gone but the scars of Stasi brutality remain' (Derek Scally), 72,000 were people arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the East German Stasi, just for trying to leave the country by “illegal” means.  4 per cent of the population was, officially or unofficially, a Stasi spy and unlike their Nazi counterparts, who have rightly been found, interrogated and shamed, the Stasi, feel absolutely no guilt and no need to apologise. Five former prisoners who told their stories to German director, Stefan Weinert, in a harrowing new documentary Gesicht zur Wand (Face the Wall). 20 years on, the Stasi are organising to spread disinformation about their former activities. They are paid a state pension, while their former victims struggle to be recognised. And, as the memory of East Germany fades, there is pessimism among former Stasi victims that their ordeal will be remembered in the history books: 'their inability to trust, to work, to feel, to love'. 'You don’t see the damage', says Anne, a school teacher from Chemnitz who recalls in the film her failed escape attempt.'They destroyed the person I was. There’s a stone lying on my soul that will never go away'. For Weinert, Gesicht zur Wand was his contribution to counter the trend of downplaying the horrors of the East German dictatorship. But the German public broadcaster ARD has rejected it. 'These are stations run by the 1968 generation who have either no interest in this topic or who feel they cannot fit it into one of the pre-packaged formats', says Weinert. Maybe, he could have added, that that generation has too easily rehabilitated the GDR out of a sense of Ostalgie. November 12th 2009 'When I speak of time, that's because it's no longer there' (Apollonaire). Similarly, we now speak of the phenomenon of the Irish Pub, just at the time when it no longer exists in Ireland, but rather in countless cities around the world, outside Ireland. When we speak of organic, real or natural, we also understand that these have long since died out, only to reappear in village markets rather in the same way as new antiques appear in up-market stores already aged and distressed. Lacan said: 'I am where I think not and I think where I am not'. Therefore, I speak of myself when I am no longer there! I re-present myself who has already disappeared. There must therefore be a pretty poor outlook for psychoanalysis and the talking cure, which brings about the disappearence of the subject via it own promotion and materialisation in the sessions. It is analogous to the so-called "delivery of care", which, due to its new professional operationalism, is the end of care which was always beyond definition. Just like the banality of explicit sexuality is the repression of the whole seductive aura of the erotic, and the advent of "word processing" represents the end, we suspect, of the serious word as such, or, indeed, the loss of language, particularly irony, metaphor, paradox and other enchantments.  Everything that was real has been forced into a processing filter where it de-realises and denatures itself. The upshot of these truisms is that time, the Irish pub, real food, the subject, care, sex, the word, and so on, only really existed when they remained un-named as such. Once naming and processing start, the inexorable process of nullification begins. For instance, at one time there was an Irish pub - it just was there, without being "themed" as such. Famously, Philip Larkin claimed that sexual intercourse began in 1963 and Oliver J Flanagan (Catholic Irish politician) commented approvingly that, 'there was no sex in Ireland before television'. Both these statements are approximately correct. It took mass popular culture and television to hyper-realise sex and pornography, thereby ending the erotic's transcendent hold on the imagination.         November 10th 2009 "Repressive desublimation", spoken of by Marcuse way back during the 1960s, whereby the erotic was "liberated" and marketed increasingly successfully, has proceeded apace during the intervening decades. Last night on Frontline (RTE) the (repressive) over-sexualisation of very young girls was discussed with concern expressed about the availability of porn on the internet and in the media generally, and the possibly detrimental effect that this was having on young girls' development. The usual contributors were there: the young singer Hannah Montana to introduce the clip; the feminist who had written a best selling book analysing the trend; the counsellors who advocate parents teaching young children about sex and above all to be "critical"; cool women talking about "safe sex" and the need for "information"; the male presenter, Pat Kenny, always afraid to be seen as "uncool", suggesting that string tops and short skirts are just a 'uniform worn by young girls', even hinting that older men who see this as sexy are 'sinister and in need of help'. Each in their own small way contributes further to the mass marketing of, the global transparency of and progressive normalisation of sexuality as commodity - trying to talk about sex without jouissance. Each tries to bring sex into the respectable operational arena, to deny it its primal power, and its obscene reach. Foucault's insight was that the erotic proceeds without us: 'pleasure is an event outside the subject'. November 6th 2009 Frank Furedi talks of "reverse socialisation" by which he means that now, via the media and education system, children are required and encouraged to socialise their errant parents. This is happening on a number of fronts. Children are very open to the new ideologies and willingly castigate their parents who find themselvs in the wrong and maybe hopelessly out-of-date. Of course, the great totalitarianisms of the last century, employed children's idealism in sinister denounciations of their parents and now we have our own soft versions of this. 'Adults have ruined our world', runs the headline of an online article targeting children, setting out to explain how climate change is going to affect the next generation. Jonathan Porritt informs children how their parents and grandparents, 'have made a mess of looking after the Earth', adding 'They may deny it, but they are stealing your future'. This has the added value for insecure adults that they can cringingly ingratiate themselves with children, another version of being their childrens' "best mate", a kind of socially acceptable version of grooming. Children's familiarity with the  instantaneity of hypertext, downloading music and film, IT and mobile technology is arguably the most insidious, albeit "natural" form of reverse socialisation, apparently rendering obsolete, non-virtual, older narrative reflexive strategies of pre-techno days. On food choices, on littering the environment, on smoking, safe drinking, and so on children are being co-opted to embarrass "naughty parents". One advertisement on RTE had two parents worrying about driving long distances at night along country roads fearing the car might breakdown, while a little boy's voice in the background keeps trying to interrupt saying, 'Join the AA'. But the parent don't listen and the little righteous voice keeps on insisting, 'Join the AA'. So parents are not just naughty but stupid as well. The most sinister example (on a par with the worst totalitarian strategies of old) is the implication that adults are potential paedophiles lurking in the shadows of the child's home, school, playground. Not only are adults infantile, lazy or stupid, in serious need of continuous education, but they could also be the most dangerous sexual predators. This ideological inflection is the most radical reversal of values in the service of so-called "truth", everyday highlighted in the media with high profile child abductions and sensational revelations of sexual abuse. One might suspect that our worthy desire to uncover the "truth" conceals at the same time a more hidden desire to undermine and destroy the age-old authority of parents, part of the legendary anti-Oedipal struggle which believes it has victory within its sights.    November 3rd 2009 "Harm reduction" is what passes for vision and policy making today. It is the Master Signifier. Everywhere you look, the message is harm reduction! Thus, Tony Geoghegan, director of the drugs services organisation Merchants Quay Ireland, responding in an article to incidents of severe illness induced by drug taking over the weekend, suggests, 'The difference between life and death is knowing the score. While the facts are stark, all the evidence suggests that if people who continue to use drugs are aware of the risks and know how to respond when things go wrong, there is a lot they can do to reduce the risk of harm to themselves or their friends'. Drug taking is a given, therefore minimise the risks. You are going to score, so know the score. Presumably, so numbed by what he sees of wrecked lives, this is the best he can come up with - some pathetic advice, some "cool" advice about, let us say (throwing up the hands), responsible drug usage. The word "use" has replaced "abuse" which is obviously so judgemental. It is a subtle shift that brings drug taking into the mainstream, normalising it -  drug user, like road user, like wheelchair user, and so on. He says, 'young people, in particular, will continue to take drugs regardless'. Regardless of what? Of the law, of adult authority? Without regard for anyone, even themselves, because drug abuse is the ultimate in autistic retreat, in a world without regard, without esteem, with an attention deficit disorder which understands seriously dangerous activities as requiring merely some tinkering perhaps, a bit of damage limitation. November 2nd 2009 Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for British government ministers Blair, Straw and Blunkett, wrote a key speech in 2000 for then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche favouring the loosening of immigration controls, acknowledged that the ‘driving political purpose’ of this ‘major’ shift in policy was to bring about mass immigration and a ‘truly multicultural’ society. This radical policy was kept secret from the British people because ministers knew they would react very badly against it..Mass immigration, he added, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function. Consequently, 2.3m people have come into Britain since 2000. This should hardly come as a surprise. For this policy was introduced by the urban (elitist) classes precisely as an attempt to end what they would regards as British parochialism, to break what Peter Hitchens has described as, 'a faith of the countryside, of seedtime and harvests and hedgerows, villages, bell music, woodland, seasons, small towns and modest Cathedral cities, with London a distant blur of smoke and crime unvisited by almost everyone. It was a faith which found it hard to survive in the filth and sunless back courtyards of the industrial cities, and whose spirit was finally broken by the industrial massacre, rats and slime of the First World War, that great broken promise'. And we should add, New Labour's "true multiculturalism" is just one more instance of "universalism", an essentially violent process inherent in Modernity itself. Here, each individual, must leave, or be wrenched from, his or her (private) "roots" to enter the public realm and assert his or her (Kantian) full autonomy and universality. All Modernity flows from this change. Multiculturalism merely speeds up the process. All the fruits of Modernity, in terms of the arts, music, culture, etc., come from this "liberation". We will no longer identify with our unchanging 'seedtimes and harvests', but rather with ceaseless change itself and a global culture. October 30th 2009 'There will always be bigots, but the public reaction to these events has been pleasingly low key'. The events that The Irish Times in its leader on 24th October refers to are the untimely and tragic death of Stephen Gately and the "coming-out" of GAA player Donal Og Cusack. Be "low key", or, you are a bigot. The liberal space for criticism or commentary has gone. Any residual right to question, criticise or interrogate a life style or ideology is met with extreme resistance, protest and sense of offence. Moderate Protestants in N. Ireland who questioned the historical drift towards a United Ireland, aided by Republican terror, were also called bigots and their lives were in danger. Clearly therefore, there is now only one permissable position in these debates: total  acceptance of the ideological position being fought for and demanded. Any reasonable criticism is equated with bigotry; you are really a skinhead or a fascist.  This is how liberalism became il-liberalism and how objective evaluation and criticism has given way to subjective coercion and (linguistic) violence. Jean-Francois Lyotard referred to this fracturing of the body politic as "dissensus" and the "walls" thus erected between groups as "différends". The différend is more than just "difference of opinion", or "agreeing to differ", it presumes an impossibility of discussion because the parties involved speak totally heterogeneous languages.   October 23nd 2009 The BNP is a "symptom" of the British liberal elite establishment, which has ignored/repressed what has now become the "white working class", once proud, once worthy of respect, having fought in and come through two World Wars (hence the BNP's grossly misplaced references to Churchill and Spitfires) and now reduced to some resentful, marginalised ultimately violent and racist core inhabiting depressed areas of Britain. This disadvantaged ethnic group has been secreted by the multiculturalist logic that has turned Britain into a new country via uncontrolled immigration. This total cultural change is disavowed by the political majority and this disavowal is revealed by the shrill denounciation of any detractors, however reasonable, from the status quo. The neo-fascism of the BNP is a very dangerous reactive force violently at odds with the "soft" fascism of the political class that believes it can freely talk down with impunity to that most traditional class, a core of which has turned violent. No mention of the much greater problem of Islamofascism, another parallel symptom of liberal secularism.      October 20th 2009 Freud is thinking about how, what we once called "character" develops in civilisation, via the taming of the drives. 'The most remarkable example of such a process is found in the anal-erotism of young human beings. Their original interest in the excretory function, its organs and products, is changed in the course of their growth into a group of [character] traits which are familiar to us as parsimony, a sense of order and cleanliness' (SE 21: 96-97). Where this goes to an extreme, we have the contemporary OCD problem, or the so-called "anal character". This civilising process is aided by what Freud termed, "organic repression" afforded by the evolution of the human being's erect posture and the subsequent devaluation of the olfactory stimuli in preference for the visual. However, 'In the nursery', says Freud, 'things are different. The excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being part of their own body which has come away from it'. However, upbringing builds upon the (organic) repression which will make 'the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent, abominable'. (SE 21: 100). But in the first instance, the small child who gives his shit as a "primordial form of gift" is giving the equivalent of his inner self to his mother. So as far as the anal object is concerned, we have the extreme oscillation of value between the object as wonderful gift and worthless waste. It is paradoxically, our most intimate self-creation and a disgusting evil waste. Animals, for instance, have no problem with waste disposal, as they do not have an "inner self" to be embarrassed or ashamed about. Lacan follows Freud by saying, 'A great civilisation is first and foremost a civilisation that has a waste disposal system', (My Teaching. Verso 2008, p65). We should therefore agree with Žižek when he calls one of his chapters in On Belief (Verso 2001), 'You should give a shit'. On U-Tube, Žižek rather humorously manages to differentiate ideologies by close examination of  their sewage disposal systems. In the German toilet, for instance, the shit lies on the pan (for inspection?) before being flushed away. The Germans are reflective, contemplative, philosophers and poets. In the old French toilets, the shit immediately disappears down the hole, symbolising the sudden revolutionary spirit of the French. In  the British toilet, the shit floats in water, symbolising the practical, pragmatic, hygienic use of water to stop the smell, for instance. However, as Lacan says, 'when it comes to the equation great civilisation equals pipes and sewers, there are no exceptions'. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel would agree when she suggests strongly the link between the anal and perversion, which aims symbolically to reconstitute primordial Chaos and the reversal of values, 'out of which arises a new kind of reality, that of the anal universe. This will take the place of the psycho-sexual genital [Oedipal] dimension, that of the Father'. (Creativity and Perversion.1984. FABooks, p11). To put it simply, in the anal universe, there is no difference, no differentiation: it's the same boring shit wherever you find it. October 18th 2009 Žižek co-opts Donald Rumsfeld's logic to explain ideology. Famously, Rumsfeld's "theory of knowledge" runs like this. Firstly, there are known knowns: things that we know we know. Secondly, there are known unknowns: things that we know we don't know. Thirdly, there are unknown unknowns: things that we don't know that we don't know; things that are so off the radar that we have no inkling of them at all, and no knowledge of not knowing them. The one formula that Rumsfeld significantly leaves out, the fourth type of "knowing" - unknown knowns: things that we know, but we didn't know that we knew them! The things that are in us without us knowing that they are there. Things that are more in us than we care to admit; the ideology that has formed us, the sets of prejudices that we are unaware that we have. The beliefs that inhabit us without our admitting to believing in them! The classic example in Ireland is the lapsed Catholic who still occasionly goes to Mass, but who boasts to others that 'he really doesn't believe all that superstitious nonsense'! He has his children baptised and sends his children to Catholic school because it is what a lot of people still do. The role of psychoanalysis is to reveal this "knowledge" in the unconscious, the ideological truth as revealed in speaking. October 14th 2009 Timothy Natchbull says he has forgiven the IRA who murdered his grandfather, earl Mountbattan, and his twin brother Nicholas aged 14. He now understands the politics of the "war". Knatchbull says, 'we were seen by some as symbols of the British state. We were totemic for the system of foreign owners and landlords. Having taken that truth on board, it became clear it wasn't just about me forgiving them, it was about me understanding that to some degree I needed to be asking their forgiveness. I can see someone saying: who does this man think he is, coming back, trying to be forgiving of us? He should be asking our forgiveness for the misery inflicted on Ireland for generations by the British'. It took time and psychotherapy, visits back to the scene of the crime and the morgue where his brother was taken. Thirty years ago on August 27th, 1979, the IRA blew up Moutbattan's fishing boat in Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, as it set off to check his lobster pots. On board were Timothy's mother, Mountbatten's adored eldest daughter Patricia, her husband John, Lord Brabourne, his mother the Dowager Lady Brabourne, 14-year-old twins Nicholas and Timothy, and Paul Maxwell, a 15-year-old Enniskillen boy who holidayed in the village and helped on the boat. Knatchbull's parents were injured. His grandmother died in hospital. Paul Maxwell and Nicholas died instantly. Knatchbull himself escaped with shrapnel wounds, perforated eardrums and damage to his already weak right eye. That same day 18 British soldiers were ambushed and killed at Warrenpoint, Co Down. Later, Mountbatten's former house manager told Knatchbull that gunshots of celebration rang out only a few miles from Mullaghmore that night. Natchbull has forgiven the perpetrators of this terrible crime; he has forgiven the unforgivable - the brutal killing of defenceless civilians. In so doing, he has been able to say goodbye to his beloved twin brother and who could blame him for wanting to "move on". However, this forgiveness is utilitarian rather than ethical, as the perpetrators have shown no regret. Forgiveness makes the one who forgives feel better. Who has the right to forgive, unilaterally, these so-called political criminals? Does not his forgiveness of them weaken the formal inhuman seriousness of their crime? Is it not ironically a dismissal of their crime, implying that it was not such a serious act because time can heal the wounds inflicted? Maybe his forgiveness is a subtle kind of colonialism mark two, enabling Natchbull to carry on now again with his privileged life. October 11th 2009 Speaking on Radio 4's Broadcasting House today, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the IRA Brighton Bomb, three victims of modern terrorist violence talk about forgiveness. Norman Tebbit, who together with his wife was a victim of the IRA bomb, Frank Gardner, injured alongside his camera man Simon Cumber, who was killed in an Al Qaeda attack in Saudi Arabia in 2004, and Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the 7/7 bombings in London, all agree that they will probably never be able to forgive the perpetrators. Norman Tebbit hopes that there is a special place in hell reserved for such terrorists, in which he would place not only the bombers themselves, but also the planners, the leadership, everyone connected to the crime, where they would suffer for ever. He acknowledges, however, that if they seriously repented by, for instance, going to the authorities to reveal the chain of command that supported the IRA bomber, Patrick Magee, it might be a different matter. Frank Gardner says he could never his attackers. And Julie Nicholson said that she would resist forgiveness, 'with every fibre of my being'. Of course, it has been suggested to each of these victims at various times that "they should forgive", which betrays the true isolation of victims of violence, by everyone who wishes them to "move on". To forgive people who have no contrition makes a mockery of forgiveness. To be asked to forgive, is 'nothing more than trite', as Nicholson says, and she continues, 'I will be angry until I take my last breath'. The crimes against these people are of such meaningless dimensions (random, chaotic, pitiless), that the victims' refusal to forgive is, in essence, refusal to "normalise" the crimes. To forgive is part of the meaningful triad: crime, punishment, forgiveness. However, the last element, forgiveness, depends upon genuine repentance, which is lacking in each situation. By exposing the chain of command, Patrick Magee, for instance, would be risking his own life too, which would be a repentance that matches the magnitude of the crime. Without such a real gesture, the victims are left with a rage of Nietzschian proportions, which rightly resists any appeasement or healing by time. This gives a proper ethical depth to the controversial Lacanian notion of, "not giving ground to one's desire". October 8th 2009 When Slavoj Žižek says, 'Law is for immature people who need an external master; when we can act spontaneously we no longer need the Law' (p281, The Monstrosity of Christ. Short Circuits, 2009), he provides a rare moment of clarity. Žižek is engaged in discussion with Terry Eagleton on the Christian notion of Grace, which resolves the seemingly eternal conflict between the Law and desire, whereby Law creates or evokes desire and then goes on to punish it. Eagleton has been suggesting that Law or the Name-of-the-Father is itself desirous - it desires our well-being, like a good father who is a wise authority that wants the best for his children. Love (agape), therefore, resolves the antagonism between Law and desire. However, in addition, love (incarnate in Jesus) is on "our" side against the "powers of this world". From this perspective, the Law itself (as well as desire) is transgressive. It was the Law, the State, not the Father, which crucified Jesus. Love, therefore, appears to do two things: it reconciles the antagonism between Law and desire; and, it reveals this world, the world order of the Symbolic, as more or less obscene, thus raising the possibility of new radical antagonisms, new revolutionary potential, beyond the status quo. This is Žižek's 'spontaneity that no longer needs the Law', or is it? This is where Žižek risks the trivialisation of his own complex thinking. For where have we heard this ambiguous word, "spontaneity"? Or rather, where today, do we not hear it? Is it not used to justify any outpouring of feeling?  It is those "immature" others who need the Law! Such arrogant superiority masquerading as "spontaneity"; it is everywhere these days, attacking everything, especially the good, especially the well-meaning!   October 4th 2009 The political-media class wins the Lisbon vote by a two-to-one majority. How could they have possibly failed this time, given the cynical coming together of political opponents, who sink their non-differences as part of the post-political virtual game. The mega-machine of Europe will now roll on without resistance. All were congratulating themselves as the foreign correspondents were packing their bags early, with no interesting story to sell. Ireland passed up its opportunity to make Europe take notice. As one comment suggested, Ireland has voted for the last time, yesterday!  This is a victory for Sameness, against a backdrop of fear and anger - a certain huddling together in the darkness. For a time the yawning gap of the Real of antagonism is closed over. As just a hint of that darkness, the Ceann Comhairle (speaker) of the Irish parliament, John O'Donoghue, chose the day of the Lisbon vote to release yet more details of his massive expenses, in the hope that that little scandal would go unnoticed.   October 1st 2009 The Lisbon Treaty with its labyrinthine text is the perfect vehicle for projection. The Left see it as a vehicle for creeping neo-conservative policies, the privatisation of public services with the "race to the bottom" in terms of workers wages and conditions which individual governments would eventually be powerless to prevent; likewise the increased militarisation that Europe might engage in as it faces continent wide threats. The Right see the possibility of a take-over by cryto-Communists, who want increasing State control of our lives, taxes, healthcare, education, and so on, and aggressive secularists who want to legalise abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, across all states. The same amorphous Treaty; polar opposite viewpoints. Just like postmodern reality itself, the more complexly nebulous and equivocal it becomes, the greater the aggressive conviction of conspiracy theorists, precisely because of their contradictions. However, as Freud reminds us, even gross delusions have a kernel of truth. The EU will go both ways (Left and Right) at the same time! In the background the same fear of the impersonal big Other. September 30th 2009 The New Electric Ballroom, performed by the Druid theatre company, is set against the backdrop of the urban middle class fantasy of the 'emotionally stultifying effects of small town life'. Maybe this play by Enda Walsh involves the cryptic racism of the chattering classes masquerading as pity, concern or even interest, certainly humour. But racism always contains a core of truth. Three sisters, Breda (Rosaleen Linehan), Clara (Ruth McCabe) and Ada (Catherine Walsh) endlessly speak and act the dark fantasies of painfully failed love in the New Electric Ballroom of their youth. Now, they are shut off from the world beyond their kitchen, while endlessly evoking the morbidity of that world. The 'exhilarating wordplay and the sheer visceral power of his stories', bring to mind the bleakness of Pat McCabe, or a darkened Under Milk Wood.  The sisters are women 'stamped by story' and 'branded, marked and scarred by talk. Boxed by words'. The youngest Ada works in a canning factory, 'turning fish into numbers'.  The sisters' only caller is Patsy (Mikel Murfi) who delivers fish. Patsy speaks himself into a manic frenzy, 'with a ball of butterflies growing inside me' and the sea getting smaller and the cliffs receding and the seagulls laughing at him: 'What is the purpose of you, Patsy? What is the purpose of me? Too big a question. Run on, Patsy'. Patsy is symbolically reborn by being hosed down, to smell, not of fish, but like a baby and he tells and sings his impossible story of love for Ada: but 'my own heart's too scarred by days and nights alone..to face into the unknown with just love as a map...and now this great space with me running over it towards nothing...My heart ripped out and I can't stop running...'. September 28th 2009 Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions (Britain), gave it all away when he said that as a society we had ‘moved on’ since the days when it was a crime to assist a suicide. What Peter Hitchens calls 'the killing of the inconvenient', in which he also cites the same middle class liberal avowal of abortion and a similar 'moving on' from when backstreet abortions were common, nevertheless underlines the secret violent core that sustains secular ideology. In this apparently innocent and progressive sounding notion, "moving on", lies an exclusion principle, at the heart of contemporary biopolitics - the politics of "bare life". From the point of view of secular logic, moving on always seems justifiable on the basis of "my right to choose", when I die, or whether or not the foetus within me continues to live. On the wrong side of this line (decided arbitrarily) you are subject to the exclusion principle and you become bare life, i.e. you leave the Symbolic and enter the Real, or in the case of the foetus you remain as remainder. It is not hard to imagine what we might move on to with an ageing population and scarce resources. September 27th 2009 Fiona Pilkington killed herself and her daughter after more than a decade of abuse from the 16-strong gang (the inquest was yesterday). At one point her son Anthony, now 19, was marched at knife-point to a shed and beaten with an iron bar. The gang threw stones, made threats and screamed abuse on a daily basis. Ms Pilkington wrote in her diary that she was "stressed out" and "couldn't sleep". Some of the gang were children from a particular family that 'refused to accept that their children had done anything wrong'. Ms Pilkington contacted local police 33 times over seven years but nothing was done and she was told she was 'overreacting'. An extreme example of the atomised society, where this family was let down by the council, the social services and police, but also by family and neighbours. Where were the others on her street? Where were her family? September 23rd 2009 If it is the stability of marriage that is the key factor in children's well being and the reason why marriage, as such, is so successful, should society be trying to get all partnerships - gay and straight - founded on a proper binding contractual basis? Stability and marriage seem to go together. Marriage should be relatively difficult to get into and difficult to get out of, with a range of financial incentives for being in and staying in marriage. The key seems to be the relative stability offered by public ritual and public commitment, not so much the gender of the individuals concerned. The overwhelming problem for children is adult "freedom" and adults who "walk away", disturbing fundamental bonds, causing lasting distress and loss. September 20th 2009 John Gray, author of a new biography on William Golding, speaking in Dun Laoghaire last weekend, jokes Declan Kybird, author of a new book on Ulysses, that Ulysses is not a page turner. It is, in fact 'boring' and part of a tradition that made reading extremely hard. He cites the example of a woman friend who had difficulty sleeping until she hit upon the idea of reading some of Joyce which effectively cured her insomnia. He speculated that with the advent of mass literacy early in twentieth century, certain writers raised the bar and started writing in a way that the ordinary man or women found impenetrable. Rather in the same way, just a psychoanalysis became part of ordinary culture and available to a mass readership in the middle of the last century, Lacan et al similarly created an obscurantist style thus developing a new echelon of academic readers, who, in turn, are now becoming a new mass readership in the twenty-first century. September 15th 2009 It is clear that the new ISA scheme is meeting resistance. The State representatives say, 'we're only doing our best to protect children'. However, the scheme's effect is a good illustration of the Pauline idea that, 'the Law brings to light that man is sinful'. The Law implies that each adult (to be vetted) is a sinner, no matter how reassuring the scheme's proponents are. You have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong! But who has done nothing wrong? Who has not thought secretly of doing wrong? The generally good and decent adults who have always wanted to help out with children may well be scared off by this "enlightenment" of the Law, into their sinful nature. For instance, men will not sign up to teach in primary schools. In other areas of work with children, people are reluctant to volunteer. The good adults will be deterred and the bad, devious, perverts will thus be insentivised to colonise the space vacated. Oozing with pseudo-concern, the State pretends to care about children, when all it is doing is putting in a new layer of bureaucracy to cover its real indifference.       September 14th 2009 John Humphrys of the Today programme: 'We are now afraid to smile at a child in the park'. The new Vetting and Barring child protection measure, which is in addition to CRB checks, has met with a mixed reception in U.K. Any parent regularly in "frequent" or "intensive" contact with children will have to undergo criminal record checks or face fines of up to £5,000, unless they have a cert from the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The battle lines are drawn: Children fear adults as potential paedophiles; adults fear children as potential muggers. Under the euphemism of, 'the sharing of information', people are now being encouraged to spy on each other to a greater extent than ever before. This new scheme, as Humphrys rightly implies, is a quantum leap in the State's intrusion into ordinary social relations, interfering with informal arrangements that have gone on for generations. This new law will create more paedophiles. You will only be barred if you already have a conviction. Having a clearance certificate lulls people into a false sense of security with inevitably less informal checks occurring. A new shadow space opens that paedophiles are expert at exploiting, under the radar.    September 12th 2009 It emerges that the members of the Taxation Commission set up to review the Irish taxation system in the wake of the credit crash, are mostly taxation consultants, the very same people who have been involved in enabling the very wealthy to avoid tax by exploiting loopholes during the Tiger years. Apparently, there are more than 100 loopholes to be exploited, so that the most wealthy people in Ireland who have fuelled the property boom have been allowed to remain super-rich. Meanwhile the rest of us will have to put up with their recommendations for property taxes, water charges and carbon taxes. It is a case of poachers turned gamekeepers and also a case of, 'to those who have been given more shall be given' - an excess of self-preservation. Ironically, Jesus was referring to the abundant gratuity, the plenitude of God's Mystery. In what Steiner has called the "Real absence" at the heart of a secular society, no money, no power will ever be enough; this is another way of understanding the radical instability at the heart of capitalism. September 10th 2009 While moderm liberal democracies masquerade as pale versions of New Testament living - tolerance for the other, equality before the Law, concern for ecology, advocacy of non-violence, and so on. All the cracks are at once apparent while at the same time covered over. For liberal democracy is not the natural end point of history, but instead stands revealed as an ideology. 'Once there was no secular' - the opening lines of John Millbank's Theology and Social Theory. Milbank's crucial insight is that the secular is not just what is left behind after we have rid ourselves of religion and superstition, leading us onto the high ground of objective, dispassionate, rational view of ourselves, in which we find ourselves as self-sufficient. It is nothing less than a particular contemporary set of beliefs and practices arising from the Enlightenment, violently negating what went before. These days, secularism's conceit is that it is peace-loving! Oppose its ideological tenets and you will be marginalised. Milbank's point is that since the breakdown of the "Medieval Consensus" (Aristotelian-Thomist informed Christianity) the notion of Grace and Gift have been replaced by pure power relations, "rights", contractual relations, based on self-preservation; in short based on implicit or explicit violence.  September 6th 2009 Declan Kybird's Irish Times essay, last Saturday: 'The elements that today might form a national culture are not so readily identifiable. The Irish language? Gone in most places by the 1860s. Traditional religion? In free fall since the 1970s. Political nationalism? Emphatically repudiated in the Belfast Agreement. Far from being addicted to so-called core values, our people are willing to jettison them once they seem no longer of immediate use'. What is left according to Kybird is an American life-style conformism. The so-called "liberation" from our core values has precipitated Ireland into post-modernity in recent decades, creating a kind of violent decompression, crises on many levels simultaneously - political, economic, ethical - with a clear dearth of leadership. Into this vacuum came the mad-manic explosion of the property boom, pissed party-goers and celebs. Now comes the picking up the fragments, the litter of modernity, its recycling and maybe the emergence in time of something new. As Beckett famously said, 'Imagination's dead; imagine'! Lacanian psychoanalysis tells us that we must live without enchantment; that nothing exists; there will be no reassurance, consolation and so on. Correctly, it resists the empty consolations of much therapy culture. But it is a recipe for the destitution of the subject: life is nothing, enjoy! September 2nd 2009 Crash, by J.G. Ballard. HarperCollins. 1973. The narrator, also called James Ballard, smashes his car by skidding on a motorway slip-road and colliding with another, setting off a whole pathological erotics of trauma. 3 years after this book was published, Baudrillard referred to cars and car-crashes as the modern form of sacrifice in an otherwise desacralised world (Symbolic Exchange and Death). Ballard's crash in which he kills a doctor, injures the doctor's wife and himself, forms the nucleus for an inexorable sacrificial logic that will equate sex and death, that eroticises the hard chromium edges of windshields, dashboard switches and vinyl interiors, on the one hand, and technologises sex - pulsating orifices and orgasmic ejections, one the other. His fascination is the conjunction of hard technology with soft orifice. 'The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality'.(p81). Freud quipped that dreaming about sex in a motor car signified auto-eroticism; Ballard, recovering from his accident, complains that, now, since the crash, he can only have sex with his wife in a motor car! The scene is set in the 'machine landscape', the inhuman spaces of W. London motorways, embankments, service stations, flyovers, slip roads, leading up to Heathrow Airport. For the author, 'a man in a motor car, driving along a concretely highway to some unknown destination', more than anything depicts the old century. 'Here, we see all too clearly the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine, and conceivably, with its own death and destruction'. (Autopia) While, it is true that cars were sold with what used to be touchingly referred to as "sex-appeal", the full eroticisation of the technology was always repressed. Here, in this surreal story, the fusion of all with all, occurs in a way reminiscent of Bataille and the so-called "passion for the Real". The trauma of the crash redefnes the co-ordinates of the narrator's life. As Martin Amis says, this story is 'like a clinical case of chronic shock, confusedly welcomed by the sufferer'. Ballard, the narrator, relives the crash by having an affair with the wife of the man he killed (again, sex limited to the car), then, comes under the influence of Vaughan, a former T.V. scientist, who now devotes all his energies chasing and filming crash scenes (found by listening into VHF by police radio) and collecting around him crash victims who, like Ballard, are caught in the same loop of the repetition compulsion. Vaughan craves the ultimate crash scene. 'In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die'.(p167). A one point Vaughan produces a piece of blood-stained leather cut from the seat of a car in which a woman died. For Vaughan, this was a 'saintly relic [which] contained all the special magic and healing powers of a modern martyr of the super-highways'.(p155). A cautionary tale, that, at a quick humorous glance today, might be used for promoting road safety, like those films that warn against drink-driving, or drug films that warn against horrors of addiction. The safety education mind-set is still blissfully unaware of the domain of Jouissance. When we see suffering we should be warned and scared off; instead there is always the danger of being turned on. Here, in the orbitals of the Home Counties of all places (associated with wealth and security!), Ballard has achieved a glacial accuracy in his pitiless portrayal of an erotics, taken to its logical extreme, devoid of humanity. August 31st 2009 The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Picador, 2006), a book about the aftermath of an unknown global catastrophe, where a lone father and young son attempt to survive on the Road with whatever they can salvage from the ash-strewn, grey-black landscape where nothing, it seems, has been left untouched by the devastation of some kind of fire-storm. Now, however, by contrast it is permanently cold. 'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blinds dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like two ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it'. (p138). Both, the boy and the man are un-named by the author as all former signs of civilisation and history, itself, are slipping away - 'the world is shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat'. (p93). They break into long abandoned houses that have already been looted and scavenge what they can. All we know is that the clocks stopped at 1.17 and there were a series of low concussions and this was some years ago. The migratory birds flee never to return. The "other", no longer neighbour, is to be feared - 'the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes'. (p192). The end point of secularism: 'There is no god and we are his prophets' (p181). However, we are given no better example of the psychoanalytic notion of, "the father coming between the son and death": 'He tried to talk to God, but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget'. (p306). The care given by the father to the son stands in such contrast to the glacial ashen landscape where even the sea is gray and all is lifeless. 'And then later in the darkness: can I ask you something? Yes. Of course you can. What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. (p9). August 20th 2009 A culture whose final value is the autonomy of the individual, individual rights and entitlements - our contemporary liberal environment - that dismisses as laughable the radical notion that "life is a gift" and that "nothing belongs to us"; this society will be fundamentally a violent one, a battle of wills, with the State wielding the greatest power with increasingly bureaucratic surveillance and law enforcement (indeed torture of suspects, where individual rights are suspended). Naturally, as it were, we are drawn to violent realities, to random violence, because this seems more real than the platitudinous surface. Our telos, therefore, is the death drive, beyond the pleasure-reality principle. Whence, comes the desire to break down all barriers to the expression of violent eroticism and the celebration of this as "good". Meantime, we go in fear of the "undead" - viruses that might mutate and run out of control, climate change catastrophe, and so on, thereby externalising the evil that is at the heart of the system.       August 19th 2009 Ryan Tubridy, a RTE chat show host, is ultra-light and represents a typical end point of the secular. Last week he was interviewing an Irish contestant who had managed to get herself into the Big Brother house. Asked why she chose such a path, she answered that she just wanted to be famous. Even Tubridy paused for a few seconds at this unwitting banality. How is it that a young woman who has had a good education aspires just to be famous with nothing added? How is it possible to be so empty and vacuous, to become a slave to the violence of the Imaginary register? Because violence is what is at stake as Tubridy reminded her, yet this same show host depends on it. The life cycle of the celebrity false persona is well known: rapid promotion to a god-like figure, who will then be destroyed and shamed in the most extreme ways possible. And the so-called "culture of celebrity" has been spreading through all media, so it is not just the airheads, but more seriously thoughful people in business, publishing, and even academia, who are subject to the same emptyings that they cannot control. It is a symptom of cultural exhaustion. As Baudrillard says: 'Henceforth, the world is there, immanent; the world is totally self-evident and this self-evidence is unbearable'.(Fragments, p105. Italics added).   August 16th 2009 'From the red of the vine set upon the wall, one will never draw - even as its law - the autumnal shadow upon the hills, which envelops the transcendental reverse of this vine'. (Alain Badiou). August 13th 2009 Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc) currently pit themselves against both Evangelical Protestants and resurgent Islamists - at least this is the tabloid view. Both groups of fundamentalists are no longer in the domain of belief as such, but in the realm of strident absolute knowledge. As the sign for one Church in American runs: We do not believe in God; we KNOW God. For them, it is no longer a matter of the mystery of faith, but literal certainty. And we should expect a similar move to be made by Atheists - with their evidence base, Scientism. The move for both protagonists is from the (uncertain) symbolic forms of faith and belief to the brutal Real of absolute knowledge. However, into the fray comes a much more nuanced and academic account of what is at stake in this debate, made over the last two decades by the Radical Orthodoxy movement (RO). It would be fair to say that Evangelical Protestants, Islamists and Secularists (Atheists) are understood by RO to deny, in their different ways, any notion of transcendence and to have replaced faith as such, by the reign of totalising Reason. RO's particular focus of criticism, however, is Secularism and it current hegemonic status in the West. Secularism prides itself on having done away with what its regards as religious superstition and obscurantism and ushered in the Enlightenment. RO, on the other hand, asserts, or re-asserts the traditional orthodox Catholic teaching of Aquinas (when faith and reason were inseparable) while at the same time being familiar and fully engaging with (Radical) post-modern thinking - Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, and so on. Both RO and post-modern theorists agree that mystery founds what we understand as "reality": at the heart of things there is an unfathomable void. John Milbank, professor of religion, politics and ethics at the University of Nottingham and founder member of RO debates with Slavoj Žižek, Lacanian-Marxist theorist and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, in an important new book entitled The Monstrosity of Christ, which raises the intellectual bar considerably. Žižek refers to himself at one point as a "materialist theologian". For him, Christ is the monstrum (monster), the exceptional one that cannot be accounted for, the traumatic irruptive event, that founds the rational order itself. Atheistic secularism denies this grounding mystery. August 12th 2009 What is Richard Dawkins doing parading himself in front of the cameras laughing that belief in God is like belief in fairies? He was interviewed on RTE some time ago saying the same thing - if people really want to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden than that's fine by him. The offence that this should have caused in even a post-Catholic Ireland was left unsaid. And now we have, with much publicity, the Atheist Summer Camp. One of the tasks the children have been set is to disprove the existence of two invisible unicorns they have been told are roaming the camp. The children have been told that unicorns can’t be seen or heard or sensed in any way but we all have faith that they exist. So far no camper has been able to prove they don’t exist. Not surprisingly, there are no prayers or religious services and even the camp fire songs have been vetted for covert references to a deity. Here, one is reminded of the rules of the State registry marriage service in Britain, where any mention of God in any reading or text is completely forbidden. The atheists are clearly having a harder time of it these days, maintaining their cultural space. The negation of the theist pole of the dialectic has never been easy. It requires constant vigilance lest any breakthroughs occur. Likewise, Christians who constantly proclaim their faith are the true unbelievers; as are, more generally, those boring egoic types who betray the fragility of their successes in their own abundant self-praise. And likewise, psychoanalysis must be able to concede its own critical psychoanalytic pole, as Freud did when he described the death drive; as Lacan did when he dissolved the École Freudienne in January 1980. Freud himself was an atheist but he maintained a warm correspondence with the French academic and  mystic, Romain Rolland, from 1923 until his death. August 8th 2009 Reason has the irrational built into it. Reason, uncontrolled, comes to grief eventually in its own destructive skepticism, but then it is too late. (Psycho)analysis should only go so far for fear it trespasses on the private mysterious core of subjectivity - a danger that Winnicott emphasised the most and one that Klein neglected the most. This great danger provides the source of our own proper resistance to the psychoanalytic project. And as for the fantasy of "explaining" contemporary life in terms of events in the womb, or from birth itself, it is, to say the least, unsubtle. The Lacanians have the Real to block the death drive effects of reason. Catholicism has the Mysterium Tremendum. While it is fashionable to think that Catholicism and religions in general are always only interested in blocking reason's advance, it is the other way round: the mysterious void saves reason from itself. Stop believing in God, said Chesterton, and you'll start believing in anything! August 5th 2009 But these machines, these robots and prostheses will save and prolong lives and therefore they must be good. However, when does the good and reasonable mutate into its opposite? When does reason, freed from transcendence, become irrational? At what point does desire freed from constraint become inhuman? The questions multiply and for many they have ceased to be questions. When does what now passes for liberal, rational, tolerant society reveal its essential anarchy and illiberality? If it is only about choices, rights and entitlements, we will never know any answers because in a radically secular society there need be nothing else. The notion that life is a gift, for instance, is foreign.  August 3rd 2009 Robots are in danger of reaching a level of indestructibility comparable to the cockroach, says an article in The Sunday Times (2/8/09). Unmanned predator drones are being used in Afghanistan. Robot guards are being developed that will have a "shoot-to-kill" capability. What is causing the most concern are those artificial intelligence products that perform human functions, like those that can learn human functions, copy our behaviours and can even find power outlets and recharge themselves so that they never stop functioning. "Nursebots"  are robotic nurses that can carry out nursing functions including empathising with their patients. Then there is the increasing risk of a "singularity", the point reached when robots have become so intelligent that they can create newer and more sophisticated versions of  themselves, the AI equivalent, let us say, of critical mass in the atomic sphere. Intelligent viruses are helping criminals to steal peoples' identities by copying their voices on mobile phones and then impersonating them. Some of these viruses already defy eradication. Maybe, what we are witnessing is a confluence of intelligences. As AI comes to resemble human intelligence even to the level of emotional complexity, so human intelligence comes to resemble AI, as the human-machine interface coheres ever more intricately. As human intelligence and behaviour becomes more mechanical and digital, AI becomes more human and empathic. Back in the '70s, Deleuze and Guattari coined the term "desiring-machines", to signify the mechanics of desire in capitalism. As we lose our humanity in favour of the machine and the synthesiser, so the machine poses itself as the healing nursebot, the epitome of soft, maternal, intelligent caring. Such a confluence of intelligences satisfies our deep rational desire for homogeny, for Sameness, and the total absence of transcendence. The ultimate materialist fantasy: all intelligence is One - human or artificial - it is just appearances! August 1st 2009 "Vetting and Barring" and its accompanying database are the flip side of our hedonistic culture and our mass "liberation" from constraints. A non-judgemental culture requires on its underside a digital penalty system impersonally administered. A close circuit, or a short circuit penalty system, an on-off binary system of reward or punishment. The ultimate administration of reason demands this fine precision now afforded by our new technologies, an updated MOT of the psyche, as it were, will objectively determine whether or not one is fit to journey with the vulnerable. Soon, it will be our DNA which will be the ultimate instrument and the triumph of non-responsibility. The barred and the barer, the vet and the vetted, the master and the slave will be freed from the question of responsible judgement. Finally, the vetting and the barring remind us of the animals we are deemed to be. July 30th 2009 The new Vetting and Barring Scheme, being phased in from this October, requires anyone coming into regular contact with children and vulnerable adults to join a new database. From November 2010, this will include authors (according to Writers' Forum) who visit schools more than once a month. This single database replaces other databases and the Criminal Records Bureau check, already in place. Even authors who visit more than once a month will then be included. Anyone coming into regular contact with..., the language implies possible infection or contamination; they might be carrying a malign infective agent. Adults, all adults, until proven otherwise, may carry some foreign erotic Thing (das Ding) that will traumatise children and the vulnerable. We now live in a horror movie where the adults who protect and love you can morph into the evil Thing. They are in your home; they are in your school; they are in your playground. Here fantasy and reality are drawing closer together. At one time, it was felt necessary to create a radical separation with fantasy on the one side (the inner) and reality other the other (the outer). Madness was when you got the two muddled. We are creating a paranoid world where those who are closest to us become the alleged source of our greatest danger. This is not just an individualist culture, or one made up of indifferent individuals. The Vetting and Barring imply mutual repulsion, the direct opposite of relations in traditional cultures. Hospitality, the welcoming of the other, becomes (against Levinas and Derrida) 'hating your neighbour as yourself'. This is the logical and "reasonable" end point of an un-Christian culture. And, ironically, it's the same old fear that returns - the fear of the body and it dangerous sexuality. July 29th 2009 When Vincent Browne (arguably the best and most committed investigative journalist in Ireland) suggested at the time of the Ryan report into institutional sexual abuse, that the abuse may not have happened, or at any rate been much less severe, if the Catholic clergy - bishops, priests and nuns - had been married at the time and had their own children. The spectre, he suggested, of children being savagely beaten and abused would have been too much for them and they would have put a halt to it much sooner. Whatever he is saying about the role of celibacy within the Church, he was making an implicit plea for marriage as a civilising institution that would tend not permit the abuse of children. He is unwittingly in line with those, and there are an increasing number, who state the obvious (backed up by extensive research), that the traditional family is the best institution for the protection of children. Children do best on all indicators when they are in a home with their two biological parents committed to their welfare in the long term. True, married couples tend to have higher incomes which greatly helps, but even when income is taken into account, married couples are still much safer and better for children, than any other arrangement. But as one respondent said after hearing John Ware's recent programmes on BBC 2, "The Death of Respect", where he stressed the role of the traditional family and the community, 'consider the amount of single parent families after WW2, did we have problems then? The reason is simple, we have forgotten that we are a species like any other where discipline is cruel but effective'. So to privilege family structure alone, the nuclear family in particular, is somewhat misleading and seems like a rather desperate last straw to clutch at in an atomised society. In the larger frame, we need to regain our human adult authority with children and stop treating them as equals or as aliens to be feared. However, the government's response to the crisis, here in Ireland, according to so-called "best practice" is to pump €25m into "child protection", i.e. more social workers, more reporting, better co-operation between State agencies, a standardised approach to dealing with abuse concerns and more emphasis on preventive measures. The Irish Times leader today entitled, rather ominously, "Taking care of our children", conjures up an Orwellian scenario where "our" children will indeed be "taken care of", by the State, which is a contradiction in terms. The State does not care! Individual workers do care and do their best, but the State is a bureaucracy, indifferent to outcomes. The State has "contractual obligations" to its "clients", which can be monitored. It "administers" a "service" in an operational language, consuming public money, and it fails to emphasise enough what the dogs in the street know that real child protection is only provided in committed families and communities.      July 28th 2009 The total amount paid back in the MPs' expenses scandal comes to roughly half a million, or less than one thousand pounds per MP. In the scale of fiddling, this is hardly a large sum, not justifying the out-pouring of hostility and scorn aimed at the political class in Britain. According to The Times, police have narrowed down investigations over the expenses scandal to focus on a handful of MPs and peers who could face prosecution. The Times has learnt that senior detectives are concentrating on at least four MPs and some Members of the House of Lords to see if they deliberately misled officials. Maybe we should understand the mass guilt and falling on swords, the depression that was said to have come over the (dis)honorable members, even the risk of suicide, as something of a displacement. With diplacement a marginal idea becomes the focus of attention to distract thinking from a more serious core issue. That more serious issue might have to do with the evaporation of the political from the political, the catastrophic loss of the big ideas that originally informed labour and conservative alike. The expenses hysteria is a proxy that makes our system seem fine - all in order, except for the expenses fiddling which is very small compared to other countries.     July 25th 2009 According to an article in Newsweek (July 20th), "Why fears of a Muslim takeover are all wrong", by William Underhill, there is little to fear from the increasing influence of Islam within Europe, which has led some commentators to create a "myth" that at some time in the near future (2025) Muslims will make up 40% of Europe's population leading to an emerging "Eurabia". Factors such as, secularism and easy tolerance or moral relativism, mass immigration and higher birth rates among Muslims, reluctance to defend Western values, the appeasing of Muslim opinion, and so on, will cause Europe to succumb to "creeping Islamisation". Toppling these so-called myths, the author claims that governments in Europe are already centre-Right, i.e. likely to control immigration, that Muslim fertility rates are likely to fall as income increases, that there are 'no powerful Muslim political movements in Europe', that Muslim attitudes vary widely to homosexuality and sex outside marriage, for instance, and that 'Muslims overwhelmingly disapprove of terrorism'. Muslims in France are largely 'decoupled from their religion. They just blend into an amorphous mass of brown or black people' (says Ali Allawi, former Iraqi defence minister and author of The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation).      There is something very debilitating about these deconstructions. The patronising assumption is that Muslims will "blend in", that they are weak politically, that they will forsake their religion (or at least practise it privately), that they will accept our values and cause no trouble! Surely, it is this kind of smug indifference to difference that fuels the terroristic impulse. Maybe it is not our foreign wars that recruit youth to the Jihad, but our colonising null mindset that just wants "them" to blend in to our urban lowest common denominators - booze, sex and sport - without causing any trouble. Maybe they are horrified, as we should be, by what Badiou calls the atonal world (monde atone), a world without a quilting-point, a point-less world, or maybe, a world without music.         July 21st 2009 Donal Barrington (Retired Irish Supreme Court Judge) has said recently that he still remembers Ireland in the 1950s: bare footed children on Dublin's O'Connell Street; Irish business men doing "the Killiney flit", literally disappearing overnight; Irish emigration reaching a 100,000 a year; people simply abandoning their houses in the poorer parts of Dublin because they could no longer afford them; the population falling to as low as 2.8m; a book by an American Jesuit called, The Vanishing Irish, which imagined the failure of the Irish State and the Irish being dispersed across the globe like the Jews. The role of Ireland, at that time, was to provide cheap labour and cheap food for the British market and to provide soldiers for the British Army. He was talking in the context of the importance of the EU for Ireland's stability and our need to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. Thirty years later, during the 1980s people spoke of the Irish State being threatened again, this time by the violent subversive power of the IRA. Thirty year further on, in 2008 and 2009, the fear is that the State is threatened yet again, this time by the collective greed of the elites causing massive overspending, massive debt and the generalised corruption, cynicism and gangland drug related violence that a loss of core values creates. July 19th 2009 Dominic Savage's Free Fall (BBC2) captures the seductive dynamics of the credit crisis. Opening in the very different times of 2007, the story follows the fates of individuals at three levels.  City banker Gus (Aidan Gillen) is at the top doing mega-deals selling packages of debt for vast profits in language that no one can understand. At the bottom are the poorer families who’ve signed up for discounted deals and are suddenly faced with a mortgage they can no longer pay. And in the middle of it all is Dave (Dominic Cooper), a cool but hyper mortgage salesman. When he bumps into an old school friend Jim (Joseph Mawle), married with two children, who’s still renting a council flat in the street where he grew up, Dave sees it as his duty to persuade Jim to take advantage of the discounted deals on offer. Driven by the new superego injunction to "Enjoy", Jim becomes aware of his "lack" and signs up to buying the dream house. After a year the discounted mortgage increases by £300 a month and the family home is re-possessed. In an ethically satisfying moment, Jim manages to track down Dave and beat him up. But Dave is undaunted, as at the end of the film, we see him selling "green" products with an effortless switch of ideology to a well off woman concerned about the planet. July 15th 2009 It is truly amazing, that, as Bryan Appleyard points out in The Sunday Times (July 12th), you can see a film of gross pornographic violence, like the upcoming Antichrist by Lars von Trier, which Appleyard thinks has absolutely nothing to recommend it, and yet an episode of  Friends on DVD had to be reclassified last month because the phrase "laundry spaz" was used to describe Jennifer Aniston's Rachel, who couldn't load a washing machine. We have, therefore, a clear split between the Right, concerned with escalating violence on screen and off, the interaction between the Real and the Imaginary and the general coarsening of culture, and the Left, concerned chiefly with Symbolic violence - the violence of language. This ideological split works in many areas. Criminal violence, for instance, and its horrific effect on innocent victims has to be conceded by the Left, but their main preoccupation is with the civil rights of the criminal; is the criminal, himself, deemed a victim of symbolic violence, being written-out or written-off by the Law? Indeed words like "criminal", "thug", "hooligan", are part of this violence of language. The same logic surrounds signifiers such as "insurgents", "terrorists", "militants", "freedom-fighters", and so on. The wrong linguistic designation can perpetuate an ongoing symbolic violence against these human subjects. The fact that these same human subjects may have "chosen" to kill innocent civilians, going about their daily lives, is normally "a matter of regret". The irony is that the incremental coarsening of culture and the nuclear energy thus freed that corrupts the social, requires urgent attention. The Left's response is via language - the policing of language and a raft of new laws protecting minorities. However, the often silent suffering of the majority is failed by both Left and Right. This majority includes not just the specific victims of criminal violence, but those frontline workers in health, in particular A and E, education, the police, prison officers, social workers and so on, who face daily the consequences of social breakdown.  July 12th 2009 'The most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause'.(p32). The Road to Wigan Pier, is a very detailed first-hand account of Orwell's experiences of working class life in the industrial heart land of Northern England, during the mid-thirties, in which he documents poverty, unemployment, slum housing, coal mining, squalor, hunger - the underfed population is estimated between 10 and 20million, and above all, class antagonism. The dole is 30/- a week to support a family. Milk is 3d a pint, a pint of mild 4d, tobacco 1/- per week, meat 2/6, potatoes, bacon, dripping, tea, each about 1/- per week. Peas, carrots, onions, cabbage total 1/-. Rent 9/-. Coal and gas total 3/3. The diet consists of white bread and marg, corned beef, sweet tea and potatoes. Most people in industrial districts have lost all their teeth by the age of 30. Death rates are about double the better off parts of town. The dole is about £75 a year, while a true bourgeois might earn £2,000 and a struggling lower middle class gentleman like Orwell, or a teacher, a parson or a small shop owner may struggle to earn £400 a year. 'I think the price of liberty is not eternal vigilance but eternal dirt', (p67).What distinguishes the working class from the middle class is smell. The lower classs smell. And this 'physical repulsion' forms the bodily real of class hatred, beyond any cultural differences. New tenants of the corporation houses coming from the slum are deloused before being allowed to live in their new houses. All their possessions are taken away and fumigated before being returned to them. Such were the conditions in the back-to-back slums, one house looked-out onto the yard with dustbins and toilets while its back-to-back equivalent looked out onto the street. If you lived in the latter, the only way to visit the bins and the toilet was out of your front door, round the end of your terrace, a distance of maybe a few hundred yards. Orwell documents the leaking windows and roofs, the bugs, the cramped conditions, with maybe 8 or 10 living in a three-roomed house, one of them a living room measuring perhaps 12 square feet with a range, a sink, a table and chairs and a dresser. A scene that Orwell says stays in his mind, 'as one of my pictures of Lancashire: the dumpy shawled women with their sacking aprons and their heavy black clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind, searching eagerly for tiny chips of coal'.(p96). Wigan in winter: 'a lunar landscape of slag heaps...factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke...it seemed a world from which vegetation has been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water'.(p98). The 'sinister magnificence' of Sheffield at night: 'sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys'.(p99).      The later part of the book is devoted more to Socialism and the types of people Orwell understands socialists to be. His view is that while socialism is profoundly necessary, ordinary working class people are put off by, what we would now call, the "nerds" that expound Socialist ideas. These fall into two categories: theoreticians including the literary ones and 'odd types', 'every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, feminist in England'. Orwell understands the nature of modern industrialisation as becoming more and more collective in nature, on the one hand, and more mechanised on the other. His warning is that if Socialism does not provide for this, then Fascism surely will. He has at least two related further concerns that border on the inhumanity of Socialism: its love not so much of equality and ending misery, but of order, 'reduc[ing] the world to something resembling a chessboard', and secondly, its love of efficiency and technology. His chapter on the increasing use of machines to replace human activity prefigures the automisation of the world and the "liberation" of humans into quite what, is his key question. He worries about the increasing soullessness of modernity. What marks this work out from its present time counterparts is its freedom from jargon, theorisation or any particular paradigm, be it Marxist or psychoanalytic. This is Orwell's own thought and concern. Throughout, he remains the English gentleman that he was always marked out to be. In a very interesting passage he makes this clear how language determines us: 'Nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinctions...notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful are essentially middle class notions...even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing...'.(p149).  From here he marks out his key point that class antagonism is real and "impassable". 'From whichever way you turn this curse of class difference confronts you like a wall of stone'.(p145). Not only that, but that the people who advocate change, rarely actually want it because the whole basis of their critique (and today their academic and research funding streams)  would disappear. 'Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed'.(p146). However, Orwell cannot anticipate the horrors to come in the shape of the global racism of the next decade and the crimes that will be committed by just such mechanised utopian regimes that he is imagining.          July 10th 2009 'Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported'. (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier. Penguin Classics, 1937. p32). Here is Helliare Bellock's poem, read while moderating a debate between Chesterton and Shaw: 'Our civilization/ Is built upon coal./ Let us chant in rotation/ Our civilization/ That lump of damnation/ Without any soul,/ Our civilization/ Is built upon coal'. It is this theme belonging to the violent Real of our civilisation, hidden underground (!), that is the inspiration for Orwell's important book.  July 6th 2009 How easily music can evoke transcendental apperception. Listening, for sake of example, to Carla Bley's Selected Recordings album, track 3, "End of Vienna" (1997), and ordinary scenes viewed while listening (on an ipod, for instance) become transformed in fleeting moments and we can "see" them from what must be God's perspective. At the same time such scenes as a family together, or a view of the summer countryside, for instance, are both beautiful and utterly tragic and pitiable. The world is suffused with pity - speechless pity. Music has enabled a breach of, or a rupture in, the opacity of ordinary alienation within the Symbolico-Imaginary universe. The shift is from the mediated-representational universe to the im-mediacy of the Real, the absolute proximity of Otherness. Materialists, from neuroscientists to drug users will say the usual things about the effects of brain chemistry. Ecstacy, for instance, creates similar effects. All this metaphysics is just the familiar "user illusion" phenomenon. And of course these days these nay-sayers, that psychoanalysts tend to hang out with, increasingly have the last word. But then you hear Stevie Wonder's, You are the Sunshine of my Life, and you feel a burst of freedom and celebration! July 4th 2009 Baudrillard, while acknowledging that artists believe they are sincere in approaching their work, refers to their "sublime autosuggestion". (Fragments, 2004. p87). He written frequently about contemporary art turning into its own disappearance, 'its declared self-destruction'. However, artists themselves, refusing any accusation of banality, deem themselves, on the contrary, above and beyond any criticism. They use a kind of blackmail which says, you criticise because you fail to understand; you are just ignorant. It has been the same with psychoanalysis from its inception. First, the Freudians, then the Kleinians and now the Lacanians: if you criticise us you don't understand; in fact, you need (more) analysis. And the more sublime (beyond discourse) the self-assertion, or self-hypnosis, the greater the feeling of immunity from criticism. And with Lacan, especially, you reach the stratosphere, never sure whether you are in the presence of sublime genius, beyond understanding, or the analysis of the absurd, or both. Anyway, as Lacan says, 'the non-dupes-err'. The clever critics who believe they cannot be duped and fooled are the mistaken ones, the ones who fall into the traps of meaning and signification, belonging to the Discourse of the Master. But it is equally foolish to be beholden to some mystical "truth" of the unconscious. Dupes and non-dupes err. More and more people believe more and more things! Dupes abound. The difficulty now is be how to halt sublime autosuggestion and how to stop people believing. Even science is succumbing to belief: do you believe in global warming? Do you believe in evolution? July 2nd 2009 Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in the Soviet gulag, is writing in the Los Angeles Times (26th June). 'Every totalitarian society consists of three groups: true believers, double-thinkers and dissidents. In every totalitarian regime, no matter its cultural or geographical circumstances, the majority undergo a conversion over time from true belief in the revolutionary message into double-thinking. They no longer believe in the regime but are too scared to say so. Then there are the dissidents -- pioneers who dare to cross the line between double-thinking and everything that lies on the other side. In doing so, they first internalize, then articulate and finally act on the innermost feelings of the nation'. He goes on to point-out that Iran has reached the third stage in remarkably quick time. Five years ago, he wrote: 'in the span of a single generation, a citizenry had made the transition from true belief in the revolutionary promise into disaffection and double-thinking. Could dissent be far behind'? The trouble is, however, the world's media and political classes appear in the main have not got past stage one, so the recent massive out-pouring of protest in Tehran has taken us by surprise. If your not so secret aim is to weaken America and to destroy Israel (Holocaust 2), then why would you ever move onto stages two and three? So Iran will continue to repress it citizens brutally and it will be allowed to make the bomb.  June 29th 2009 In our post-Christian world, only the blind can lead the blind, and, by extension, for instance, only gays can lead gays, only women can lead women, only children can lead children, only criminals can lead criminals (like terrorists who are allowed to control a section of the prison), only the Same can lead the Same, and so on and on, with the Other excluded, who never existed anyway. This is the best non-interference, non-judgemental policy that our elite classes not only insist on, but also legislate for. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.(Matthew 15:14). Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind. (Katha Upanishad). June 28th 2009 Nietzsche thinks the void. In his Untimely Meditations he tells the story of the clever little animals who inhabited a miniscule little planet orbiting a mediocre star who developed words like truth and goodness. They thought they could attain genuine knowledge in this essentially dead universe. But their little star eventually cooled that these little creatures died out and with them their proud words and hard gained knowledge. The universe shed not one tear, but merely looked on from its cold, infinite uncaring skies. Maybe some quirk of quantum entanglement has installed this cooling process many decades ago and we are finding it increasingly hard to avoid seeing it. We prefer theories about global warming! June 26th 2009 Writing and thought must pursue the void, must, as it were, shadow the shadow, precisely in order to maintain some critical distance from what passes for reality. The immense pressure on thought today to become fully operational, to serve a function and collapse into the ubiquitous bla, bla, bla order of integral reality, represents the massive ascendancy of instrumental reason. The demand: what is the point of what you are saying/ thinking? Of what use is it to us? Critical thinking must resist this apparently innocent pressure to conform, to join in the debate; the "value" of thinking must not be a priority. Baudrillard understands thinking as counter-gift (Mauss), a use-less giving. Free association, no less, is an effusive drift towards meaninglessness, as are dreams and jokes, all inspired by the void. Black humour and nightmare scenarios are gifts from the Real. The heterology of thought should be allowed its sovereignty beyond our preoccupations with life and meaning. Bion following Kant referred to 'thoughts without a thinker' and what he described, rather movingly, as beta elements searching for a container, where they would be transformed into alpha elements and eventually into our philosophical and scientific systems. Maybe the thoughts themselves would prefer to be left alone! 24th June 2009 It is as if every significant institution in Ireland is being hollowed out from within to become a  mere shell - hard on the outside with nothing in the interior. In this category belong, the Catholic Church, political parties like Fianna Fail, the Dail, the traditional family, the banking and financial system. The hard exterior is well maintained by a massive spin apparatus that each system is obliged to develop to cover it own emptiness. Liberals now tend to accept this analysis, but regard this voiding as a positive, or as a "challenge" (a key signifier), delighting in institutional "radical transformation" and what they call "continuous change". This hollowing out has been brought about by a number of trends, but not least by a kind of institutional sub-suicidal impulse - latent over many years. Maybe each institution, unable to accept it own inevitable duplicity, wants to end it all and join the party like everyone else. Key players (the correct term!) in each area of responsibility have engaged in suicidal ideation with abandon, as we have been discovering: priests, bankers, politicians, parents, liberated from all constraints! June 20th 2009 The proper comparison between modernity and post-modernity is between the cine camera and the digital video camera. The former works by clockwork, light and frames per second. The result is a juddery imperfect picture with wispy edges retaining a certain charm and romance. We understood how the mechanism worked. The video, by contrast, is electronic, digital and perfection itself. Who would not be seduced by the latter. No one understands how it works. The question of charm or romance does not enter here - only full realisation. With the former there is still a margin of freedom, with the latter full digitalisation. What digitalisation stands for is beyond freedom and unfreedom, which join the list of outmoded concepts. Digitalisation is totalisation. June 17th 2009 With two more reports to follow soon, the stories of clerical sexual abuse are still unfolding their horror. In the larger picture, it is claimed that one in four people have suffered physical and sexual abuse in Ireland. That is close to a million people. If that sounds shocking to our civilised ears, it is evidence of how far removed we have all become from the Real in this and so many other ways. Living as we do in a de-caffeinated society, we can no longer bear the brutal harshness of the erotic as understood by psychoanalysis. And without a grasp of this Real, it threatens to overwhelm us. June 15th 2009 The priest, Monsignor Thomas Coonan, who referred to the children in Daingean school (featured in the Ryan Report) as "ruffians" yesterday in his homily, has apologised for causing offence to his parishioners. His careless use of language, his little slip, of course utters the truth. He later modified his remarks saying, 'not all of the boys in the Daingean reformatory were angels'. But he was right on both counts! For, as many have observed, the middle classes at the time were ashamed of poverty and the children that represented poverty and abjection were hived off into these brutalising institutions, out of sight and out of mind. An OECD report in 1965, Investment in Education, found that the Irish educational system was grossly neglectful of children from the poorer classes and that over half left school at or before the age of thirteen. These children left 'no trace' in the administrative apparatus. June 13th 2009 The rant about child abuse, necessary and understandable as it is, becomes madly excessive with comparisons being made with the Camps and the Gulag. In the context of generalised indifference and the diffusion of all values, the screams to be heard get ever louder in the general clamour of complaint. In the absence of any big Other to listen, the rant becomes a rage, an outrage, and the other must be stunned into abject silence. Only victims have an emotive claim on us to be heard and heard forever. With the ceding of all authority and legitimacy, in the absence of objectivity, all that is left is emotion – the force of feelings, a sort of flailing in the void. A new language of feelings, MY feelings, has emerged. There is a new role for the Imaginary and the emotive force of the image. So in order to demonstrate the dangers of driving fast, for example, we must see mangled bodies and grieving relatives. Without access to reason, we will not know that driving fast is dangerous. Similarly, with smoking, the warnings become evermore strident and graphic with diseased lungs and hearts and fears of erectile dysfunction. Every aspect of public education has to be force-fed, “in-your-face” – not through reason, but through fear. Only though terrifying vignettes will the message get through. Hype up fear, for your health, your safety, your life. May contain nuts, a novel by John O’Farrell, about mother who feels so permanently panic-stricken at the terrors of the modern world, catches this mood of permanent risk-aversion. June 11th 2009 The unique position of the Catholic Church in post-Independence Ireland acted as a Lacanian Master Signifier. That is a blind authority which exerts its power with the force of no questions needing to be asked. There is no “why”? It is strictly irrational – not needing to be grounded in reason or discussion. It is this way because we say it is this way. This stops any argument. Meaning is not just fixed but fixated. A dialectic is effectively prevented and democratic processes curtailed. The “slaves” thus created (by the Master) are prone to extremes of every enjoyment and every counter-enjoyment: more alcoholics and more pioneer abstainers; an excess of good and an excess of evil; an excess of violence and an excess of meekness; greed and starvation, and so on. But the slaves gradually learn in secret how to undermine the Master and now, in the new century, they will tolerate no Master, no fixity of meaning. This is a new Master Signifier. There shall be no Master. It is this way because we say it is this way. No questions taken.  June 10th 2009 The generalised indifference of the major parties in Britain has led to the election of two BNP neo-fascists, while in Ireland, as Vincent Browne says, we no longer oscillate between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, but between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dee.  June 8th 2009 Is it not entirely shocking to read that the Archbishop of Dublin, no less, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said that he did not do more about concerns he felt 40 years ago about Artane industrial school because his role ‘as a seminarian in my 20s was in helping those young people to integrate into society’? He says, ‘we did consistently hear stories of severe physical abuse and Dickensian conditions there [in Artane]… This information was common knowledge at that time to those involved in social work with young people’. “Common knowledge” and he himself did nothing, as he, presumably, did not want to damage his chances of advancement in the Church.  He says, ‘Sadly, the Ryan report came so late’. And of course he had nothing whatever to do with this lateness which he is so sad and so hurt about. June 5th 2009 There is a most revealing picture in today’s Irish Times of masked Palestinian Hamas gunmen with new assault rifles across their knees watching the televised speech of US president Barack Obama in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, yesterday. The former operate in the Real, the latter in the Symbolic or better still the Imaginary. Violence is wrong! Obama like the Messiah preaching non-violence appears cool and authoritative, may be operating in a force field off the scale of what passes for reality. Fundamentalists are not believers, they KNOW: I am right; you are dead. June 4th 2009 Public anger is being exploited in order to argue against the continued existence of denominational schools, is correctly pinpointed by the Iona Institute. Even the Government Chief Whip, Pat Carey, has added his voice to those who question the future of denominational schools. ‘I think that progressively, over a period of time, that schools should be divested from their current arrangements, whether it be trusts or directly by religious, into a State system’. According to the Iona Institute, ‘A big part of that agenda is to secularise the education system’. When it comes down to which ideology you would prefer, in the long run, one must prefer the Catholic ideology with all its faults. It is not enough to say, as the Iona Institute does that, ‘we need to put parental choice at the centre of this debate’, and that ‘three-quarters of the public want parents to have a choice of schools to which they can send their children, rather than a State dominated system’. Important as this democratic mandate is at present, it may not last forever in spite of the resurgence of religion across the planet. The key difference is that the Church stands for values that extend back two millennia, while the State remains at the heart of the post-modern crisis of values. Just consider the spineless creepiness of Fianna Fail who in earlier decades was indistinguishable from the Catholic hierarchy (permitting child abuse to take place by default), and now is in thrall to every secular lobby group without exception. With the State, the desert will bloom. June 3rd 2009 According to Patsy McGarry (The Irish Times), the Christian Brothers continued to deny as recently as May 15th last, five days prior to publication of the Ryan report, that there was any abuse in institutions run by them. In letters to the Residential Institutions Redress Board, the Brothers repeatedly insisted that no abuse took place. the Christian Brothers’ province leader Br Kevin Mullan repeats that the only form of corporal punishment allowed by the Christian Brothers in the institutions (for boys) which they ran, was ‘moderate slapping on the palms of the hands with the approved leather strap’. Let us take, at some length, the most radical analysis given to us by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek recently. ‘Here we come to the “heart of darkness” of habits', he says. 'Remember the numerous cases of paedophilia that shattered the Catholic Church? When its representatives insist that these cases, deplorable as they may be, are the Church's internal problem and display a great reluctance to collaborate with the police in their investigations, they are, in a way, right. The paedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns merely the persons who, because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation to the Church as an institution, happened to choose the priesthood as a profession. It is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as such, that is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution. It does not concern the “private” unconscious of individuals, but the “unconscious” of the institution itself: it is not something that happens because the institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal life in order to survive, but something that the institution itself needs in order to reproduce itself. One can well imagine a “straight” (not paedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in paedophilia because the very logic of the institution that seduces him into it’. (Violence, p142). Paedophilia is inscribed into the Church’s very functioning; this is the most extreme anti-Catholic “diagnosis” of our current crisis. It fits with the more general Lacanian notion that every official power structure structures itself of necessity via an obscene (off the scene) violent supplement that is disavowed; every official “positive” rest on an unofficial violent negation. Every institution is two-faced, with one face appearing and the other obscene. For instance, that ‘approved leather strap’ referred to by Br. Mullan, was frequently filled with coins that would make the punishment more corporal. One should also ask, what secret obscenities lie at the unofficial heart of liberal secularism as a modern power structure?  May 28th 2009 Rightly shocked by the revelations of the Ryan Report into institutional child abuse, we should maybe pause for much thought on just four leading contemporary and contradictory ideological positions that continue to affect children's lives. Our attitudes to children now are not as instinctually “loving and caring” as our present outpouring of emotion might lead us to believe. 1) The Catholic prohibition on artificial contraception inevitably resulted historically in very large families that the collective wealth of the newly independent state could not possibly sustain. The result became the taking of many poor children into the degrading and primitive conditions of the industrial care system, where they were abused by those celebates whose young lives were harshly repressed at an early age by the same authoritarian ideology. 2) Today’s liberal secularists who would be most vocal in their condemnation of Catholic institutional abuse, would at the same time accept the need for abortion, that is the “termination” (neutral word, like “collateral damage”) of sentient life right up to possibly 24 weeks, regarding this simply as an unproblematic fundamental right. Secondly, they would seek to so broaden the definition of “family” to include new arrangements that research has shown in very many, but not all cases, to be very detrimental to child welfare, while at the same time expecting the same State, that failed the earlier generations, to pick up the tab for child protection. 3) Sinn Fein, equally vocal in condemning the industrial care system now exposed, also pass over the “accidental” killing and maiming of hundreds of innocent children and their parents in what they still regard as their “legitimate” war in the North. During all those years, the Catholics and the liberal secularists, both here and abroad, including key political figures, with some very honourable exceptions, were constantly hand-wringing but not quite as vocal and effective as they might have been in stopping the obscene violence against civilians and children. 4) The neo-conservative ideology and the unregulated operation of the Market, created such a spiral in house prices, such a growth in inequality, that both parents, except for the wealthy, felt they had no choice but travel large distances to work and leave their sometimes very young children for long hours in the care of strangers, with possibly untold effects in terms of later depression and anxiety states. And in the shadow of the same Market, sex trafficking of young children accelerates. May 25th 2009 Coincidently, psychoanalyst Dany Nobus, from London, has been speaking in Dublin this weekend about perversion. He spoke for 4 hours in total, including discussion, but only the last 20 minutes was given over to our current preoccupations in Ireland, which Nobus was unaware of. The key defence mechanism in perversion is disavowal (verleugnung). It is paradoxical avowal and disavowal at the same time: “I know very well but still…”, or, “I know very well, but I don’t think it’s that bad…”. People knew what was going on in these institutions but disavowed that they knew. In this sense the whole culture became perverse in its excessive religiosity. People disavowed the reality of a traumatic perception (shouts accompanying beatings, unexplained injuries and even deaths). The key psychoanalytic understanding of perversion is that the pervert transfers the suffering that is common to humanity as a whole, onto a suitable victim; the victim becomes the suffering subject while the pervert, who is an “expert” in suffering remains “free” and triumphant as he victimises the victim. The pervert musters all the power of what Freud later called the death drive to inflict total suffering on the victim. In the simplest version, the psychical agencies of superego and the id combine their energies to terroristic effect. Prohibitions will then be enforced with sadistic violence, passed off as God’s will. And since the energy in the superego is borrowed ultimately from the id, they are “natural” allies in claiming territory from the beleaguered ego. The supposed disinterested autonomy of the moral Law meets total objective indulgence of cruelty, contemporaneously with Auschwitz. This is what happened in our institutions. The essential Pauline split between the Law and sin was overcome. If it had not been for the Law I would not have known sin, becomes a diabolical evil that knows neither; instead division is overcome in a return to raw nature, as it were. A few years earlier, Pádraig Pearse had proclaimed that The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. The notion of the “blood sacrifice” implies this same conflation, the same “ethical” extremism tilting at the Sacred and Sacrifice. It might not be so far-fetched to link the more or less culturally enforced “sacrifice” of the young initiates into Religious life and their later perverse “acting-out”, of that same sacrifice on others in their “care”. They took the Law into their own hands literally with whips, canes, belts and so on. They became one with the Law and its brutal enforcement, virtually closing down the space for ego-development. Or, to put it another way, civilisation and civilised values are only maintained in the essential gap that exists between the Law and its transgression; the maintainance of a dialectical relationship between desire and prohibition. Perversion overcomes this division. It literally turns around the Law. The diabolical sense of triumph signals the manic illusion of this overcoming. The pervert “knows” the secret of total desire beyond mere human division and celebrates the evil success of this enactment. However, commentator Eoghan Harris does not involve himself in any such disavowals or cover-ups: ‘The answer is that when it comes to Catholic nationalism, to Corkery's trinity of land, religion and nationality, Irish people seem willing to cover up any atrocity. We cover up the crimes of Catholic farmers and merchants during the Famine. We deny the enforced exodus of at least 60,000 Southern Protestants in the period 1920-22. We whitewash the Provisionals' sectarian campaign against Northern Protestants and their savage punishment beatings of Roman Catholic young boys’. In the words of Nietzsche: human, all too human. 24th May 2009 At least at the beginning of that period, Europe as a whole was flirting with Fascism as an authoritarian ideology par excellence. Young women in Britain for instance, who got pregnant outside marriage were bundled off to mental institutions and in some cases not heard of again. Language terms such as, ‘emotional, physical and sexual abuse’, were not part of the language of the time. The perpetrators were wholly without today’s therapeutic sensibilities. So the religious orders should not be singled out for blame, because a number of factors contributed to the unique position of the new Republic as a whole, in respect of what historian Tom Galvin refers to as ‘the monolithism of the culture of partitioned Ireland and, in particular, the intense authoritarianism and appetite for power of a popular church’. Only a hundred years earlier there was the apocalypse of the Irish famine, followed by the hugely impoverishing effects of the 1922-1923 period, followed in turn by the 1929 crash and the great depression that followed, as well as the trade protectionism and the slump caused by the calamity of WW2. For Galvin, the ‘intellectual conformism’ generated failed the country as a whole and has endangered its future. The sclerosis was generalised as wide ranging vested interests of, for instance, farming, trades unions, the civil service, business, the professions, journalists, as well as clerics, formed an ‘elite complacency’ which allowed gross authoritarianism to flourish largely unhindered. The so-called ‘moral community’ envisaged by Eamon de Valera, Thomas Derrig and John Charles McQuaid was consolidated between the 1938-42 period. To break ranks would have cost you your job or worse. But the appalling question being asked now is just how could the Christian Church lend itself to such totalitarianism? How could such cruel treatment of children be part of God’s plan?   May 21st 2009 The Irish Times has a picture on its front page of lines of beds, end to end, in precise  rows, five on each side of a big central isle, with a Cross prominently displayed at one end, part of a massive dormitory in an industrial school (Artane) that will treat the poor young people in its “care” as objects, as mere things, denying them basic human dignity. The final report of The Child Abuse Commission, the largest investigation of religious orders in Ireland to date, outlines the “systematic”, “endemic”, “emotional, physical and sexual abuse”, inflicted on young people who attended a number of schools, institutions, industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1990s, run by the Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy and other religious orders. More than 800 individuals were identified as having carried out physical or sexual abuse of children during this period. Hundreds of those victims interviewed described “being beaten on every part of their body” and many said “beatings were administered in public” and that “they were sometimes made to remove all their clothing” for public beatings. The report's five-volume catalogue, which runs to 2,500 pages and cost an estimated €70m, took 10 years to prepare, documents the scale of trauma suffered by innocent children under the care of Catholic priests and nuns. It should be conceded that, as a source close to a religious order told the Irish Independent, priests and nuns feared that they would be “scapegoated” in the report and by the media, with less focus being placed [now] on how in harsh economic times many dedicated religious tried to educate and feed children whose care was neglected by the State. The report accuses religious authorities of a “culture of silence”. More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than all other male orders combined. This neglect was endemic and allowed to persist for so long because of widespread collusion by civil servants within the department of education, deemed ‘deferential and submissive attitude’, as well as doctors, teachers, judges, bishops, politicians all of whom “knew” that such perverse practices were widespread. The whole culture is implicated. And Patsy McGarry suggests that ‘It was due to the extraordinarily powerful position of the Catholic Church in this State throughout all of the relevant decades. It was the dominant body in Irish society, to which all deferred out of respect as much as fear’. He refers to, ‘a stain on the Irish character’. He does acknowledge, however, ‘The many great schools, hospitals, and widespread social services were gleaming achievements of the Catholic Church in Ireland during those decades and a massive contribution to the welfare of the Irish people, at home and also abroad’. But what was also revealed by the report was the secret unconscious supplement to this great record, what McGarry refers to as, ‘the parallel, deeply dark underbelly of the church at that time’, with its ‘exercise of absolute power’. He asks: ‘What was it that so dehumanised these men and women that they could perpetrate sustained terror on children’? However, Kevin Myers also points out the tragedy of, ‘all the selflessness and the sacrifices of thousands of religious (many of whom, as teenagers, had been forced into the clerical life by their parents) have just about been forgotten’. His reminder is crucial, although perhaps not today or tomorrow. Myers continues, ‘We have now flipped that society on its head, and we have a new conformism, with another priesthood in place of the old one. A left-liberal dogmatic secularism now prevails, especially in our schools of journalism and in most of its manifestations it is as intolerant as that which it has supplanted’ (emphasis added). We should not forget the case of Nora Wall. However, to say that one “priesthood” equals the other is pure moral relativism as such. The historic systemic violence, the violence that accompanies post-independence Ireland, was, and still remain, wrong, across time. Courageous people even tried to signal precisely that at the time. However, psychoanalysis shows us that brutality has a certain autonomy and it can change sides – from left to right or right to left. Certain individuals lent themselves to this brutality and got fired up into a sexual-violent frenzy by it. They allowed themselves to become instruments of a brutal authority – objectifying the other and themselves in the process. Brutal enjoyment courses through them, and their subjectivity, their humanity and the humanity of the other, is by-passed. They become mere instruments of a violent authoritarianism. This is an entirely perverse deadly logic that strikes terror into the other and indeed the whole culture becomes terrorised into acquiescence and conformity. It is the same logic that inspired the PIRA whose spokesmen and women are still heard to declare: ‘Unfortunately the violence, the killings, were necessary; it is regrettable but it was for the greater good of the larger Cause’. And it is that parent or teacher, about to administer a beating, who says, ‘I can assure you, this hurts me more than it hurts you’; I am not responsible for my acts of violence. 19th May 2009 Last night on TV3, Vincent Browne was discussing issues to do with the local and European elections with four panellists. After the ad break, he invited on Maeve Taylor to join the discussion briefly, a woman, a mother, caught up in the Dublin Monahan bombings of 35 years ago. There had been a small commemoration of that atrocity yesterday. She tells of the carnage in Dublin's Talbot Street and her two young daughters, Michelle and Lisa, who were cut by flying glass. Browne then turns to the panellists and asks for comments. A little later he turns to Toreaisa Ferris (Sinn Fein) and asks her if members of her party ‘feel any sense of shame or embarrassment at all in relation to the 1,500 deaths caused by the IRA over those 30 years’. Toreaisa replies, ‘Certainly not, Vincent. Regret yes, for any lives that were lost, but as a Republican, I have no shame…’. ‘No shame for the Le Mon disaster’, continues Vincent, ‘for Enniskillen, for Bloody Friday, no shame’? He describes the deliberate targeting of Protestants in the Le Mon disaster with fire bombs. ‘No shame, he repeats, not even a particle of shame and you expect people to vote for you…’.        May 16th 2009 With between three and four hundred “hits” a day and rising, this site is barely above the background radiation levels of the internet. But this is not a disappointment, as visibility always involves dilution. Forty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out that television destroys people. What he meant was that in order to fit into the frame one has to alter oneself and what one believes out of all recognition. The medium effects a translation and translation is violation. There is an irony here: in order to exist in the world - to be visible - distortion is required; whereas to remain real, to remain true requires invisibility. One can only be real if one doesn’t exist! Consider, for instance, an unknown ethnic group that has been found: in order to exist, it has to parade itself, manifest itself, make an appearance. However carefully and “sensitively” this is mediated, the otherness (essence) is lost, becoming an exotic attraction, a matter of nostalgic history, as the hitherto unknown ethnic group, as we say, "enters the twenty-first century" with all the modern calibrations that this implies. Its otherness becomes precisely that – other, alien, foreign – a source of touristic interest. The trick then is remain in the background, on the border between existence and non-existence. The dilemma is this: to exist “out there” is to become virtual and unreal; not to exist is to remain really unreal, as dark matter that binds the universe together. Most of what Baudrillard writes concerns this old problem of representation: real presentness disappears into virtual re-presentation. ‘Those who are condemned to resemblance and representation are the defeated. Representation is a slave condition’ (p111, Jean Baudrillard, Enrique Valiente Naoilles, Exiles from Dialogue. Polity Press. 2007). It is a question of veiling and unveiling. Today, we do not tolerate veiling; everything shall be mediated with total explanation, i.e. without otherness.  May 14th 2009 ‘The mystery of where the milk went to was soon cleared up. It was mixed every day into the pigs' mash. The early apples were now ripening, and the grass of the orchard was littered with windfalls. The animals had assumed as a matter of course that these would be shared out equally; one day, however, the order went forth that all the windfalls were to be collected and brought to the harness-room for the use of the pigs. At this some of the other animals murmured, but it was no use. All the pigs were in full agreement on this point, even Snowball and Napoleon. Squealer was sent to make the necessary explanation to the others. “Comrades”! he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brain-workers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples”’. (p32. Animal Farm. George Orwell. 1945). May 13th 2009 The British Daily Telegraph cartoon by Matt: ‘I went into politics to make my living room a better place’, or another one showing an MP telling his son, as both peer into a large shop window, ‘one day son all this will be on expenses’, speak much about our post-political world. Allegedly upset by not being awarded recent pay increases, these passionless administrative managers and damage limiters went on the fiddle. But compared to other countries, the fraud is quite small. Imagine Matt on Saddam Hussein: I went into politics to make my eight presidential mansions better places. One day Uday and Qusay all this will all be yours. Or, consider Nicolae Ceaucescu building himself the largest administrative palace in the world along with an equally grandiose neighbourhood, Centrul Civic, to accompany it. Or, what might Matt make of some African distators tracked by Transparency International? For instance, Omar Bongo (Gabon) and his relatives who allegedly owned 39 properties in France, mostly in the rich 16th district of Paris, as well as 70 bank accounts and nine cars. The properties also include luxury villas on the Riviera. Or consider, Denis Sassou Nguesso (Congo), who together with his family owned 24 apartments and had 112 bank accounts in France. So the British examples are miniscule by comparison, but compounded by their sudden cringe making conversions to mass truth telling, excessive contrition and condemnations of a system that they themselves invented. Even their guilt is self-serving, as if one can just say sorry and all will be well! It is only when they are found out, and only then, they say ‘the system is all wrong, it’s disgraceful’! They don’t even have the humour of Michael Mates who resigned  in 1993 after it was shown that he had sent the fugitive tycoon Asil Nadir a watch bearing the by now legendary inscription, ‘Don't let the buggers get you down’. In the absence of any great political passion, they go in absolute fear of the slightest public censure or exposure; their excessive guilt and immediate reparations are an unconscious acknowledgement of that zero degree of vision that marks contemporary democratic politics.  May 11th 2009 The Irish Independent today: ‘Thousands march in warning to the killers. Streets thronged in protest at thugs and killers. The father of murdered businessman Roy Collins said the thousands that came onto the streets of Limerick yesterday showed that the city has had enough of “scum and low-life mutants”’. The Irish Times: The Collins family hold hands at a protest march of an estimated 5,000 people through the streets of Limerick against gangland activity in the city. Thousands take to Limerick's streets to pledge solidarity in fight against gangs’. The Irish Times, as always, further from the Real of violence. A case of disavowal? May 10th 2009 Peter Hitchens, writing today about,  ‘all those who have connived at the dismantling of marriage, and continue to connive at it, should recognise their own grave guilt in sacrificing the welfare and happiness of children to the selfishness of “liberated” adults who ought, above all, to be shielding the young from harm’. Although, he is clear, and rightly so, that this is only a statistical summary, with many many individual exceptions that buck the trend, he quotes the following figures: ‘Research in Canada and Britain shows that non-married households, where there is a series of boyfriends who are not the natural fathers of the children, are startlingly more likely to be the scenes of abuse than are stable married homes. The Canadian figures show that  a child is 50 to 100 times safer with natural parents than with a step-parent in the home. The British research found married homes were 33 times safer than those with serial boyfriends’. Maybe, it is the unconscious sense of guilt that demands greater and greater state involvement in the “protection” of children, when the very real source of protection, the traditional family, is being hollowed out from within – remember the old '60s slogan: nuclear family no way. Maybe the same guilt argues for the “autonomy” of children to even up the liberation stakes. You are free; I am free. That’s fair. And, after all, that “equality” “respects” children. So here is the formula: destroy the structures of authority that protect children in the name of freedom and then argue for a whole costly state funded child protection industry to “cope” with the destress caused. It is as always front-line staff that have to pick up the pieces and they are reported to be overwhelmed. Why don’t psychoanalysts who were the first to theorise in a complex manner the importance of childhood have more to say on this? Why have they not been arguing for years about strengthening the family?  May 8th 2009 (Spam) It's now possible to earn affordable Bachelor, Master or Doctorate Degrees! No Studies. No Attendance. No Waiting. No Examinations. No Hefty Fee. Earn a recognized university degree based on work or life experience from university within 10 days! Get your desired degree on the basis of your prior knowledge and life experience. No longer any need for the unseemly delay of the Reality Principle. Of  the two principles of mental functioning, the Primary Process and the Secondary Process, the former is winning out on the educational front. For a real example, the teachers in a well established Dublin private third level college were told by a course director at the beginning of the year - Do not to fail any students. May 5th 2009 The Irish Times, in its leader, responding to the proposed new blasphemy law in Ireland, suggests correctly that such laws are very much in vogue in parts of the world. For instance, ‘the Pakistani Supreme Court recently upheld a judgment that the only fit punishment for blasphemy is death. In Afghanistan, the journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh received such a sentence last year for distributing an article critical of the status of women within Islamic societies. In Sudan British teacher Gillian Gibbons was convicted of insulting Islam by allowing a child to give the name Mohammed to a teddy bear’. Of course, we might add that it’s fine to refer to the Pope as a Nazi or a homophobe and Bush as a religious fundamentalist. This brings howls of approving laughter. But for a Minister of Justice (Dermot Ahern) of a modern European country, not apparently being aware of the risk to free speech and more importantly, critical thinking, should make us really wonder, precisely what justice he presides over. 21 years after the Rushdie affair and the fatwa, which hardliners, including the Revolutionary Guards, in Iran still regard as valid, and all the murders that have happened since. Incidentally, the British government resumed relations with Iran with the fatwa still in place. May 3rd 2009 An interesting slip was made by Labour TD, Sean Sherlock, commenting angrily on the celebrity solicitor Gerald Kean being used by the HSE (see below) as part of its “communications” strategy. Sherlock fumed about the appointment of this, ‘liar to the stars’. Apologising for ‘typographical errors’ in the press release, he said he meant to say ‘lawyer to the stars’. The unconscious speaks the truth; he was right the first time. April 29th 2009 As injustice, frustration and rage mount, spin doctors always redouble their efforts. The HSE is now adding spin to spin, by engaging celebrities to put their message across. The texts and email arriving onto Pat Kenny’s show (RTE Radio1) universally refer to the real world of the HSE. Paul Connors, national director of communications at the HSE, speaking on today's show, says that he is ‘always listening, setting up this and that committee, rolling out this and that... The more negative the comment gets, the greater the absorption capacity: ‘I’m not surprised at the feeling out there Pat’! He can take anything! After each criticism, Connors says, with undue haste, ‘Can I take that one on Pat…Can I talk about that Pat…I’ll look into that Pat’, as he rolls into more and more denial, stonewalling and absorbing at the same time.  A woman texts in to say that she visits her husband in an isolation ward and she has had to wash the floor herself under his bed, during her visits – a woman in her 70s. Celebrity lawyer Gerald Kean, no less, was the first person approached by Connors, under the HSE’s new ‘open mind policy’. As Mr Kean is a regular contributor to chat shows, the HSE is anxious he be well informed. ‘Mr Kean is what I would call an “opinion former”’, Connors says. ‘I am meeting opinion formers, that’s how I would describe it, but with a view to contextualising issues in the HSE.  We want to break down barriers and give an honest assessment. It’s good communications. If you can’t get an answer to your questions, I’ll get someone to answer them for you’. The language is the giveaway – for those who have ears to hear: Contextualisation, open mind, communication, breaking down, honesty. The virtual is brutal. This “communication” is violent. Even Pat Kenny, himself, part of the wider world of communications, seems briefly perturbed until he settles back into his, ‘we give it to you folks’, routine. April 28th 2009 Last night on Vincent Browne’s late news discussion programme on TV3, people were texting in to suggest that the Fianna Fail led government should take a collective trip to Mexico. Ministers have become renowned for taking the government jet on expensive trips to far away places, ‘to promote Ireland’, and now there would be the added bonus of the risk of swine ‘flu. There was much amusement recently when the a minister responsible to the now defunct electronic voting machines that cost €50m, took a short trip in a helicopter (instead of his government Merc), and a short way into the flight, the door of the helicopter fell off. April 24th 2009 Northern Ireland still has some 40 so-called “peace” walls at key flashpoints to keep the two “communities” apart, more than 10 years after the peace agreement. People want the walls to stay so that they can feel safe. The wall in Cupar Street in West Belfast reaches as high as 40 feet, so that bricks and stones are harder to lob over it. Now, it begins a re-decoration, taking down the old graffiti that recalls the darkest times in recent sectarian history. The new community artwork will bring, ‘constructive creative energy to this wall, an intimation of the time when the walls will come down’. Many tourists already come to see the new artwork. The wall will now come to symbolise the interminable brutal real of racist antagonism and its virtual resolution through art. April 21st 2009 At the UN conference on racism in Geneva yesterday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced Israel as ‘the most cruel and racist regime’. He railed against Israel, saying the state had been established following the WW2 ‘under the pretext of Jewish suffering’ (italics added). This shows that anti-racism can be the precise rage-filled mirror image of racism itself. It has also broken a politically correct taboo. Formerly, only colonial-white-imperialists, and so on, could be deemed “racist”, almost by definition; minorities, similarly, could never be racist as they were deemed victims and therefore entitled to be enraged. But with Ahmadinejad, this taboo has been broken with media outlets referring to him quite openly as racist. Just imagine if Ahmadinejad had been a skinhead BNP leader, with precisely the same sentiments as the Iranian leader,  addressing the conference, would the BBC still have been so even handed, talking as Jeremy Bowen does about this kind of speech causing a problem, and Paxman calling the British ambassador’s walk-out a mere pointless stunt?           April 18th 2009 Reported in The Irish Times (April 13th): Pro-Hamas speakers at a fundraising event held at the RDS in Dublin at the weekend argued that the recent violence in Gaza, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, was a “victory” because it put the Middle East conflict back on the international agenda and galvanised Muslims worldwide. This fits well with the relentless formula of the ongoing Jihad, delivered in no better a place – the Royal Dublin Society. Leaving aside for the moment the whole illegality of incitement to violence and the usual nothing that will be done about it, what do these people and their fellow travellers want? If we take the Lacanian-Hegelian formulation of desire as being the desire for recognition, then here we have it in its most extreme form: staging of the provocation of the Israeli state with many years of rocket attacks followed by the Israeli punitive reaction as a macabre drama to ‘galvanise Muslims worldwide’, paid for with Palestinian blood, hyper-realised by the worldwide media. They “want”, if that is not too human a word in this brutal context, to stage a violent counter-reaction to Western hegemony. And their supporters work on the time-honoured basis that our enemy’s enemy is our friend, or this may be just the manifest form of a fearful identification with the aggressor. The state apparatuses in the West, for their part, stage their own countertransference reaction – the War on Terror. The original meaning of the word Jihad refers to the “inner struggle” of each Muslim. In its current form the inner has been externalised. The reaction of many in the West has been to play down, excuse or ignore the global Jihad, preferring to think of it as a Western fantasy of the Other, which has more to do with racist control of the Other within their own societies under the guise of an apparent threat. This attitude towards a real and potent threat is dangerously condescending and dismissive. The analogy here is with those indulgent parents, who faced with implacable hostility from their children seek to affirm their children’s youthful authenticity – we admire your spunk! In this context, all the Other can do is ratchet up the rage until you do get the message. And the message is so alarming that it creates your own fearful immobility and self hate masquerading as tolerance. In this sense anti-racism strategies are themselves covertly racist, as they overlook and deny the seriously disquieting or radical otherness of the Other. Thus western support for the jihadists is often cringe-making. Instead the most robust response is required, to make the Other a worthy enemy. Following a Kleinian formula, the jihadists are held in the grip of a death (drive) cult that has swept aside ego functioning. However, even in this extreme ideologically induced rage and brutalism, we assume there remains a marginalised and tyrannised ego, which threatens to return self-awareness to the acephaly. As far as cell allegiances are concerned this, 'return of the repressed', is a great threat to be constantly guarded against so that missions can proceed. Self awareness has returned spontaneously to some cult members who have turned publicly against the jihad in recent years. Here, therefore, we have a function for western anti-terrorism strategies: to wrest the stranded ego from the cult fixation, by force and violence if necessary.          April 16th 2009 Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard, dramatises David Frost's (Michael Sheen) legendary TV interviews in 1977 with the disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). The encounter turns into a duel, with Frost gambling his own money as backers fall away and Nixon trying one last time to rehabilitate his catastrophic fall from grace, three years before. The erotic bond between the two men becomes apparent, especially late one Friday night when Nixon unexpectedly calls Frost by telephone. Nixon has been drinking and he asks Frost, who himself came from humble origins, if he ever felt looked down upon by the liberal elites in media circles. Frost replied that he had never felt snubbed in this way. Disbelieving, Nixon continued more and more bitterly: he could never win, never be accepted by them, however hard he tried. However, during the taping sessions themselves, Nixon is managing to counter-argue the carpet bombing and the mass killings of civilians in SE Asia, until, that is, he is caught by the sudden emergence of the traumatic real. Frost confronts Nixon with his disavowed knowledge of the authoriation of the Watergate break-ins. Here, Nixon, hesitating, fully assumes his own guilt for the first time. He leaves the intervioews a broken man. Frost has won on the imaginary level – he always was only a “performer”, and the “show” breaks all records; it is a spectacular. But Nixon has “won” on the unconscious symbolic level, where he knows he will have to bear his loss until he dies in 1994. Nixon has reached the point of “symbolic destitution”. At their last meeting at Nixon’s home in California, Nixon asks Frost what they had talked about on the phone that Friday night during the filming, because he had forgotten he had made the call. ‘Oh, burgers’, says Frost, the moment for the more humiliating Real having passed. Frost leaves Nixon with a present of men’s slip-on Italian shoes. Nixon has earlier referred to these as ‘kind of effeminate’. The rather trivial hint is clear: these shoes are the ones worn by the liberal elites.   April 15th 2009 Returning to this á la carte atheism, and the notion that religion is good for you, professor Casey (UCD) asked, why it should be that religion has these mental and social benefits? She said one reason is likely to be the social support offered by belonging to a religion. Another is the ‘rules for living’ offered by religion which discourage self-destructive behaviour. A further reason is that religion offers a sense of meaning and purpose which gives life meaning and purpose. This encourages a sense of hope. And according to, Dr W Brad Wilcox, who lectures in sociology at the University of Virginia in the United States, religion helps men to be better husbands and fathers. His particular focus was on Evangelical men. He pointed out that men tend to have weaker ties to family than women. In America, 28pc of children do not have their father living with them, and in Ireland the figure is at least 20pc. He said that ‘familism’ is higher among religious men than non-religious men and highest of all among Evangelical men. He defined familism as putting the family in a central place in your life, and placing it above career etc. Dr Wilcox said that Evangelical dads tend to spend 3.5 more hours per week bringing their children to youth-related activities, eg sports, than non-religious dads. They also showed more affection to their children in the form of hugs and praise. They also are better at keeping tabs on their children with 95pc knowing where their children are at night. In addition, they are most likely to say they are “very happy” in their marriages and those with children are least likely to say they would split up if unhappy. They are also least likely to be violent towards their wives. Catholic men score less well. They tend to be about half-way between Evangelical men and non-religious men as fathers and husbands, Wilcox claimed. (Source the Iona Institute).     We have discovered what we intuitively knew that religious people contribute to social cohesiveness in very many ways. This is bad news for the secular jihadists, who believed and preached that religion is bad for pretty well everything. Now, we live in a post-serious age, and age without awe, where religion and spirituality are being “sold” as a goods. So what if it works, comes the reply? It may reign in the disaster somewhat. We now have a situation where thorough-going materialists and á la carte atheists pick and choose their religion from the vast range on offer, because, although they don’t really believe in it, some people say it works.  The story is told about Neils Bohr, the eminent physicist and Nobel prize winner. A friend, surprised to see a horseshoe on the door of his house, told Bohr that he for one didn’t believe in that superstitious nonsense. Bohr replied, it’s true, I don’t believe in that stuff either, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if one does not believe in it. This is precisely the attitude of some post-Christian families in Ireland today, who say that they no longer believe in God, but they have their children baptised and confirmed, send them to Mass each week, have them educated in Catholic schools, “just in case”. And now we are told it does work in the mental health domain at least.  April 5th 2009 As The Irish Times reported yesterday, the professor of psychiatry at UCD and consultant psychiatrist at the Mater hospital in Dublin, Dr Patricia Casey, has defended her public endorsement, as a medical professional, of religious practice. She is defending herself against the likes of Dr Robert Sloan, professor of psychiatry at the University of Columbia, who had written in the Lancet that, ‘where doctors depart from areas of established expertise to promote a non-medical agenda, they abuse their position as professionals’. He said attempts to link health to religious/spiritual activities was similar to ‘the now discredited research suggesting that different ethnic groups show differing levels of moral probity, intelligence, or other measures of social worth’. The ‘non-medical agenda’, is said to be abusive if it comes from the oldest Judeo-Christian tradition in the West, but not, it seems, if it comes from the aggressive secular agenda of the Left. The latter is regarded as merely “progressive”, and can do nothing but good! Not to mention of course that such a “positive” agenda disrupts all former traditional bonds and creates maximum instability and uncertainty amidst a bewildering plethora of so-called life-choices. “Best practice” is always ideologically based; it comes with a secret unconscious supplement that sustains it. Surely, co-opting religion as a positive mental health factor is itself disparaging of religion, no less, and smacks of an attempt to bring “back” religion under the guise of mental health. Religion is good for you! Only in a post-religious age could we think of “using”, subordinating, taming religion in this way to facilitate mental functioning. Religion should stand alone in its Otherness. This is the same pallid logic that regards music as therapeutic, or indeed laughter as therapeutic and so on and on. Each distinct cultural form has to “lighten-up” and become more and more relevant.  April 2nd 2009 The founder of Swiss right-to-die organisation Dignitas, Ludwig Minelli, has told the BBC that suicide is a ‘marvellous possibility given to a human being’. Simon Cox, of Radio 4's The Report (8pm) - the programme which interviewed Minelli - discusses his call for the assisted suicide law to be clarified. Minelli asserts that there, ‘should be no restrictions on suicide. It is a human right without condition’. He points out that such a policy will save money. ‘For every 50 suicide attempts only one succeeds. The others are failing and this can be very costly, sometimes you have to put them in institutions for 50 years’. British psychiatric patients are “assisted”, based one psychiatric report only. Schizophrenics, patients with bipolar disorder, for instance, with perhaps decades to live, are assisted, as have been couples with suicide pacts. One woman, accompanied by her husband, faked a terminal condition; she was assisted in the morning and her husband was assisted in the afternoon. Relatives of the woman said they had seen her shopping only a day or two before. For Minelli, ‘it is not necessary to be terminally ill to be assisted, this is a British obsession’. Swiss psychiatrists will not write reports for Dignitas patients. British psychiatrists can be tricked into writing a report that will later be used by the patient to facilitate suicide in Switzerland. Cox believes Minelli is not motivated by money, but by ideology. We should understand that it is an ideology - a rights-based ultra-materialist ideology very much in tune with the times. Slowly but surely suicide is becoming more and more acceptable, part of the range of choices that free, autonomous, rational people should be able to make, without conditions. As is always said by activists, a right is a right – you cannot have a bit of a right, half a right, to suicide. So eventually, the so-called conditions, which are a cover, part of an initial reticence, will be swept away. As so many people fail to kill themselves effectively at present, our activists will say: why not help them and save the health service money in the process? Similarly, with the old and frail and their alleged loss of quality of life? It should remind us of the films made in fascist Germany during the 'thirties exhorting doctors and nurses to carry out mercy-killings of the disabled and the insane, for their own sake.   March 31st 2009 “The medicalisation of normality” (BBC Radio4, 30th March and 1st April). Journalist, John Naish, asks, ‘if we are turning normal human behaviour and normal stages in human development into medical conditions? It seems that a new mental illness is invented every week, covering every potential quirk in the human condition, such as Restless Leg Syndrome, Social Anxiety Disorder, Female Sexual Dysfunction and Celebrity Worship Syndrome’. What follows are some points made during the programme. 10% of children in U.S. are on Ritalin. “New” illnesses are proliferating, and we are constantly finding new ways not to be normal. Just about every type of behaviour can be labelled abnormal. Hysteria and Neurasthenia were the fashionable illnesses of the nineteenth century, while in the twenty-first, there has been a massive upsurge in psychiatric ills, particularly in the young. Many, worried about their symptoms, testify to feeling relieved and reassured upon getting a diagnosis of, for instance, depression or autism. People can feel like misfits in a highly homogenised, fast moving society and drugs iron out our quirks. However, many creative and scientific discoveries were made by quirky, aberrant people. Life seems to be becoming difficult for the different. There is now a huge emphasis on sociability – people feel they must have endless social contact. We live in a psychologically demanding society, with a whole swathe of people feeling unable to cope. 9% of U.K. citizens are on SSRIs. Drug companies have been leading the way in the medicalisation of normality, they put GPs under pressure to prescribe. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, men were told: “don’t buy them flowers, gentlemen, buy them oestrogen”. More recently, for instance, there has been a preoccupation with erectile disfunction, measured by the “Erectile hardness” scale of one to four. Rebuilding communities and self-help groups lessen mild to moderate depression, but in the meantime, the U.S. has opened up the drugs market legalising the advertising of medical drugs in 1997. In the E.U. drug companies may soon be able to give information about their products directly to consumers on websites. We are only at the beginning. March 30th 2009 ‘Most people in this country die weepingly lonely – cold, starved, and left in no doubt that they have overstayed their welcome. This is the greatest shame and horror of our society and our age’. A.A. Gill. The Sunday Times Magazine. 29.3.09. p36. Years back, around the time of the smoking ban, there was a cartoon depicting two very frail old men bent over walking sticks in a broken-down old peoples’ home. One man manages to say to the other, ‘Just imagine, if you and I had continued smoking, we’d have missed all this’. March 26th 2009 ‘I send a message to the people of the West. Stop spending your money on tanks and aircraft and attacking the poor people of the world. Look after your own poor people and let us be. You must be positive not negative. Change your policies. You cannot win here or in Afghanistan. Keep out’. Few in the liberal West, apparently, would disagree with these moral exhortations, especially those who are proud to claim they are on the Left. They were made to Sky News’ Correspondent, Stuart Ramsay in the Taleban administered Swat valley in Pakistan, by Muslim Khan, a charismatic English-speaking leader of the Taleban. The Pakistani army has just given up a two-year battle and handed over control to the Taleban forces. In return for “peace” the Taleban can administer the region, run Sharia courts, ban women from marketplaces, outlaw music shops and stop educating girls over 13.  In the town, Ramsay notes, hooded Taleban enforcers are the law, patrolling the streets and meting out their own form of immediate and brutal justice. In front of large crowds they flog people who have broken edicts issued by the Taleban. Drug addicts and dealers are held down in the dust by heavily armed militants and flogged. They cry out in pain, shouting for "Allah". It is cruel and frightening, but it is popular. A man accused of burglary is questioned by a masked gunman, who casually lifts a revolver and fires at point-blank range. None of the people who are watching moves. March 25th 2009 ‘We are, after all, nine times more prone to schizophrenia, than any other people, and five times more likely to be alcoholic’, according to Kevin Myers writing recently in The Irish Independent. Why does it seem impossible to verify these figures, that nevertheless seem, intuitively, to be roughly proportionate? Limited internet searches turn up little in the way of comparative data. Why is there silence on this subject? Why do psychoanalysts in Ireland never write about schizophrenia in the specifically Irish context? March 23rd 2009 It has been suggested that Austria’s, “addiction to harmony”, enabled, at least in some sense, the crimes of Josef Fritzl, who kidnapped his daughter, Elisabeth, in 1984 shortly after her 18th birthday and imprisoned her in a dark and underventilated cellar under the family home in the town of Amstetten. He raped her several thousand times; she bore him seven children, including two boy twins in 1996, one of whom died shortly after birth and whose body Fritzl disposed of in a domestic boiler. How the authorities missed this two decades of closeted squalor and bestiality. And was not Fritzl’s “apology”  - his resistance allegedly crumbled after he caught sight of his daughter Elisabeth during her secret visit to the courtroom - and guilty on all charges plea, a desperate attempt to appeal to that same addiction to harmony. March 19th 2009 "The economy of happiness". Talk to be given in Independent Colleges, Dawson Street, Dublin.20th March at 5.30pm. All welcome. Freud and psychoanalysts, generally, avoid the topic of happiness, per se. Freud has just one entry on happiness in the 24 volume, Standard Edition. And, we should ask, what economy? The economy has collapsed! So the challenge of this talk will be to consider things that no longer exist, or that people believe no longer exist, or no longer have faith in. This paper will touch on the nature of belief itself and what we might turn to when belief fails and disaster beckons. So we will be considering, in particular, current events trying to get a broader take the fragile unstable "reality" we call the postmodern Alistair McIntyre at 80 speaks in UCD. Bernard Lonergan once observed that, ‘a civilisation in decline digs its own grave with relentless consistency. It cannot be argued out of its destructive way’. According to McIntyre, the West has subverted the very markets which generate wealth and its distribution, as well as international trade and welfare. It has become desensitised to any objective understanding of morality. Individuals, no less than corporations or countries, cannot be “regulated” to do the “right” or “moral” thing. McIntyre emphasises, ethics is, by its nature, “obedience to the unenforceable”, and the ultimate guarantor of trust. He says, we are talking about “sin” here. A type of behaviour or mindset may not be designated a crime as such; it may not be prohibited by rules or regulation, but instinctively we recognise it for what it is – an offence against the moral order. (Source: The Irish Times) March 10th 2009 A teacher interrupts a violent fight in the classroom or on the corridor, preventing injury. In the process he has to use appropriate force. Next day the teacher is called by the school principal, who has received a complaint from a parent that his son has been physically abused and has some injuries. The teacher gives his version of events. In some cases (currently running at 800 in Britain) he is suspended from teaching duties, pending investigation by the LEA and/or the school authorities. Years later, in the great majority of cases, the teacher may be fully exonerated, after judgements and appeals. In some cases the investigations are carried out incorrectly. In the meantime he has not been able to teach. He has got some compensation, but probably less than we would have earned had he continued teaching. The incident and the investigation(s) are on his file permanently, and he is very unlikely to be ever able to teach again, in spite of being innocent of any crime. (BBC Radio4. File on Four, March 8th)       March 7th 2009 The Class, directed by Laurent Cantet. The “story” revolves around a young French teacher, Marin (Francois Begaudeau - a former teacher, who adapted the script from his novel, Entre les Murs) as he struggles, moment by moment, to assert his authority on the racial mix of 14 - 15-year-old boys and girls, while teaching them the finer points of formal French grammar and the distinction between written and spoken French. The resentments brought on by the legacy of France’s colonial past are simmering here with tensions boiling over. The “authorities” are hard put to contain the posturing, the sometimes defiant and righteous attitudes freely struck in this minimalist, survivalist culture of the small classroom and school yard, which is clearly too much for at least one other teacher. Marin, however, is fully and energetically present with the students, an excellent teacher, and there are moments of humour and insight. However, we sense even Marin’s generosity and understanding may not be enough, or not for much longer, when race hatred beckons - hatred for "whitey" that is.      March 6th 2009 Whatever about the dangers of psycho-analysis with its invasions of privacy, its psychical reductionism and so on, the dangers of genome-analysis are of another order. It is now possible to identify over one thousand genetically inherited diseases. This is reductionism of a new order which will spread fear into coming generations - the terrorism of the gene. Ordinary terrorism one should be lucky enough to escape, but this "intimate" terrorism, the curse of our genes, there will be no escaping from. March 2nd 2009 Hyperreality and the giant illusion that sustained us! The banks lend money that they have borrowed from other banks for individuals and developers to invest in property, commercial projects and land that become vastly overvalued. Fifteen Anglo-Isish investors owe roughly €500m each, only a tiny fraction of which they will be ever able to pay back. The banks, the regulatory apparatus, the central bank and the Irish Department of Finance are all complicit. The government took the increased tax revenues that were generated to buy votes. Everyone paid themselves more and Ireland became a high wage, high price economy. The code was “donning the green jersey” behind the nods and winks that were being given allegedly in the national interest. Banks were told, in effect, regulate yourselves. All institutions acted in unison. The public sector expanded massively. Banks grew their balance sheets by throwing money at anyone to buy any sort of property at massively inflated prices. And at the end of last month, the former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern travelled to Central America, to deliver a keynote lecture to the Honduran National Business Council. It was entitled The Celtic Tiger: The Irish Model of Development. “We have the honour and pleasure to invite you to listen to a lecture by former prime minister Bertie Ahern – driver of the Irish Economic Model”. The hyperreal does not get better than that.  February 25th 2009 The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam. Faber and Faber. 2008. ‘After September 11, 2001’, says Aslam to a journalist, ‘I asked myself whether in my personal life and as a writer I had been rigorous enough to condemn the small scale September 11s that go on every day’. In this complex interweaving story condemnation and outrage hold the various complex strands together. The book follows its characters through the three recent invasions of Afganistan, starting with the Russians, who were driven out by the Muhadjeen resistance aided by the Americans ushering in the Taliban era, who in turn were repulsed by the Americans.      Marcus Caudwell is an elderly English doctor and one time perfume maker who now lives alone near the Tora Bora mountains in his home, each room of which is beautifully decorated with Islamic calligraphy and animals. On the ceilings of the rooms are nailed all the books of the house, to represent the regressive effect of the Taliban - ‘A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike though the pages of love, a spike through the sacred’.  There's a disused perfume factory nearby, with a gigantic Buddha's head in the middle, now lying on its side.      Marcus’s Afghan wife, Qatrina, and daughter, Zameen, are dead. The story opens with a Russian woman, Lara, recently arrived at the house, searching for her brother, Benedikt, a soldier in the Soviet army who went missing during the Russian invasion in the 1980s. David Town, a former CIA operative, has arrived on a search of his own. Twenty years earlier, Zameen, was held captive and raped every night by a Russian soldier, who turns out to be Lara's brother. Zameen survived and gave birth his child. Later she fell in love with David Town. However, a suspicion developed that she was spying for the Russians. After waiting in vain for his return, Zameen was forced to prostitute herself to the local pro-American warlord to fund medical treatment for her child. Finally, David did not prevent her being killed by the same warlord, anxious to impress the Americans who funded his lavish lifestyle.       The Taliban forced Qatrina to cut off the hand of her husband, accused of “stealing”, when he had tried to retrieve Qatrina’s paintings discovered in a patient’s house. It was when he returned from hospital that he found all the books had been nailed to the ceiling. Later, as a punishment for her “illegal” marriage, Qatrina herself was stoned to death in public, her cries being broadcast over a loudspeaker. Finally, Casa, who has been indoctinated for Jihad, resides at the house biding his time as a labourer, under the proection of David, until the time to act beckons.     The greatest outrage, it seems, Aslan reserves for Islam itself. Marcus, quoting Qatrina, says as much: ‘The cause of the destruction of Afganistan is the character and society of the Afgans, of Islam. Communism wasn’t the ideal solution to anything but, according to her, her fellow countrymen would have resisted change of any kind’. However, the author comments, ‘What did they, the Americans, really know about such parts of the world, of the layer upon layer of savagery that made then up’? But the clerics of the mosque, shouted from the minarets, that, ‘while the USSR was a prison, and the USA was a whoorhouse, Islam was the answer’!      How things have changed. David can remember how shocked the Afghanis were when suicide bombing was proposed to them by the Americans as a way to defeat the Russians. Muslims believed at that time that suicides went to hell. Marcus remembered the independence of the women of Kabul, 20 years before the Taliban came. And a group of students felt free enough to cover the car of a visiting Pakistani poet with lipstick kisses.        However amidst outrage and cruelty, Aslam evokes beauty. ‘There are a million marks of love on the earth…The communal script of belonging. The First Text’. ‘The city centre down there is full of citrus trees, this valley being famous for its orange blossoms, verse makers from across Afganistan gathering in Jalalabad each April every year for a poets’ conference to recite poems dedicated to the blossom’. Even as Marcus waits for his hand amputation in a small room at the back of the mosque, he smells the rose essence that he himself gave to be mixed with the mortar during the building of the mosque years earlier. It's still fragrant all these years later. February 24th 2009 GPs in England are failing to help people with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, a report warns. Constance Barter, who has just turned 16 and has suffered from anorexia, and her mother Sarah discuss what it is like to live with the disorder on the BBC4 Today programme. There has been an 80% rise over the last decade in cases of anorexia with girls as young as 12 years old being diagnosed. Constance spent 7months as an in patient being force-fed. A year on, she knows she has to keep eating now. She reports, ‘The voice doesn’t haunt me anymore, the voice that tells me to stop eating, is less strong now. The voice used to tell me that my mother was deceiving me by giving me food. If I didn’t obey the voice it would shout even louder and it only went when I went to sleep. I was running. I had a passion for running. And I found it as a way to lose weight and it got worse and worse. Gradually, in hospital, I came to realise that I had to listen to the healthy voice’. This commanding voice in her head implies psychosis and represents the disembodied superego – an archaic superego – that has to be confronted with some force if the patient is to get well.  February 23rd 2009 The culture of narcissism hypothesis: the “baby boomers” of the 1960s and 1970s created what has been called the biggest tantrum in history, demanding freedom to enjoy. In the 1980s they demanded the unfettered right to be greedy via Thatcherism, which led to exponential borrowing during the 1990s and the growth of the virtual ecomony. Then on to the massive crash of recent months, with the boomers declaring suddenly, ‘now we’re all socialists’, and we want our children and grandchildren to work to pay back our debts.   February 14th 2009 Milk, directed Gus Van Sant, opens with archival footage of police raiding gay bars and arresting patrons during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by Dianne Feinstein's November 27, 1978 announcement that Supervisor Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) have been assassinated.  The film traces Milk’s life and rise to power. After two unsuccessful political campaigns in 1973 and 1975 to become a city supervisor and a third in 1976 for the California State Assembly, Milk finally wins a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 for District 5. He is the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in the United States. The dramatic tension in the film chiefly concerns Milk’s relationship with fellow Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran, former police officer and firefighter. White is a man who has served his country and been damaged psychologically in the process. However, the ideological coordinates of the film will disavow this truth. White’s obsession is to keep the neighbourhood “clean” for his children to grow up in – no gays, no deviants. Dan White epitomises the conservative pro-family lobby, depicted as violent, repressive and life-hating, while the burgeoning gay rights lobby is cool, easy, progressive and life affirming. We are carried along in this history of liberation. Liberation for gays is liberation for all oppressed minorities. And the challenge to the gay men, and it is almost all gay men, is to “come out”. The demand is for your sexuality to be transparent. Sexuality must no longer be a private affair. You are defined by your sexual orientation which is the engine of change. The reduction and polarisation are complete in the split universe: gay versus straight; gay “good” versus straight “bad”; homophobia versus heterophobia, but phobia nonetheless - fear on both sides. The battle lines for intolerance are redrawn. The war in the 1970s was waged against the Christian Right, but there is a far worse battle to come in this century with Islamist theocracies.  February 10th 2009 In the context of a recent report by the Children’s Society which concluded that the greatest threat to British children was their parents' rampant individualism and aggressive pursuit of personal success, Andrew Samuels, Jungian psychotherapist, is in discussion with a number of others (The Moral Maze BBC Radio 4. February 4th). -Should individual choice be elevated above everything else? -Choice is good. -But surely, people’s personal choices can damage children, for instance? -Yes, of course! But what you are leaving out are the complexities of peoples lives and you seem to want to make everything safe and comfortable, like the authors of this report. Creativity requires something else, indeed creativity requires a degree of unhappiness, even depression. Look at any artist for instance. -Why do you react so badly when it is suggested that we should put others, especially children first? -But who is saying what to whom? Is this a seeking for the deferential in society again? -Yes, but this report is about individualism, or hyper-individualism, and as a psychotherapist, aren’t you about developing individualism? So no wonder you might find this question difficult, or as you describe it, “preachy”. Are you not at the heart of putting, “me-first”.  -No. Not at all. People come to therapy mostly with relationship problems, so what you are saying is the problem is not really the problem. -Do you ever advise people to put other people first? -Actually, I don’t advise or tell people what to do! Unlike this report! -It seems that what you are saying is that anything that restrains personal behaviour is a bad thing. -No, I think there has to be a balance, between communal things and individual things. -I think you’ve said that the essence of a civilised society is choice. Would it not be more true to say that the essence of a civilised society is responsibility? -No, I don’t really see what the difference is. This is a sort of cheap opposition: choice or responsibility. Responsibility implies choice. The way people grow is via exposure to difficult things. And this report wants to make things easy. From my Jungian perspective, this report seems to be all about the surface, from the point of view of the persona. -But should we not offer some guidance for at least some people, so that we may not make their early lives impossible? - I think I trust people more than you do. I listen before I go anywhere near anything that might be termed guidance or advice. Even though they have talked to 35,000 people, they haven’t really listened. They have not really understood that people want is to be given the space to do it their way, which isn’t going to lead to wild individualism. People may want to be collective, for instance. People left alone don’t necessarily retreat into the abyss of selfishness. No, instead, they connect to other people because they deeply want to.    February 8th 2009 Nothing illustrates better the Baudrillardian difference between virtual reality and the real than the current financial crisis. Within an astonishing six months the difference has become all too painfully obvious. The virtual itself has become sub-prime. Yet still we prefer belief to reality. The reality is that our living standards, measured by rates of pay, need to fall by 30-50% from current values, to become significantly competitive vis a vis other countries with whom we trade. Everyone was in on this imaginary bubble, not just the very wealthy who can now earn scandalously, as much as a hundred times the average industrial wage, but also those people who went after bogus 100% mortgages and those who peddled them; all were believing in the virtual. The hope that, “we might all pull together”, is another virtual belief and seems as unlikely as it always really has been, because those who are rich – across the spectrum – from ministers and politicians, to media types, to soccer stars, to the professions, senior public servants, wealthy artists and tax exiles, to the liberal elites of all kinds, will publicise that they are voluntarily taking  their token “hits” which are no more than virtual reductions. The people who will take, and have always taken the hits, have been the broad middle class, currently people earning in the €40-60k region and, more especially, those who lose their jobs, who join the ranks of the vulnerable and weak. It is also said that the Crash has exposed the lack of leadership at the top. The reason being, that there are no metanarratives to which we all subscribe, except possibly the Rights base culture, which has a lot in common with the virtual. The virtual of my rights conflicts with the now occluded real of my responsibility. The notion of entitlement belongs to the virtual, whatever “rights” one is considering. The medical consultant feels entitled to his private as well as his public practice; the banker feels entitled to his bonus; the politician feels entitled to his expenses which alone may be more than the average wage. Each one of these groups’ Rights ignores the real of debt that they incur. Similarly, my right to a particular life-style choice has real consequences. Each has his “me too” entitlement. We have no overall agreed ethical basis from which to assess the difference between the virtual and the real. And, we must expect the break-up of the virtual to reveal the underlying real of conflict and social antagonism.    February 2nd 2009 Revolutionary Road. Directed by Sam Mendes, adapted from a novel by Richard Yates. April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) live with their two children in a very comfortable home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut in the mid-1950s. April is an amateur actress, Frank is in an office job in Manhattan. He remembers serving in France during the war and his troubling feeling that ‘people are alive there, not like here’. Maybe they will emigrate to France, while they are still young, and follow this dream. But the dream is really an empty dream, just as “empty” as the cliché of suburban America of the 'fifties. It takes a neighbour’s son who is mentally ill to speak “the truth”. Not only is this beautiful wooded neighbourhood apparently empty but “hopeless” as well. Wrong. It is the Wheelers themselves, ‘that nice young couple’, who are revealed to be empty and hopeless.         January 30th 2009 Here is part of a letter sent to potential participants in a forthcoming group analysis conference, by way of preparation: Dear Participant, In our workshop we try to give priority to emotions over thoughts and behavior. It seems that in our culture we tend to consider ourselves as thinkers more than feelers. We tend to appreciate thoughts more than emotions. In our workshop, we would like to explore together how emotions (more than thought) influence our personal and inter-personal life. This concentration on affect which is fashionable in Kleinian and Group circles needs to be challenged. While it is true that affects and emotions are closer to the core of the self and somehow they are more “truthful” than thoughts, the latter must not be lost in a welter of emoting. For as Lacan has emphasized, we are “speaking beings” and ultimately the register of the Symbolic – articulation and representation join us to the world: the world of meaning, place and context. Emotion is impoverished and regressive in comparison to the expansive richness that is offered by the domain of narrative – speaking, dreaming, writing, representing. The movement from affect to speech is the crucial one. January 27th 2009 Here is a book review of I. D. The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. Susan Greenfield. Sceptre. 2008. She gives yet more evidence of the erosion of “identity” on the brink of the post-human. Her approach is limited to neuroscience, but her message is clear. The loss of a narrative space, so necessary for identity formation, is being caused by the immediacy of burgeoning image-screen-text based culture that enforces, that imposes the ascendancy of intense experiencing over thinking and meaning. Under this new regime we will become “nobodies” or “anybodies”. January 25th 2009 A report in yesterday’s Irish Times gives further evidence of the true nature of a “peace process”, such as the one arranged in Northern Ireland more than 10 years ago. If we follow Levinas in this respect, we will understand the so-called peace process is really a “pacification” process. The Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the legacy of the war in the North has proposed a £12,000 payment to the next-of-kin of those killed, even if the fatalities were involved in paramilitary shootings and bombings. The proposal to compensate all the families of the 3,700 people killed in the conflict, regardless of the circumstances of those killings illustrates with absolute clarity, the “no fault” position, the condition of official jaded indifference to the truth, and the moral relativity that dominates the ethical space. Not surprising, therefore, to find that a church figure, no less, the former Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames actively condoning and supporting this proposed betrayal. Eames and Bradley, it is reported, are determined to press ahead with their proposals. They discussed them with British prime minister Gordon Brown on Thursday. They argued that the £12,000 payment was justified because the issue of a “hierarchy of victims” must be put aside. Yet, again and again, the true victims of crime are required to suffer in silence (be pacified, be at peace) while the perpetrators of the crimes create their own inverse hierarchy of victimhood and claims to their “human rights”. Eames-Bradley, the Church and the Law, re-cover the Truth. And those who have been the greatest abusers of human rights will shout the loudest for their rights to be scrupulously observed.   January 21st 2009 “The Truth About Knife Crime”. BBC 1 (Mark Sigsworth). ‘Mothers, sisters and survivors reveal why they are releasing CCTV footage of fatal stabbings and opening coffins to shock the nation into action’. A Glasgow sink estate is divided into gangland areas. Stray into the “wrong” area and you risk be knifed in an unprovoked attack. Youths with reptilian brains display their scars and joke about the dangers they face. Academics are interviewed giving their analyses of the rise in knife crime. A hospital consultant who stitches up the wounds of the victims is clearly overwhelmed by what is happening and his work load. He shows graphic pictures of the victims. One has a kitchen knife sticking out of his back, another shows deep long machete wounds, another shows an exposed open lung. The police are marginal and most knifings go unreported. One youth did report the crime against him and was subsequently knifed to death in a revenge attack. In his memory, his mates daubed his name on a derelict wall. Mothers and sister grieve. But where are the fathers? Without the symbolic “cut” imposed by the Father – symbolic castration in the psychoanalytic shorthand – there must occur in its place the real cut of brutal unmediated authority that it was the father’s place to forestall. Without fathers and surrogate fathers (youth and community workers and volunteers), barbarism returns - ultimately without limit. There are no limits in the Real. January 20th 2009 We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. Daily Telegraph from Iran: 'Out on the streets, thousands chanted his name. But only to yell "Death to Obama". They didn't wait for the inauguration to deliver their verdict on Obama, dragging his portrait through the streets of Tehran and then, three hours before he took the oath of office, setting fire to it alongside a picture of George Bush. It was the Supreme Leader's Special Representative though, who put it most graphically and with evident disgust. "Obama's is the hand of Satan in a new sleeve", explained Hossein Shariatmadari. "The Great Satan now has a black face". His words have weight because he speaks for Ayatollah Khamenei'. January 16th 2009 Slum dog millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan (co-director, India), written by Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup. It is the story of Jamal Malik, now 18, from the slums of Mumbai. At the climax of the film, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20m Rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" However during the break in the show, he is arrested on suspicion of cheating. How could a slum dog know so much? Jamal tells the story of his life in the overcrowded violent slums of Mumbai and of of his love for Latika, the orphan girl he lost and found again. Each correct answer on the show relates to key events in his life-story. It is a story of survival in brutal conditions, shot close up and intensely, a story of chance and contingency, which for just one in the millions of the excluded, comes right.   January 10th 2009 Hamas spokesman Fathi Hamad on Al Aqsa TV: 'we have created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the jihad fighters as if to say to the Zionist enemy: we desire death as you desire life. Death has become an industry’. Another Palestinian caller yesterday to RTE’s Liveline, challenging the “Zionist Crusader” to, ‘come and kill us all, every last one of us and then will you must leave our land…’. It is very hard for western minds to comprehend this suicidal rhetoric. This fact was noted recently by the Christian convert son of West Bank Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who told Ha’aretz: ‘They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In Palestinian culture a suicide terrorist becomes a hero, a martyr. Sheikhs tell their students about the “heroism of the shaheeds”’.  This logic, this 'pure culture of the death instinct', that Freud spoke of rarely locating is largely missed by the western media. It is literally unbelievable. We feel they must have a reason: so we seize on the IDF and blame them for defending Israel.      January 8th 2008 The film was called “Chosen” (Channel 4 True Stories. Directed by Brian Woods. December 15th 2008) and it consists of the testimonies of three men in their fifties and sixties recalling their days in the late 1950s and 1960s at a prestigious boy’s preparatory school in S. England, where, among other things, they excelled at rugby, a key sport for that establishment. The rugby teacher was a charismatic man who coached the young boys on the First XV. In those days, boys who were sent to board in these schools were often from homes where normal affection was not expressed adequately. Each spoke of their mothers and especially their fathers being “remote”, and in various ways being preoccupied with status, work, golf, etc. and in one case, extra-marital affairs. They each recalled being sent from home to board at the age of 8 or 9 and the bleak loneliness of it all. However, each of the three boys went on to do well in the school and each excelled at sport to the highest level. They were praised and given special attention by the rugby teacher, who photographed them in their kit, kept notes on their performance and provided special treats like being driven in his car to matches. However, in the hype, this same greatly admired and hugely influential teacher was eventually able to seduce them into being taken from their beds, separately, to be sexually abused by him. Each recalls, ‘crossing the line’ as they entered his room, where he was often naked and sexually aroused. Each reported remembering in exact detail, the room, the bed, the smells, the various sexual acts performed. For them at age 11, sexuality was a complete unknown. They recall the shame and isolation felt, the profound taboo broken, the sense of no return to normality and finally the self disgust at going back to this room of seduction time and time again. They were unable to tell anyone for fear of blame or disbelief. These accounts, told with absolute honesty and sincerity after so many intervening years of reflection and soul-searching bear witness to the abiding need for the love of a father who chooses us and esteems us. This rugby teacher-paedophile acted originally in place of the father only to cruelly mutate into a monster who perverts us.      January 4th 2009 In the asymmetrical warfare stakes, military fire-power is overwhelmingly on the Israeli side, while the symbolic debt incurred is vastly in favour of Hamas. Hamas reaps the reward of its huge suffering and the greater its suffering the greater the symbolic reward. The Israeli action rachets up western guilt to unbelievably high levels making even anti-Semitism seem like an acceptable position, and normally decent thinking people ponder Israel’s destruction.    December 30th 2008 Watch an interesting video clip from Alistair McIntyre in 2000 about radical "compartmentalism" in modern life – people being required to behave in very different ways in different contexts – driven by the complexity of the modern world but also by the loss of a 'shared and agreed impersonal system of beliefs and obligations', and the notion of character – have I acted as I should have done? Now, in the contemporary world, one must constantly make choices, what he calls the 'burden of choice', coming firstly from the notion of consumer choice. Character has been replaced by a preoccupation with identity. With identity comes the notion of solidarity with the group which tends to become relatively autonomous and unaccountable to the larger community, making public debate less and less possible. He notes that massacres, mass murders, have occurred contemporaneously with this new fractured society. He quotes an unnamed British analyst who told him that many neurotic patients are afraid of death: they do not know how to die, because they no longer have a feeling about their lives as a meaningful whole. Asked whether people should now be considered more shallow than before, he suggests that they are not necessarily more shallow, but in fact they themselves believe they are, if you have nothing called character to fall back on.    December 23rd 2008 According to BBC Radio 4, Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. He explained that defending God's creation was not limited to saving the environment, but also about protecting man from self-destruction. The Pope emphasised his rejection of “gender theory”. Speaking on Monday (yesterday), Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurred the distinction between male and female and could thus lead to the "self-destruction" of the human race. However, according to the Iona Institute, he was misquoted by the BBC. This is what he actually said, ‘What is often expressed and signified with the word 'gender' leads to the human auto-emancipation from creation and from the Creator. The human being wants to make himself on his own and to decide always and exclusively by himself about what concerns him. But, in so doing, the human being lives against the truth and against the Spirit creator. Rain forests deserve, yes, our protection but the human being - as a creature which contains a message that is not in contradiction with his freedom but is the condition of his freedom - does not deserve it less’.         US Ambassador Robert Tuttle, summing up the Bush legacy in face of strong criticism from the BBC Today presenter, John Humphrys, ‘the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan are yet to be finished’. Finally, Humphrys asks, ‘and you haven’t even defeated your old enemy Osama Bin Laden?’ The use of the word “your” says it all about the BBC. December 21st 2008 It is 20 years on from the Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed, including 35 Syracuse students returning home after studying in London and Florence. There is original footage and reportage from the scene of the crime. There are services in the town of Lockerbie and elsewhere to remember. It is near the top of the news after mention of the on-going financial crisis. But it is the matter-of-factness of the reporting that strikes one. It is the fate of every such singularity to be incorporated and relativised and therefore become part of the normal currency of exchange, although admittedly Lockerbie remains at the extreme end of what has become the currency of terrorism. This transformation awaits all singular acts of horror. With time, Lockerbie enters the universe of meaning with negotiations and compensations, dedicated websites and so on, and the country that sponsored the atrocity brought back into the fold. Most significantly, the crime is renamed “a tragedy”, and those grotesquely murdered become “unfortunate victims”. December 17th 2008 The Sunday Times (14th December) has a good article by Bryan Appleyard, “The living dead”, on near death experiences (NDEs) and out of body experiences (OBEs). Both these phenomena have revitalised the mind/body dualist hypothesis. Radical secular materialists believe that there is only brain and the mind is an effect of the brain and no more than brain functioning is needed to produce consciousness. The rest is “user illusion”. But, as Appleyard points out, ‘Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts. Dualism means that the mind and the brain are not made of the same things and therefore in theory, they can be separated, as in NDEs’. Neurons firing and the electrical patterns they generate are not thought itself.  As Appleyard points out, ‘For all our technology, nobody has yet seen a thought, nobody has shown how matter becomes mind’. As physicist Henry Stapp emphasises quantum mechanics is crucial here. Firstly “non-locality”, the notion that two separated partcles can influence each other. Secondly, mind can affect our perception of reality. We can “see” light, for instance, as either particles or waves. The quantum world as applied to the mind suggests that, ‘quantum non-locality could mean the mind is capable of being non-local to the brain, of floating to the ceiling of the room’.  It can become, as Stapp puts it, “unglued”. This is the strong contemporary challenge to scientific materialism, haunted as it always has been by paranormal phenomena - telepathy, spiritualism, even psychokinesis. The unconscious is in there too with dreams, both are different “realities”. Skeptics abound however, suggesting that NDEs are a mechanism that has evolved to console the psyche by distracting it from the unimaginable and intolerable prospect of its own end. Quite what “fitness” this might confer, however, is not clear. MRI scans of patients in a deep coma, or PVS indicate deep brain activity, even in clinically “dead” patients. ‘In other words,’ suggests Appleyard alarmingly, ‘the clinically dead may not be quite as dead as we think’. The fact that NDEs tend to be reported as cultural clichés and therefore are likely fabrications does not hold, because all our conscious experiences are culturally relative, so one shouldn’t expect NDEs to be any different, they are bound to be reported in the only language we know. However, for psychoanalytic materialists, NDEs and OBEs represent the return of narcissism, by putting the conscious subject back at the centre of the universe, just at the time when Lacan had managed to make the subject fade almost to extinction.  December 14th 2008 The loss of distance (continued), the loss of metaphor is illustrated by various actings-out. A patient of psychoanalyst Ernst Kris complains that when he writes he feels he is plagarising someone. Kris asks to see his writing and after reading his work tells him that he is not a plagarist, but using the notion of plagarism as a defence against having ideas of his own. The man leaves the analyst’s office and goes to a restaurant and orders fresh brains. A woman is told by her lover that he loves best of all the way she looks at him. Then she sends him one of her eyes beautifully wrapped. A man who feels he is rubbish throws himself into a skip saying ‘I’m rubbish!’ He is pulled out and he jumps in again. A man injured his leg badly in a motorcycle accident. The doctors thought of amputating it, but decided in the end that they could save it. They did so, but the leg was deformed. In order to bring about a real amputation, this man laid his leg across a railway line in a very careful manner so that a train sliced it off cleanly. In another case report, a man wanted to disable himself. He had the overwhelming desire to cause one of his legs to be amputated. No doctor obliged him with an operation. In desperation, and with elaborate precautions, he fired a gun shot at a precise distance from his leg. He then tied the tourniquet. Covered in blood, he phoned for an ambulance. Relief, the amputation was necessary.  December 10th 2008 A television programme which shows a man ending his life in an assisted suicide has been accused of being the latest "reality TV" stunt. It is the first time suicide has been shown on BBC television. From assisted suicide, to general suicides, to suicide bombers, and so on and on – the progressive normalisation of former taboos. Everywhere, the normalisation of evil. Things that Have always been “outside” are firstly, reluctantly and with much hand-ringing, included by “courageous”, “brave” and “honest” media entrepreneurs, and then increasingly discussed, debated and realised in a vast softening up and diffusion process. The softening up process are the soft strategies called, 'winning hearts and minds'. This is the way to breakdown civilisiation, to evercome every separation and every division. As Baudrillard puts it, ‘Distance is everywhere abolished: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between the stage and the auditorium, between the protagonists and the action…nowhere is a value judgement now possible…’ (J. Baudrillard. 2004. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity of the Pact. Translated Chris Turner. Oxford and New York: Berg. P75.)        December 8th 2008 Shane Hegarty writes about the decline of “Misery Lit” (Irish Times, 6.12.08), a genre whose trajectory has followed the fortunes of the Celtic Tiger into recession. Titles such as, No Way Home: The Terrifying Story of Life in a Children's Home and a Little Girl's Struggle to Survive . Or Deliver Me from Evil: A Sadistic Foster Mother, a Childhood Torn Apart. With a book such as My Name Is Angel: This Is My Story: A Traumatic True Story of Escaping the Streets and Building a New Life, have been best sellers. ‘You have to believe’, suggest Hegarty, ‘that at some stage in recent years an editor has taken a look at a manuscript and thought: you know if there was just another couple of beatings, maybe a death of a child or something, then maybe I'd be more interested; that a marketing mind has said, our rivals found a blind girl who was chained in an attic for 15 years. Can we get a deaf-mute in a basement or something’? And yes, Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes is not a spoof but a real book. This is the, by now, normalised, but extreme end of the hysteria that all media create around such issues. A few short decades ago there was no sexual abuse and a few decades further back still there was no physical abuse. These crimes “existed” only in the (Lacanian) Real, and therefore were unknown and unspoken. With the gradual emergence into visibility of these crimes, physical and then the sexual abuse, critical mass was reached during the ‘80s and the explosion begins. Not only do these crimes now exist, the hyper-exist. They move from the invisibility of the Real to the total visibility of the hyperreal. Baudrillard has always defined the hyperreal as the more real than real, the Real as in a state of exhaustion through being hyper-realised and attaining a virtual existence with its own dynamic and internal logic. Mention “abuse” and one enters a whole language world which is ultimately intolerant, where the real subject of suffering is exploited for the “story” or the “narrative”. And untold numbers of children will not now be comforted by decent adults who care.  December 6th 2008 A friend scoffs at the mere mention of a certain name in Irish public life, ‘Oh isn’t he that Right Wing Catholic? He’s that pro-family guy. Ugh!’  If Freud is right about all our relationships being ambivalent and that we each have what amounts to a quota of hate (as well as love), currently people feel obliged to be all inclusive, not to apportion blame for any alleged wrongdoing as we never know the full facts of any given situation. What then happens to the negative quotient, the negative half of the ambivalence? A head of steam must build up and it is vented against new targets – Veritas, the Catholic Church and Christians in general, the Middle class, and, of course anyone who might be pro-marriage. These new targets of cynicism escape censorship. Nobody speaks in hushed tones about these "culprits". Even, the former Labour leader, Ruairí Quinn, today referred in passing to the “No” voters on the Lisbon Treaty as “head cases”, and of course none of the other discussants passed any comment. November 30th 2008 This paper (to be posted) compares psychological and psychoanalytic approaches to the subject and finds both wanting in respect to ethics. In the post modern world described by Baudrillard as “integral reality”, which is supported by various evidence based psychological approaches, psychoanalysis with its Lacanian mythology has been holding out against the loss of the subject, the unconscious and the Real. Crucial to this difference is the Lacan’s register of the Symbolic, while the psychological approach remains mired in the Imaginary register. However, beyond both psychology and psychoanalysis and the void of the Other, Levinas, Patočka and Derrida will point to the lost ethical (Christian) dimension to subjectivity and responsibility. The trace of this loss might invigorate psychoanalytic practice and thinking.         November 24th 2008 Here is a paper on Winnicott presented to the College of Psychoanalysts in Ireland (CPI) on 21st November. Winnicott is re-read through Lacan and others. What is key here is that Winnicott does not fetishize the unconscious or analysis per se. However, Winnicott lacks a theory of the Real. November 17th 2008 In an age where people do not want to hate, judge or stigmatise the other for fear of damaging their enjoyment, there is arguably plenty of hatred around, including according to a Bernardos’ recent report plenty of hatred of children. Bernardos have produced a new ad-video based entirely on language gleaned from online comment pages. The short video shows three men talking about “vermin” and “animals” that are “feral” before grabbing shotguns and taking to the streets. Then it becomes apparent they are referring to gangs of children that they want to search out and shoot in the dark mean streets of any British suburb. These words are allegedly used daily in reference to children. Barnardos’ Chief Executive and former Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey said, ‘these are not references to a small minority of children but represent the public view of all children. Despite the fact that most children are not troublesome there is still a perception that today's young people are a more unruly, criminal lot than ever before’. The video shows white males in the manners of racists, but now their target is children. Children are seen running in fear of their lives as shots ring out. The video is intended to shock and places the blame squarely on violent adults attacking innocent youth. It looks real. Bernardos are pointing to a real enough breadown of trust between adults and children, which is appalling for children themselves. But Bernados' analysis, a plea for more ‘understanding and tolerance’ of children, has always been a central part of the problem. The reciprocal Oedipal contract between parents and children has broken down. Often, parents no longer feel the need to teach children any controls. Instead they leave children alone in their rooms with their screens and games, or leave them equally alone out on the streets where they seek new “family” peer groups. If we want to generalise about recent developments, it seems now that parents fear children, even their own children. They are afraid to exert controls and are afraid to correct other children. Children, therefore, are left to control their own drive-impulses which they are quite unable to do, hence the rise of ADDs and the increasing use of Ritalin. Children, relatively uncontrolled and hyperactive, inevitably arouse fear and hate in equal measure in the scared adult population. And the Bernardos’ video only serves to increase this paranoid atmosphere, blaming only the adults for what seems their hate crimes. There is no acknowledgement by this charity of the generalised coarsening and disrespectfulness of children towards their elders on the streets and in our towns, observable everyday. This charity does not serve children but the ideological tastes of that small coterie that produces such a shock video, by portraying adults as if they were BNP supporters or Klansmen ready to go out and shoot to make their point. It is the same catastrophic logic that suggests to children that they are most likely to be abused by ‘someone in their own home’. 'Do not trust adults', is the disastrous message given to all children by the media. This is abusive. What kind of covert hatred does this kind of message represent?      November 16th 2008 ‘The trouble with modern Britain is that the wrong people are afraid’, writes Peter Hitchens today. ‘Inexpressibly cruel killers are afraid of nothing, and rightly view the criminal justice system as a feeble joke. But the police, the courts and the social workers are increasingly fearful of the violent, conscience-free underclass’. He is writing about the savage death of Baby P in England in the most neglectful and cruel circumstances. He continues, ‘if a middle-class Baby P had fallen off a swing and banged his head in a genuine accident, the selectively vigilant social-work squads would have been demanding his removal from the home’. The wrong people are afraid, that is the generally law abiding silent majority. It is the same in modern Ireland. Hitchens could have been writing about the death of journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996, right through to the murder, more than 12 years later, of Shane Geoghegan a week ago in Limerick. Good people live in fear.   November 12th 2008. Nick Cohen: ‘The intellectual must be managed and constrained until his argument is "accessible" enough for viewers they take to be cretins to understand’. Cohen was talking about the BBC, but it applies to all mass media. Everywhere the complexity of an argument is reduced and is more than likely to be converted to dramatic emotive imagery accompanied by special effects frequently with an ideological message. Getting closer and closer to the facist mentality.  November 10th 2008 An Irish analyst talking about his work as an analyst, on RTE recently, mentions a dream of his, where his father, who has been dead for many years, appears suddenly, walks past the dreamer to give the dreamer’s brother an important message. The analyst interprets his dream as the father coming to tell the son about his impending death. The important thing to note is not that dreams may, or may not be, premonitory (something that Freud always doubted), but that the dreamer imbues them with a meaning, and in this case, a highly significant meaning. There is no proof that any one meaning is the "right" meaning. The dream in general calls to the dreamer to remember, to reflect on his or her life, to grasp something of the deeper core, at the edge of the void of being. This should not be seen as a narcissistic preoccupation, but quite the opposite, as part of the teaching coming from Greek philosophy, namely, the “care of the soul”. The soul is always a beyond to be glimpsed to be re-collected in responsibility; a responsibility that lies between the Sacred and the Profane. The task is to find some way of sublating everydayness without falling back into the darkness of  the orgiastic sacred (jouissance). It involves enabling oneself, or being in a state of readiness for oneself, to be struck by meanings. To allow meanings to emerge from the most banal everyday events, thoughts or free associations. These meanings span the range from the subjective to the objective. They are subjective as personal and linked with personal history on the one hand, and objective, as having to do with one’s death, on the other. The dream for this analyst had to do with three deaths, his father’s, his brother’s and his own to come. So when we talk of meanings, we must not confuse these with the trite pop psychological “meanings” effortlessly provided by self-improving books, that confine us to the Profane. Meanings are always linked to the Sacred, that is to death and non-being. The soul gathers these against a backdrop of  forgetting. The task in analysis is to enable people to be struck by meanings as well as meaning-less-ness, both of which may bring dignity and gravity to an entire life.   November 4th 2004 Election day! Can this (below) be dismissed as just another racist smear? A former top deputy, Dr. Vibert White Jr., to Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, tells Newsmax (November 1st) that Barack Obama’s ties to the black nationalist movement in Chicago run deep, and that for many years the two men have had ‘an open line between them’ to discuss policy and strategy, either directly or through intermediaries. ‘Remember that for years, if you were a politician in Chicago, you had to have some type of relationship with Louis Farrakhan. You had to. If you didn’t, you would be ostracized out of black Chicago’, White said, who spent most of his adult life as a member and ultimately top officer of the Nation of Islam. White broke with the group in 1995 and is now a professor of African-American history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. According to White, the Anti-Defamation League has denounced Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam as a “hate group”. Farrakhan has called Jews “bloodsuckers,” “satanic” and accused them of running the slave trade. He has labelled gays as “degenerates.” In a 2006 speech, the ADL again condemned Farrakhan when he said: ‘These false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people and the people of the world and bringing you down in moral strength. … It's the wicked Jews the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality. It's wicked Jews, false Jews that make it a crime for you to preach the word of God, then they call you homophobic!’ Obama was careful to “denounce” Farrakhan’s comments – but not the man -- during the Democratic primary season earlier this year, but only after Hillary Clinton called him out for benefiting from Farrakhan’s support.        Farrakhan endorsed Obama in a videotaped speech to his followers at Mosque Miryam in Chicago in February. ‘You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth’, Farrakhan said. He told the crowd that Obama was the new “messiah.” Once the news media and the Clinton campaign got hold of those comments from Farrakhan, demands mounted from all sides that Obama “renounce” Farrakhan. But as he has done repeatedly throughout this campaign, Obama was careful to parse his words. ‘You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan's anti-Semitic comments’, he said during one appearance on Meet the Press. ‘I think that they are unacceptable and reprehensible’. Then, Obama hastened to point out that Farrakhan had been praising him as ‘an African-American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can't censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we’re not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally with Minister Farrakhan’. Obama goes on, ‘Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing’. Black nationalism is a current of thought and political action in the African-American community that has been championed by Farrakhan, Wright, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and Khalid al-Mansour. Obama discussed his attraction to black nationalism at length in his 1995 memoir Dreams of My Father.        In addition to the ideological affinity Obama expressed for the black nationalist movement, White believes that Obama owes much of his success as a public orator to speaking techniques that Farrakhan developed over the years, and exploited for years to great success. ‘If you listen to the rhetoric and you take away Obama’s political jargon, you hear a religious tenor to it that is very much Nation of Islam-like. I don’t know if anyone has ever touched on it, but Obama’s speaking style is very Malcolm-like, very Farrakhan-like’, White said. Any American who has listened to early radio or television interviews of Obama can hear how dramatically Obama’s speaking style has changed since he became a United States senator. In clips dating from 2001 and even early 2004, Obama speaks haltingly and in long, rambling sentences packed with legalese and dense pseudo-academic rhetoric. But not today. ‘As a former minister of the Nation of Islam, I know how they speak’, White told Newsmax. ‘I don’t know who was training Obama. But that style is not a ministerial style like in the Christian church. It’s a Nation of Islam style’.      How can these ideological affiliations not be a cause for concern? Remember: God damn America?          October 30th 2008 Gomorrah is based on a book by journalist Roberto Saviano. The film's title plays on the Biblical reference to Sodom and Gomorrah and the Camorra, the notorious Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia. The Camorra has been responsible for more murders - over 4,000 - in the past 30 years than any criminal or terrorist group. Set in and around Naples, Gomorrah depicts the unremitting brutality and corruption of the underworld network, known locally as "the System", that holds total violent sway in that region. The film opens in a tanning parlour with four men in the blue light of their cubicles relaxing, then, immediately, shot dead - alluding to the classic Mafia style murder. Matteo Garrone's so-called “drama” is dramatically short on narrative, but nevertheless comprises a number of brief storylines. One strand involves a young androgenous boy, Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), who wants to leave his close friend and join the gang. We see him making this choice in what is the only genuinely tragic moment in the movie. Totò passes the initiation of being shot while wearing a bullet-proof vest. ‘Now you're a man’, the gang leader tells him. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a nervous bagman who hurries to give out cash to families of faithful Camorra members, who never cease complaining. There is Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), an expert tailor on a couture-house shopfloor, who gives lessons to a rival Chinese concern. Two pimply youths (Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone) find a cache of guns, tear around firing them, not heeding the warnings, they become a threat to be eliminated. An apparently more respectable face of the System is the linen suited, Franco (Toni Servillo), whose business is the disposal of toxic waste as landfill. The film's most chilling moment comes when an elderly peasant woman gives Franco and his lieutenant a tray of peaches. Once he's on the road, Franco throws them away: they're toxic. Imagine a city built by crime. Imagine its people ruled by fear. Imagine a system poisoned by corruption. Nobody is Innocent. Nowhere is safe. No one is spared. These are the words of the trailer. Saviano describes Scampia, a suburb north of Naples, as ‘the largest open-air drugs marketplace in the world’. We see a culture in near total decay, where the System itself has become an anti-System, existing in the empty concrete cells of destroyed apartment blocks on sink estates, where old obese low-lifes fight for survival, largely left alone by the normal culture that secretes them. This is a documentory of a de-humanised society, with its toxic waste leaking into the ground water poisoning everyone. This is an objectively nihilistic film. There is no meaning, no reason, no explanation and no tragedy, only the immediacy of the edgy camera work and the soundtrack from Massive Attack. October 27th 2008 BBC R4. The Torturer’s tale. Jolyon Jenkins speaks to former torturers from different countries about the process of  ‘crossing the line from acceptable to unacceptable behaviour’, and asks how they cope with the knowledge that they had done wrong. To hear him question these soldiers you would think that Jenkins believes these people are interrogating wrong-doers in a school playground. He is so high-minded and righteous. And who does he interview? US soldiers in Iraq, post Abu Guirab, soldiers from the right-wing junta in Greece, soldiers from the former fascist Somoza regime in Nicaragua, soldiers from the Congo and then for good measure, to round things off, from Vietnam. These are all torturers from the West. At no point do we get any sense of the sheer brutality of what these soldiers might have been fighting against. At no point is there any distinction made between fascist dictatorships and legitimate Western democracies, and at no point to we hear of the torturing done by their enemies.The conclusion: only the West does torture.     October 23rd 2008 Kevin Myers writes yesterday on Sinn Fein’s planned protest march against the Royal Irish Regiment when it returns from active service in Afghanistan. ‘What I'd really, really like to do’, says Myers, ‘is to put some Afghan women democrats in the same room as a group of Shinners, and to get the latter to outline their position on Afghanistan to the former. Similarly, I'd love to have got the Shinners of yesteryear to sit down with a train-load of Jews bound for Auschwitz and explain to them why they supported the Nazis’. However, Sinn Fein are only slightly more hostile to the British Army than the BBC, for instance. Reporting on Gayle Williams, the British aid worker who was assassinated recently in Kabul, the BBC news reader questioned the correspondent in Kabul as to the nature of the Christian aid agency Williams was working for, thereby implying that the Taliban had their “reasons” for murdering a denfenceless young woman. October 18th 2008  If there is anything that specifically defines Ireland as a post-Christian society, it is the shock that has been delivered to the old people of this country during the recent budget. It is not, first and foremost, the withdrawal of the automatic right to a medical card for the over-seventies and the indignity of the mean-testing envisaged, it is the attack per se on these people who have worked all their lives, served this country and paid their dues. It is the palpable sense of distress and humiliation felt by so many that should be noted. Those people feel morally betrayed. Those who want and believe the State to be a protector, a guarantor, maybe should think again. In this one blow, the State has revealed its inhumanity beneath is smooth talking veneer. To think that they could relatively comfortably make the axe fall here, against the old, shows, beyond Lisbon, how radically out of touch they are, how elitist and decadent the political class has become.   October 16th 2008 People are rejoicing over the banking crisis seeing it as a crisis at the heart of capitalism itself. As Irish Senator David Norris, for instance, declared amid roars of approval, 'I am trying to push capitalism down the drain'. And there is more rejoicing that Obama looks certain to win next month. The fact that Obama is linked to, was linked to, according to many sources, an underground black supremacist movement, is swept away in the euphoria and goes largely unreported in the mass media (except to reject those sorts of comments as racist). Anyway, how could such a charming senator be thus involved. The big question remains, what might replace the current imperfect system? Would it be a Russian or Chinese style autocracy? Or, going further, an Islamic style theocracy? Such is the hatred of democracy and America in the western media, the BBC has recently be comparing America and Al Qaeda and declaring, without any remorse or fear, that Al Qaeda is winning! Such is our belief that the only evil in the world comes from America. October 9th 2008 New book: Raising Parents: Attachment, Parenting and Child Safety. Patricia McKinsey Crittender. 'This book provides a systematic account of parental behaviour and the means of identifying and addressing inadequate parenting.  Understanding and helping troubled parents to become secure and balanced people'.  Quite a reversal. At one time it was the children who had much to learn from the parents. Now it seems that parents are deemed so inadequate that they have to be 'raised' just like children. And who is going to do the raising? The State's so-called experts. October 4th 2008 The banking crisis gives a whole new dimension of meaning to the Imaginary. Here were the banks, before the crisis, with all their solemnity and silence, occupying the best premises in town, models of sobriety and correctness, the manager being a person you went in fear of; now they are exposed as deeply fraudulent. The bubble of the Imaginary has burst. What we can now see is massive indebtedness – the indebtedness of the banking system as a whole, of whole countries like the US, of individual banks and the massive debt of individuals who have been encouraged to borrow without any thought given as to how to repay the debts. This crisis bears all the marks of the relativism of the postmodern “floating” world. With the Imaginary, disconnected from the Symbolic and the Real, there is no sense of debt. The Symbolic is structured around notions of accountability and debt, but with the postmodern ascendancy of the Imaginary, indulgence without accountability is the new reality. There is no accountability and no fault and no judgement, not just in the financial world with the Left delighted with the exposure of “greed”, but also in the world of relationships, where lifestyle choice is also unaccountable with maybe equally disastrous consequences, for those people wronged by others, who like the gambling bankers will probable never brought to book.  September 30th 2008 Garage (2007), written by Mark O’Halloran and directed by Leonard Abrahamson. Josie (Pat Shortt) minds a tumbledown garage and lives on site in a rural landscape just outside a small Irish town suffering its own rural isolation. Josie is known and liked for his “softness” and is treated well, until a teenager, David (Conor Ryan), comes to help out at weekends. Josie and David get along and Josie shares some cans of beer with him in the evenings at the weekends. Then things go downhill as David is only fifteen and Josie also shows him a pornographic video given to him by a lorry driver returning from Holland. Word gets out and Josie is warned to stay out of town, even though we believe him when he says he meant no harm. Shame and isolation overwhelm him. The bleak landscape of drink, social breakdown, sexual impoverishment, rural decay and finally suicide are never far away.    September 25th 2008 A Spanish judge, Eloy Velasco, has asked Interpol to find one of Spain's best known convicted Eta terrorists, now understood to be residing in Dublin, where he has been living in recent weeks (report in Irish Times). The Dublin address for the wanted man stated in yesterday's court petition is the home of James Monaghan, a member of the so-called “Colombia Three”. The man at the centre of the case is Inaki de Juana Chaos. The 52-year-old was sentenced to 3,000 years in prison for a series of 25 murders in the 1980s. He was released from prison after 21 years on August 3rd and flew to Ireland the next day, apparently on a Ryanair flight. On his release he wrote a letter expressing his support for the continuation of Eta's Basque separatist terrorist campaign. The letter was read at a meeting and also published in a pro-Eta newspaper. His release this year made news worldwide after it emerged he was planning to live in the same apartment block as a number of people widowed by Eta.        Not only has an active terrorist supporter found a safe haven in allegedly “neutral Ireland” – ‘no war machine involvement with the EU here’, as Vincent Browne and others are so piously fond of saying, but also the Columbia Three have been allowed to quietly return here after travelling on forged documents and allegedly helping the Farc with their bomb making technology, enabling them to kill and maim innocent Columbian civilians more effectively. The only authority to have officially charged them and imprisoned them was the Supreme Court in Bogota, who last year upheld the 17-year sentences against Monaghan (62) and two other Irishmen for 'training Farc guerrillas in IRA bomb-making techniques'. Here in Ireland, nothing has happened to them and to date there has been no public condemnation of their illegal and criminal activities overseas.  September 22nd 2008 Taking the temperature of the postmodern as its chaotic, indeterminate essence becomes ever more obvious, Kevin Myers has written (Irish Times, Sept 19th) about the radical uncertainties manifesting during the current financial crisis. He says, ‘I have no idea what is going to happen to me, my life, my savings, my home, or to society generally: none at all. New rules apply, not ones of fiscal prudence, social rectitude and compound interest, but of thermodynamics, metallurgy and gravity’. He goes on to list the larger threats that present themselves.  The American debt incurred by fighting two wars costing trillions. The tax-base to pay for those wars is shrinking while unemployment rises resulting in higher taxes, and therefore deeper recession. Then there is the emergence of China, which as other commentaors have reminded us, work from a particularly malign hybrid of Capitalist-Communism, which could undermine the entire US economy. Hundreds of thousands of jihadist volunteers in remote areas of Pakistan are joining the epic struggle against the West in Afganistan and the rest of the world, with, it must be stressed the tacit support of some elements on the Left and the denial of the seriousness of this threat by many other others. The UK are similarly engaged in two wars which must be won, but do not have strong public support. Their economy is entering recession, with immigrants competing for dwindling employment. Meantime, individual and families are struggling to repay huge loans, while being in negative equity. How will Africa cope as the entire continent seems dependent upon hand-outs from once rich economies which now may be collapsing. ‘So it seems’, concludes Myers, ‘that we are heading into the historically darkest period of my entire life: for this is not a crisis, with a potential cure in sight, such as those various major conflicts of interest which occurred during the Cold War. Each of those could be defined and then managed out of existence. No, this an entirely new epoch, a realm of chaos composed of many global variables: and the greatest and most sinister of the lot is ignorance’.      Then Ian Traynor, in The Guardian (Sept 17th), no less, suggests, ‘the west's efforts to use the United Nations to promote its values and shape the global agenda are failing, according to a detailed study published today. A sea change in the balance of power in favour of China, India, Russia and other emerging states is wrecking European and US efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism. Western policies, in crisis in regions as diverse as Georgia, Zimbabwe, Burma or the Balkans are suffering serial defeats in what the study identifies as a protracted trend. The haemorrhaging of western power, as reflected in longer-term voting patterns in key UN bodies, is mirrored by the increasing clout of China, Russia and the Islamic world, according to an audit of European influence at the UN by the European Council on Foreign Relations. "The EU is suffering a slow-motion crisis at the UN," says the report, noting that the west is now being regularly outwitted in global diplomatic poker by the Chinese and Russians. "The problem is fading power to set the rules. The UN is increasingly being shaped by China, Russia and their allies … The west is in disarray. The EU's rifts with the US on many human rights issues at the UN in the Bush era have weakened both"’. Tranor continues, ‘US and European failure to win the day at the UN security council in recent votes on Zimbabwe and Burma as well as defeats last year on Kosovo or Darfur and the constant struggle to muster support for global action against Iran because of its nuclear ambitions are traced as part of a broader decline over the past decade. “opposition to the EU is growing, spurred by a common resistance to European efforts at promoting human rights”, said the study. He goes on, ‘China and Russia defend national sovereignty and non-intervention in sovereign countries no matter how grievous the atrocities and human rights violations blamed on national governments. Over the past decade support for Chinese and Russian stances on human rights issues has soared from less than 50% to 74% in the UN general assembly. Serbia is to use the current session to demand a vote on the "illegality" of the secession last February of Kosovo, whose breakaway was strongly backed by the US and most of the EU, and to refer the dispute to the UN's international court of justice. Despite strenuous lobbying by the Europeans to prevent the vote, they have conceded defeat. Only 46 of the 192 UN states have recognised Kosovo's independence. And western attempts to rally support for Georgia in the Caucasus crisis will be rebuffed by the Russians. The use of “soft power” and the EU being the world’s biggest aid donor and the UN’s biggest funder is not working’, concludes Traynor in his excellent summary of the crisis facing western values. It must be significant that this article appears in the Guardian whose readers would be more or less one hundred percent supporters of the UN’s right to govern the world as the only guarantee of peace.        The haemorrhaging of western power has been the defining property of the postmodern era stretching back over at least four decades, accelerating most recently in the new century. But the elites in western countries believe this is all to the good and will result in a tranquil world of 'equality within difference'. But, as Melanie Phillips argues on her blog, the UN in its real hidden functioning, ‘ignores, condones or protects gross abuses of human rights, while attacking and undermining democracies which abide by them. The fact that it [the UN] is sanctified by the west as having more legitimacy than individual nations, and for embodying the deluded progressive belief that ‘soft power’ can bring about the brotherhood of man on earth, has meant that the west has turned a blind eye to the excesses committed by member states and institutionalised the UN as a weapon against western interests’. Soft power is absolutely no match for the universally hard power of the new barbarism of the re-tribalised multipolar world, where each pole is potentially a violent singularity. The western media, still operating on broadly western consensus values, cannot “see” this logic of darkness, where for instance, a disabled person, or a child is forced to wear a suicide belt and blow up innocent bystanders in a Baghdad market. There must be a reason, they say… September 15th 2008 Sarah Palin is the unimaginable antithesis, the radical other of the liberal orthodoxy! As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist, who shows her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, she is everything the enlightened define themselves against. “Inclusiveness” yes, but Palin is a step too far! People laugh and say openly how they hate her. The war against her, mounted by the mass media, is on. She was treated as a sex object. Some journalists turned her family into an object of disgust. It was suggested that Palin was pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her teenage daughter’s. In every respect, the “packaging” of Palin has been and will continue to be rigorously interrogated. Ironically, however, it will be Palin who will get the votes from the poor working class whites that the Democrats always intend to help with their boundless condescension. As Clive Cook commented (Irish Times, September 12th), ‘The trouble is, they [Democrats] lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt’. They believe the media are unbiased, except of course for the tabloids, Fox News, etc. The fact that the media widely express Democratic views is just regarded as good sense and nothing more than enlightened. The fact that the Republicans will support Palin and may well win in November is seen as due to the simple backwardness of much of the country. Palin’s husband is a fisherman. She speaks for a great number of people the Democrats allege they want to care about, yet her selection has induced consternation, all the more so after 8 years of Bush. There is another irony too. Palin wants both evolution and Creationism to be given class time in schools. What could be more inclusive - equal weight given to truth and lies! September 14th 2008 Lacan famously defined love as, giving something one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. This morning on The Sunday Service (BBC Radio4) a speaker tells the terrifying story of her successful escape from a burning aircraft. In the chaos, she was amazed to see a priest, waiting for many passengers to get safely out before jumping to safety himself. Later she asked him why he had waited and not immediately tried to save himself as everyone else had done. He replied saying that he had had a very good life, that his life would soon be over and he felt many others might not have been as fortunate as him. During the Zeebrugge disaster in 1987, some survivors said that some people had made themselves into “human bridges” to enable others to escape. Giving everything one has to someone who does want it.  September 9th 2008 As Foucault says, ‘the turning point came when Levi-Strauss, in the case of societies, and Lacan, in the case of the unconscious, showed us that “meaning” was probably no more than a superficial impression, a shimmer, a foam, and that what was really affecting us deep down, what existed before us, and what was supporting us in time and space, was system’. Meaning then comes as a consolation, as against the system of signifiers – meaningless, austere, differential elements. This is some turning point! August 31st 2008 Gina McKee (Fiona) and Jeremy Northam (Simon Mortimer) star in, Fiona’s Story, a one-off drama (BBC), written by Kate Gabriel that ‘explores one woman's fight to hold her family together’, when her husband is accused of downloading indecent images of children from the internet. Their comfortable lives are shattered when the police unexpectedly arrive to arrest Simon for allegedly downloading images of child sexual abuse, taking all the family computers as evidence, apart from one that Simon had destroyed. From the start Simon dismisses the accusations, suggesting that credit card numbers got mixed up and again later when his case seemed to become a low police priority and he gets bail. His attitude is keep quiet, tell no one and it will go away. While Fiona is depicted as utterly responsible and caring of their children and even her husband in spite of increasing misgivings about his truthfulness, Simon, on the other hand, is cast as quite unremittingly irresponsible and self-serving, nearly to the point of justifying his nocturnal internet searching as due to the lack of a satisfying sexual life with Fiona. ‘Do you not realise these are real children; think of your own children’, Fiona screams at him. At one point we see his brother also siding with him, downplaying the crime to Fiona, further isolating her with the children. Simon is full of self-pity and self-hatred and pleads with Fiona not to break-up their marriage – she break up their marriage!        Yet more images, as if more were needed, of weak fathers (strong women encumbered by men behaving badly). This could not be more obviously and coincidently serving the ideological needs of the elite, rather along the lines of “Soviet Realism”, although everyone accepted and knew way back then that that was propaganda!  August 26th 2008 The Sailor in the Wardrobe, by Hugo Hamilton. Harper. 2006. Here, in effect without realising it, Hamilton defines the unconscious: ‘You can disguise yourself like an actor and choose what to remember and what to forget. But there is always something that gives you away, from some tell-tale part of you that cannot be hidden. It’s not just the obvious things like your accent, your language, your appearance. It’s the way you look at the world, your point of view. You can never disguise that because it shows up like ancient ruins on the landscape’. His preoccupation in this volume, as with The Speckled People, is identity, caught, as he beautifully illustrates, between his fanatical Irish speaking father and the ever present memories of his German mother who survived the Nazi era.      Aware somehow of passing on more than history, but trauma as well, his mother would get the children to draw their nightmares, there and then, when they awoke in the middle of the night. She believed that, ‘once you have put it down on paper you will never have to dream about it again’. ‘Our family is a factory of remembering and forgetting. My mother’s diary is full of secrets and nightmares …There were nightmares in Irish and nightmares in German…family nightmares and world nightmares…Sometimes we had to draw the nightmare and also the solution’. Contrary to the mother’s naïve (psychotherapeutic) belief that drawing brings closure, ‘the more we drew our nightmares the more we made up new ones’, and the house became a "nightmare factory". And there were nightmares by day! In a huge effort to make friends to be accepted by his peers (not to be a “Nazi”), Hugo and his brother help build the traditional Halloween bonfire. When lit it burns out of control and the fire brigade comes to put it out. The firemen were pelted with anything the children could get their hands on, cans, branches and sods of earth. This is all in the spirit of the night, but when Hugo throws a huge sod, it hits a fireman full in the face. He runs in terror of punishment and everyone gives chase as he squeezes through the railings just in time.  ‘It’s Eichmann’, they shout, but Hugo manages to flee and hide away. Just like his mother, he remembers her story of escaping punishment when her and other girls blocked the town’s fountain, flooding the local square. From then on he tries to become invisible, ‘like Eichmann in Argentina’. His German cousin Stefan, is on the run from his father, who told him that during the war he had seen people, including naked women, being massacred in a forest in the Ukraine. Stefan felt his father was a murderer and he wanted to get as far away from him as possible and he goes missing in the West of Ireland. Hugo’s sanity is only saved by his friend Packer, down at the harbour. Even here there is conflict between two fishermen, one Catholic (Turley) and the other Protestant (Tyrone). As the conflict worsens, mirroring the conflict in the North, Hugo has a nightmare that Tyrone is hitting him and he can’t escape. He wakes to find his father in a frenzy of violence, hitting him, punching him, even while he is still asleep, ‘all the punishment in history being passed on blow by blow, here in my bedroom’.(p219). He can see him remove his watch, roll up his sleeves, smell his sweat, and see the spittle on his mouth. At this point, Hugo runs off from the house full of muderous feelings for his father. But later returns, wanting to forgive him and remember the good things. ‘I hated to see his hurt mind and my own hurt mind’. Stefan returns eventually, and Hugo tells him of the father’s beating. Stefan tells him that he had hit his father and knocked him to the ground in the garden, leaving him there while his mother had to help him to his feet. Stefan says he now wants to return, because, ‘that injustice that he had done to his father had begun to haunt him as much as the story that had been passed on to him from the war’. This has been a tale of three fathers, Stefan’s, Hugo’s and Hugo’s father’s father – the sailor in the wardrobe, John Hamilton, the sailor with the soft eyes who got locked in the wardrobe by my father (his picture was “hidden” in there). ‘I know he lost his life when he fell on board a British navy ship during the First World War and after the Irish liberated their country from British rule, he disappeared, because my father wants Ireland to be fully Irish and thinks his own father betrayed his country’.       August 25th 2008 Consider this torture: ‘“The consumer society takes the meaning from this; that what makes up the element in quotation marks that we qualify as human, is given the homogeneous equivalent of any other surplus enjoyment that is a product from our industry, a fake surplus enjoyment”. (Lacan in Italia, 1978). Indeed, increasingly it is the unlimited availability of objects of jouissance (enjoyment) that are produced externally to the subject that drives society and its individuals. It drives the individuals away from another kind of jouissance, namely, the jouissance of their unconscious, which is a jouissance attached to the object a…..’ The flier continues in this vein for another page! It is a “call for papers” for a conference, a Lacanian conference, no less, that invites other health professionals to participate in a discussion entitled, THE CLINIC OF CONTEMPORARY SYMPTOMS. Who apart from Lacanians could, or would be inclined, to participate when faced with this kind of pseudo-complexity, which Lacanians are inclined to justify on the basis that the unconscious itself destabilises language and meaning? No doubt, but this is the worst kind of obscurantism which shields adherents and ensures that no one can challenge their assumed elite position. The fake enjoyment linked to the vast range of consumer products leads us astray from our own specific relation to enjoyment? Is this the meaning intended? The so-called “object-a” is what organises our own patterns of enjoyment and desire and this is what we will be turned away from, alienated from, by consumerism?          August 11th 2008 Nick Cohen reads things exactly. He is writing about the rock-solid, fatal confluence of views in a broad swathes of the populations in the West, by no means just confined to the liberal-left. These views have been reinforced and reiterated by the “quality” mass-media as it eagerly awaits the election of Obama.        ‘It doesn’t know it, but the liberal-left in Europe and North America has been lucky to have Bush. By building him up into a great Satan, the oil man who invades countries to seize their reserves and the Christian who orders bloody crusades, they have hidden the totalitarian threats of our age from themselves and anyone who listens to them. Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy. Even those in the European elites who do not buy the full ‘America has it coming’ package believe that Bush is a cowboy who doesn’t understand that the postmodern way to end conflict is to compromise rather than fight. In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the ‘root cause’ of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired’.       Even as Obama attempts the “talking cure” between America and its “enemies” and maybe it fails (as the talking cure often does), perhaps with disastrous consequences, then for many years to come, there will be the consolation that the failure is down to the hell of the Bush legacy. More “proof” that Bush and his cronies were satanic and that America, even with Obama, is wrong. Wrong because America is always wrong!  August 5th 2008 A new journal, Sitegeist, has appeared with an open agenda that sound exciting on first reading. It is the journal of "the Site of contemporary psychoanalysis" (published by Karnac). It is, 'a space for thinking and questioning philosophy and psychoanalysis...avoiding professional territorialisation, the journal will be committed to the encouragement, exploration and light handed orchestration of the polyphony of current thinking about the subject and its vicissitudes...without falling into [the twin dangers of] a diffuse eclecticism or seeking to establish new orthodoxies'. This is code for avoiding New Age psychobabbling and/or rigid Lacanian-Kleinian intimidation. We'll see. July 30th 2008 On a recent, All in the Mind, BBC Radio4 presentation, there was a brief report of a young boy of ten whose OCD had led him to believe that he had caused the WTC devastation on September 11th, because that morning he had failed to step on the cracks between the paving stones, which was his normal morning ritual. He became very distressed and his obsessive symptoms worsened. His treatment consisted of a combination of medication and CBT based on the rational argument that, the time difference between the US and UK is proof that he could not have caused the atrocity. Impressing this fact upon the boy, helped by his mother who was a psychiatric nurse, ameliorated the symptoms. The only question left that we might ask is: what has happened to the unconscious rage that we might assume is driving the OCD mechanism and which the latter keeps in place? This is properly a psychoanalyitic question.    July 25th 2008 The Fallout. How a Guilty Liberal Lost his Innocence. Andrew Anthony. Jonathan Cape. 2007.  Early in 2006, the British media collectively retreated from publishing the Danish cartoons, when it was the biggest story across the world. They failed even to describe them in detail. ‘Who can seriously doubt’, writes Andrew Anthony, ‘that there was only one reason why newspapers failed to publish such tame material: terror. They feared, perhaps correctly, that they would make themselves, their staff and anyone who stocked newspapers potential targets for terrorists’. Fear masquerades as tolerance, censorship is made to look like restraint, we would rather accommodate the illiberal, the intolerant and the superstitious than support defining liberal principles, such as the rule of law and free expression. However, when Anthony says that, ‘one of the many enduring achievements of the Enlightenment thought is that nowadays we take it for granted that a play can be written about anything…’, here is a key paradox, because the Enlightenment, ultimately, opens out onto the broad plateau of nothingness. It moves inexorably in the direction of the diffusion of all values. In a sense, Anthony is asking liberals to stand up for nothing! He implicitly acknowledges this. ‘Indeed the most energetic wing of liberalism, the postmodernist, relativist school of thought, has devoted itself to exposing liberalism as just another self-serving cultural construct, a white, Western justification for neo-imperialism. The beauty of that argument is that is that it can’t be disproved’. Anthony’s position is that a return to some shared values is required.        According to the rhetoric of anti-racism, only white people can be deemed racist, as they are derived from fromer or current imperialist races. Black people cannot be racist! As Anthony says, ‘There is apparently no insult, if aimed at white working class, that is deemed unacceptable’. He goes on, ‘The kinds of seething social hatreds generated in any dynamic society are by and large repressed in a multicultural society…The exception to the rule, the single pressure valve, is the “chavs”, whose vilification is commonplace across the media and middle classes’. As a Chav himself, and British, he felt a blast of this hatred, when as a student he went out to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, working alongside other idealistically motivated young people. At a party over there, he met a young Irishman who was blatently “jubilant” at the brutal shooting of two British soldiers who had been had been stripped and beaten. ‘His hatred for me was visceral’, comments Anthony. ‘I should have remonstrated with him, said something’, he recalls, not least because his brother had served in Northern Ireland. ‘I should have done so because the soldiers were lynched….I should have said something because the truth was the overwhelming majority of English people had no desire to maintain a military presence in Northern Ireland’. ‘I should have said something because there we were in Nicaragua, a group of multinational internationalists united in just one cause, and yet a guy whose party and whose country remained neutral in the Second World War and even entertained the policy of supporting Hitler, was bating me on the basis of my nationality. However, I said nothing, I allowed the Dubliner to carry on insulting the “lying, two-faced English”, rejoicing at the soldiers’ sickening fate, because I had accepted the idea that his Irishness gave him some moral right to behave offensively to an Englishman, namely me’. And the reason, he doesn’t, we don’t speak out is guilt: ‘post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt’.     July 21st 2008 With the glut of information unleashed by the internet in the post-political era, an entropic effect is created whereby information and misinformation can co-exist unproblematically. Reality and unreality mingle with indifference. Neither cares for us. There are many ironic effects. Radicals are more often than not today likely to be Reactionaries (Jihadists). Liberals are illiberal (see Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Jonah Goldberg). Think of Mussolini's famous definition of Fascism: ‘everything in the state, nothing outside the state’. This is precisely what today’s Left demand. And the received standard rhetoric of the Left to which most people subscribe especially in the world’s media, is still regarded when uttered by young people, for instance, as “new”, “courageous” and “refreshing”. To “come out” as a victim (of the dominant culture only) is praiseworthy (Baudrillard: ‘The New Victim Order’). To attack the war in Iraq was deemed so dangerous that one may risk one’s career and reputation! Visceral intolerance masquerades as “inclusiveness”. People who love “difference” and “otherness”, quirkiness, funkiness, etc., reserve a visceral and unchallenged hatred for “sameness” – Bush, Blair, traditional families, Christianity, white males and so on. Indeed, one has to be very careful what one says, not just officially in public, but also in private. There are absolute no-go areas policed, the ideal way, by people themselves via an internalised “correctness” mechanism. People who are against war, are universally in favour of language wars. The actual hidden truth of things is irrelevant, for it is the way one sees oneself reflecting the contemporary orthodoxy that is crucial. Baudrillard has it: ‘Reality asks for nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses. And it confirms them all’ (The Perfert Crime. Verso, 2002, p99. emphasis added). June 30th 2008 The Secret Scripture. Sebastian Barry. Faber 2008. Roseanne McNulty has been confined to Roscommon Regional Mental Asylum for most of her long life and slowly the story unfolds of her as a young person and her long and wrong incarceration in this Victorian institution. Her psychiatrist, the Langian influenced Dr Grene, who is unsure about curing people and even more unsure about the soundness of Roseanne’s original diagnosis and confinement is trying to assess whether Roseanne is fit to be released into the general population as the old asylum is due for demolition. Through the testimonies of both Roseanne and Dr Grene who is re-assessing Roseanne while grieving the loss of his wife, a hidden history of Ireland unfolds, which, in this aspect, is really a history of Irish Catholic racism against a poor protestant family.           Roseanne is daughter of a good man, Joseph Clear, keeper of the graves in a Catholic cemetery, who also may have served at one time in the Royal Irish Constabulary in Sligo. A group of young irregulars, opposed to the 1922 treaty with Britain, stumble into the family hut carrying a dead comrade, John Lavelle. The young terrified Roseanne is sent to fetch the local priest, Father Gaunt, to administer the last rites (Priests were forbidden to administer the Last Rites to IRA irregulars). Roseanne is accused by the irregulars of betraying the boys to the Free State Army. As a result of Father Gaunt’s embarrassment, Roseanne’s father loses his job and becomes the village rat catcher. He is later found hanged, whether by murder or by suicide is not known, after a paraffin drenched rat causes a fire in an orphanage.       Gaunt “arranges” a marrage for Roseanne to a Free Stater, Tom McNulty, who develops fascist symapathies. This “mixed” marriage takes place against the wishes of the McNulty family, who at a later climactic point in the story refuse to help Roseanne, turning her away in wind and rain. Gaunt, walking out with a group of priests, spots the young bride talking to Willie Lavelle, the brother of executed John, who is taken with Roseanne’s great beauty. She is banished by her husband’s family to a life of complete isolation in an iron shack at the edge of the sea. Gaunt arranges with the Catholic authorities for her marriage to be annulled on the ground that she is a nymphomaniac, and he schemes to have her imprisoned in the mental institution. When crossed, Roseanne says that Gaunt, ‘was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him’. She says of herself, ‘I am completely alone. There is no one in the world that knows me now outside of this place, all my own people, the few farthings of them that once were, my little wren of a mother ... they are all gone now’.      The character of Roseanne is based tangentially on one of Barry’s great aunts, who similarly disappeared into an institution, having somehow transgressed the rigid codes of Catholic Ireland. In one way, says Barry, The Secret Scripture is a final breaking of the long familial silence that enshrouded her. ‘I once heard my grandfather say that she was no good’, says Barry. ‘That’s what survives and the rumours of her beauty. She was nameless, fateless, unknown. I felt I was almost duty-bound as a novelist to reclaim her and, indeed, remake her’.     However the nature of the story that unfolds is so bleak that even Barry himself wants to diffuse its radical truth, as he ponders the accuracy of any written history.   ‘Most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust’.     However, all this relativism does not resolve the killing machinations of Father Gaunt, and behind him the Catholic Church, in his damning document that leads to Roseanne’s confinement: ‘It is really a remarkable piece of work, clerical, thorough and convincing. It is like a forest fire burning away all traces of her, traversing her narrative and turning everything to ashes and cinders. A tiny, obscure, forgotten Hiroshima’.      ‘Roseanne is just a bit of paper blowing on the edge of the wasteland’.   June 28th 2008 Global media, such as CNN and BBC World, seek to foster, promote and inculcate the “one world” vision, by showing enterprise in the third world exemplified often by young poor people with voice overs of hope, greenness and connectedness and “we can do this together”, often linked to some global banking enterprise, backed by soft colours and soft world music. These gestures to the masses of the world’s poor are juxtaposed with the most exotic sporting events, yaughting, golf, business updates and holiday commercials of beautiful places and beautiful rich people.     June 17th 2008 The Irish NO vote is being reacted to in Europe in the same manner as the Israeli Knesset member Itzhak Ben-Aharon (United Workers Party - a faction of the Labour Party) reacted to the news in 1977 that Menahem Begin's Likud party had won the election, overthrowing 29 years of left-wing hegemony. If that is the will of the people, then we need to change the people. June 15th 2008 Ireland votes NO to Lisbon! This “NO” is an effect of what Baudrillard terms, the “silent mass” which operates like a hidden inert substance, like a hidden object. In Ireland today, but not just here of course, resistance to all progressive notions belonging to virtual reality and the political elite appears for a brief instant, before closing off again in silence. In Ireland, the politicians of course claim not to be an elite, but “of the people” and they are still saying this in spite of the defeat of the three main parties who united in wanting a YES vote. Their anger is clear. The silent mass acts like the dark matter of the universe: it is never seen, and therefore doesn’t “exist”, but its effects are great but indicipherable. The enlightened ones - the political, professional and business class of the virtual world are interrupted briefly in their forward march towards utopia. Meanwhile the mass sweats under its exclusion. June 12th 2008 A new paper, 'Žižek: silence and the real desert', can be found here. Žižek's insistence on "the Real" is discussed, yet his universal and indiscriminate negation of all "symbolic" universes and his wreckless revolutionary fervour are questioned. June 9th 2008 ‘We are afraid of language since we have been told about the signifier and all that. The signifier has introduced terror into language. “The unconscious is structured like a language” – nothing has wreaked such havoc as that kind of proposition’. (Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V.  Polity Press, 2005, p95, emphasis added). The use of language now has to be monitored by us all. Use language “wrongly”, even unconsciously, and you can be “killed off” just as effectively as from other terrorist threats. Worse, there is no escape from language. Part of  “surveillance culture” has come, not so much from the Right with its hated anti-terror surveillance operations, but from the Left. We demand this type of covert language surveillance. Where the post-‘68 Left failed to foment revolution in the real world, it has more than succeeded in the virtual world via “political correctness”.  June 3rd 2008 Robert Fisk, commenting on the "war on terror", suggests that the only way to end the attacks by Al Qaeda is for the West to pull out entirely from the Middle East. Maybe he has in mind what Hussein Massawi, a former leader of Hezbollah, has stated very clearly recently: 'We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you'. What else can Fisk really think, believe or say, as for a long while now he has been in the grip of a version of the Stockholm Syndrome. In order for him to continue to work and above all live – stay alive – in the Middle East he must be a spokesman for their cause. How would he fare if he took a more neutral, or, heaven forbid, a pro-Western stance?   May 31st 2008 Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Conor McPherson's, The Seafarer. Five characters getting drunk on Christmas Eve. Sharky (Liam Carney) has returned to the city from the countryside to look after his alcoholic brother, Richard (Maelíosa Stafford), recently blinded when he dived into a skip to retrieve wallpaper. Sharkey is on his third day without drink, but Richard's drinking buddies Ivan (Don Wycherley) and Nicky (Phelim Drew) drop in for an evening and night of drinking and poker. The very well dressed Mr Lockhart (George Costigan) includes himself and the stakes are raised ever higher as it becomes apparent that Lockhart is in fact the Devil, who has come to bet on Sharky's soul. McPherson's story stems from the tale of Wicklow's “Hellfire Club”, where Satan is said to have appeared during a card game. Although very well cast and acted, the spectacle of a largely middle class audience watching a crowd of drunks cursing and fighting is amusing in itself and a too well worn theme. The tragic elements, however, are close to hand: the murder for which Sharky was acquitted; the sense that Richard has not long to live; the pathetic fear and escape from women and the generalised sense of lives wasted beyond repair. May 26th 2008 A Lacanian joke: A man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental hospital where the doctors work hard to convince him that he is a man. However, when he is cured and now believes that he definitely is a man and not a grain of seed, he is allowed to leave the hospital and live as a normal man. He is outside the front door of the hospital and comes rushing back in trembling and scared. There was a chicken outside the door. The doctor tells him, ‘Look you know that you are not a grain of seed but a man’. ‘I know that full well’, says the patient, ‘but does the Chicken’? It is a question then of my knowledge of and my beliefs about myself, and the Other’s knowledge, which can be a shock or even traumatic and persecutory.  One never knows what the Other is thinking! And there is ultimately no reconciliation between these two knowledges; the one that is visible and the one that is opaque. May 21st 2008 ‘We have in this country [Britain] at the moment a situation in which you can have two children, of exactly the same age and gestation, and one is in a cot with all the resources of medical science being poured into saving it and the other is quite deliberately being taken from the womb and destroyed’. British MPs vote to retain the 24week limit for abortions. Marie Stopes International said it was "reassuring" that a majority of MPs were wise to what it called an emotive and misleading campaign to chip away at women's reproductive rights and had disregarded it in exercising their votes. The women’s "right to choose" contains keys words, "right" and "choose", two Master-Signifiers of modern liberal democracies. What could be more reasonable and civilised more than 40 years after abortion was legalised? What this law also demonstrates is the psychoanalytic truism that all law is based on an unconscious, disavowed obscene violent supplement. The obscene supplement to this exemplery human right is absolutely transparent: the death of a potentially viable foetus-infant. May 18th 2008 John Bowman’s archive programmes early on Sundays on RTE Radio One have been following the amazing singing  career of Margaret Burke-Sheridan, or “Maggie from Mayo”, as she referred to herself. Orphaned at the age of eleven, blessed with a wonderful singing talent, she went on to become a world class opera singer. Her brief career lasted just 12 years. This year marks the 50th anniversary of her death. Originally from Castlebar, the Dominican nuns of Eccles Street, Dublin, noted her wonderful voice. With the generous patronage of Lady Millicent Palmer of Kenure House, Rush, she was able to go to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music. While in London, singing at a soiree in Mayfair, Marconi the famous inventor heard her. Later, he told her: ‘Yours is the voice I've been waiting to hear all my life’. She went to Italy in search of an operatic career, where Puccini took her on. He was said to have been spellbound by her interpretation of his Madame Butterfly and when Gigli was making his debut in Covent Garden, he chose her as his leading lady. She played many great soprano roles -- Mimi in La Boheme, Desdemona in Otello and the title role in Manon Lescaut. But despite her beautiful voice, her technique was not up to the terrible strain of regular operatic singing. Having conquered the opera houses in Italy and London, Margaret was advised to go to America to perform in New York and Chicago. However, while singing for the BBC, her voice cracked on a high note and this was the beginning of the end. She came back to live in Dublin. Thanks to the generosity of patrons she stayed in the Shelbourne Hotel and later she had a flat on Fitzwilliam Street. She died from cancer in 1958 at the age of 69.   Listening to these scratchy recordings from the 1920s, replayed by Bowman, one is struck by the intense fragile beauty of her voice and how such beauty veils and yet evokes the Void.  May 13th 2008 Iran, according to some estimates may be only a year away from having a nuclear device with which to ‘obliterate Israel’, which it has made no secret of wishing to do. So when Senator Hillary Clinton was asked how America should respond to such a catastrophe, Clinton suggested a similar retaliatory strike against Iran. Fintan O’Toole (Assistant Editor, The Irish Times) expressed outrage at this suggestion on last night’s RTE, Questions and Answers. Iran has been at covert war with the West since 1979, and for nearly twenty years O’Toole remains in his delusional denial. What would his answer have been to Clinton’s questioner?       May 12th 2008 This is Declan Kiberd (Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin) from The Irish Times (May 1st). "1968 was pivotal. Some of the best and worst practices of our culture derive from those experiences. Among the negatives are the "rage communities" which emote daily on radio and TV phone-ins; the drugs which have destroyed the lives of so many; and the reduction of sex to a matter of consumption and performance rather than tenderness and love.    In the West, those who failed to make a revolution in the world settled instead for making one in language. They retreated from the streets and factories to university arts' facilities. There they propounded extreme forms of post-structural theory in a specialist jargon, which no normally intelligent person could (or should) ever hope to understand.    Every rebellion contains the seeds of its own destruction. The superb education given to thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, Althusser and Sartre, has been made impossible for the next generation of students".   It is no so much that these writers are “difficult”. They are, but that is not the problem. It is the nihilistic intent which has spread gradually and inexorably from their écrits to the wider Western culture and its institutions. They did not make a revolution on the streets; instead it was a cultural revolution that paralleled its violent variant perpetrated by the Red Guards in China, which was supported by some Western intellectuals. 1968 marked more or less the beginning of the post-modern period, when it would soon become apparent that the revolution was unstoppable. As the losses mounted, the whole notion of loss itself was abandoned. Nowadays, at least a generation further on, few know what has been lost; many would claim nothing has been lost, much has been gained! Baudrillard, however, summarises it apocalyptically: This is the story of a crime – the murder of reality.     May 3rd 2008 In Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a 30-year-old Londoner with an openness and simplicity attuned to each moment of her everyday encounters. She loves her job, her friends, her freedom. This film follows her over a few weeks one spring as she lives her freedom, as she learns to drive and embarks on a new romance. Poppy is not the superficial, trivial, ‘have a nice day’, soul of contemporary dull positivity that her name suggests. Instead, she is fully present on the surface and this work is more of a loving open portrait of her than a story - a film built around one powerful performance. Leigh is much more interested in observing her with the kids she teaches, or with her intensely paranoid driving instructor (Eddie Marsan), whose car tells us, via a sign on the back – good driving is no accident. But he is an accident waiting to happen and, in the end, she has to confront him. After ten years with her flatmate, we know too that her freedom is structured by its opposite: her sister is married, pregnant, bossy and worrying about pensions and flat-packs!    April 30th 2008 The Irish Revenue, which is investigating 2,000 overseas property transactions by Irish residents, claims that it lacks the legal powers to pursue its tax inquiries thoroughly. And new Revenue Commissioners’ chairwoman Josephine Feehily has said she will ask the Government to change the law to compel Irish estate agents to release details of foreign property purchases by Irish residents. The law, we understand well, operates at the level of reason and fairness respecting human rights. It is entirely fair that Revenue should be able to track down possible tax defaulters who may have stashed money away in foreign destinations. But there is another level, a secret (unconscious) perverse supplement to the law, a superego of enjoyment, quite outside and hidden from its official claims. This was Kafka’s world. You could almost hear it in the cold determined voice of the chairwoman herself when interviewed by RTE recently. This voice says, without saying: ‘I take pleasure in my power over you and I can do what I like with you and you can do nothing about it’. The same secret perverse supplement is at work one suspects when the police “interview” suspects, or chase them in high speed vehicles like boy-racers.   April 25th 2008 It might be useful to think of the various new contents of the superego that accompany post-modernity. All new injunctions involve transgressions – Enjoy! Do it now; think later! Be good to yourself. Go for it! Love X. The superego no longer opposes the id but augments it. Each reinforces the other. So in our European cities, everywhere, the “call to enjoyment”, parallels the “call to prayer”. The former is post-modern and the latter is pre-modern. Behind the latter we can also discern the “call to jihad” – the violent counter-reaction, the blind injunction to destroy enjoyment.     April 16th 2008 Rather than police the youth drinking culture with singular commitment, the (Irish) government commissions a report into the views on the subject by young people which among other things suggests lowering the drinking age to 16. We are assured by the government that they are, ‘impressed by the mature and responsible manner in which teenagers participated in the consultations’. This palliative “listening” to the teenagers, while allowing a drinking spree to spiral out of control with all the knock-on effects of antisocial behaviour, unwanted pregnancies, violence and even suicide, is just one example of an enfeebled value-free older generation ceding authority to youth and ignoring the mounting casualties of such an approach.  April 14th 2008 It is a great irony that the discipline that elaborated and deciphered the splitting (Spaltung) of consciousness, the coexistence of parallel states of consciousness, the "divided subject", namely psychoanalysis, has over the last decades become split itself. There are now clearly two languages of psychoanalysis with no mutual interaction or translation: the language of Kleinian process psychoanalysis, and, the language of structural Lacanian psychoanalysis. They share no commonality, no common bond. Although Lacanians have some knowledge of the Kleinians, as Lacan initially respected Melanie Klein herself, deriving the “mirror stage” partly from her work, they have no feel for the Kleinian approach. Projective identification, for instance, does not exist! As for the Kleinians, Lacan was an obscure French intellectual, where the whole question of structural lack and desire are completely incomprehensible. Both, in their unique ways, respond to the bricolage of the post-modern: the Kleinians to the intense affectivity of borderline personality disorder (BPD); the Lacanians to the desire for an ever closer and more sophisticated reading of the other.  April 7th 2008 Here is a review of Mad, Sad and Bad. A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, by Lisa Appignanesi. April 5th 2008 John Simpson, currently reporting from China, tells a story about his translator from way back in the 1970s, during the darkest days of communist rule and suppression of individuality. Each year on their wedding anniversary, she an her husband would put the children to bed early, maybe with something to help them sleep more deeply than usual, then very quietly, they would lift up a section of the floor boards in their tiny living room where, stored in a box, were their pre-communist evening clothes. They’d put on the clothes and then they’d waltz silently around the room, just a few times, to remind themselves of that other life that they had known once. No music because if their children had found them, they would report them to the authorities and they would certainly be imprisoned and sent to a labour camp for years and years and may even have been executed for showing this small gesture towards individuality. April 2nd 2008 In an article in yesterday’s Irish Times, writer Colm Tóibín describes his experience of regression therapy. He is a friend of the renowned Irish psychiatrist Prof. Ivor Browne, exponent of the controversial, Stanislav Grof  regression psychotherapy, over many decades. Over a weekend in May 1992, Tóibín underwent deep regression in Browne’s workshop held in the Dublin mental hospital, St Brendan's in Grangegorman. Tóibín’s father had died when he was twelve and he had never mourned his death. Browne had been suggesting to Tóibín over a number of conversations that this therapy would help unblock the grief. A combination of strong music, drumming and increasingly fast breathing induces panic, fear and a great outpouring of distress and sorrow. You work with a partner who will help you reconnect with sometimes vivid “memories”. Tóibín recalls, ‘I was moaning and screaming. I was in my parents' bedroom on the morning that my father died. My mother was downstairs. I felt the shock and the powerlessness of the grief - fierce, wild, absolute things. The realisation that he was dead would cause me to seize up on the mattress and start to scream and cry out’. ‘Fifteen years later’, Tóibín comments, ‘it is difficult to make raw remarks about what happened that weekend. But it has to be said that I did not know before then that my father's death, the pure and almost unbearable grief which I had denied for so many years, was so close to me, could so quickly be summoned up. It was an extraordinary thing to learn’.     This process may have “worked” in some sense for Tóibín, because of his desire to approach the feelings around one key event. The subject accesses the horror of the Real via an artificial stimulation of the autonomic nervous system (through music and breathing techniques) and experiences extreme feelings of distress. This process, sometimes referred to as “Holotropic Breathwork”, alleges direct access to unconscious mental states, bye-passing the normal defences. The more general problem posed by this primal scream approach is the same problem that Freud found when using “catharsis” with his early patients. The symptoms would disappear, only to return later. Freud abandoned catharsis in favour of analysis. The Real is too much. It is an excess that overcomes the subject, bringing danger of breakdown and permanent regressive states whereby distress and trauma can establish themselves as the new order – the new defence. This type of catharsis went to an extreme with the “screamers”, as they were known, who took up residence in Burtonport in the West of Ireland during the ‘70s. They would attack those relatives whom they alleged had traumatised them, by screaming at them. They travelled around in a van that would from time to times pulsate with screams. Screaming became a way of life. They left Burtonport for Columbia. March 22nd 2008 “How to build a Psychoanalytic Community”, was the title of a paper given at a conference last month in Dublin. The title carries within itself a contradiction. Whatever values may be embodied in the psychoanalytic “cause”, bringing people together with a common aim, there is so much more that will drive them apart. The normal rivalries (of any group) are amplified and exposed in analytic groups by the transferences invoked and exposed in each individual (training) analysis. These transferences once mobilised are never resolved. Secondly, the term “analysis”, meaning to loosen, to separate, has an atomistic effect – decomposing what might have otherwise have just held together. Thirdly, any (valid) criticism of the community is immediately understood as an attack coming ultimately from allegedly, ‘unresolved oedipal impulses’. Analysis is sceptical about virtually all human values understanding them as reaction formations against primary atavistic impulses. This makes criticism impossible as motives are always deemed suspect. Therefore, all psychoanalytic “communities” become corrupt from their inception.  This is a structural given. The only way analysts can co-exist as analysts, is in a decomposed state – no more than a loose agglomeration of equals. They can (co-) exist in the same way that survivors of sexual abuse can ‘fall in love’, by believing that they were never sexually abused.  March 18th 2008 Dr. Carol Owens has recently presented a paper (in Dublin) paralleling and comparing Lacan’s leaving the EFP in 1979 and his subsequent letter declaring, ‘The Other is missing’ (he refers to himself as the big Other), with the recent events within the small Lacanian world in Ireland. Owens asks, ‘Can we shrug off the inevitable historical identification with the EFP as a failed experiment which [as Lacan said] waters down the Lacanian teaching and fails to produce decent analysts? What indeed do we place in the position vacated by the père-sévère? The way we respond to these questions in our acts will significantly shape the future of the practice of Lacanian  psychoanalysis in Ireland’.     This is a key question. Contrary to Dr Owens’ position, however, it could be suggested, that one might, no one should ask: why are we analytic “children” still beholden to a père-sévère, still caught in this intense transference love, often to the exclusion of other thinkers of equal stature to Lacan? Why are we still fighting and denouncing each other, secretly, in the name of someone who refers to himself at the end of his life as God (where have we heard this before?) – the big Other – who similarly withdrew from his own Creation? Instead, why not leave the vacated place empty and water and dilute away the theory! Let us be, ‘the failed experiment that fails to produce good analysts’. Fine! If He has left us, let us turn things around; it is us that should have left him. Otherwise, without this incestuous bond being shattered, an Oedipus-type plague descends. Without this minimal distance from the Lacanian Thing, nothing but harm can come. March 17th 2008 Finally what can we say about Fairytale of Kathmandu, about the Donegal poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his one time trusted friend and neighbour Neasa Ní Chianáin? When you are unfortunate enough to get caught in the ideological vice (there are a number here) and become transformed into an object of observation, all you can say is: please leave a message after the moral high tone.  March 10th 2008 Tennessee Williams’, The Glass Menagerie, was staged recently in the Gate Theatre (Dublin). Set in the depressed 1930's St Louis, the semi-autobiographical work tells the story of the isolated Wingfield family in their tenement housing block. Francesca Annis appears as Amanda Wingfield, the very demanding, very romantically nostalgic mother of Laura (Katie Kirby), and her brother, Tom (Garrett Lombard) and his school pal, Jim O’Connor (Marty Rea). At the outset we learn that the father has deserted the family - ‘a long distance man who fell in love with long distances’, and arguably his absence haunts the play - his picture hangs on the wall. Amanda, her name means requiring to be loved, worries incessantly about the shy Laura, wishing endlessly for ‘the gentleman callers’ of old, and maybe just one now who might show an interest in her daughter, so that life can get going again. But none shows up anymore. Laura has a little collection of glass animals, her managerie, that represents her static, brittle fragility. ‘Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are’. Laura is not only crippled physically – she has a limp – but also psychically. Amanda also worries over Tom, who stays out every night, allegedly going to the movies, instead of actually moving, as he admits himself. The only visitor to the house is Jim, a workmate of Tom’s, who remembers Laura from their school days. He shows an interest in her, helping her to speak and come to life for a while. She shows him her glass animals, especially the unicorn, but as they dance the unicorn is knocked off the table and its horn breaks-off. Jim is embarrassed, but Laura is reassuring - now he will be more like the other animals. Laura has surrendered her singularity. Later, however, rather shamefully, Jim has to admit to Laura that he is engaged to another. He apologises formally to the family and leaves/escapes to collect his fiancée. With this final disappointment, the pent-up incestuous family affect explodes in a powerful scene, and we know in an instant there will be no return to dreaming. The glass imaginary is shattered. ‘Go, then! Then go to the moon you selfish dreamer’, screams Amanda. Tom leaves, smashing his glass on the floor, slamming the door, never to return, like his father before him. However, he can never forget his sister. ‘Time is the longest distance between two places…I travelled round a great deal. The cities swept round me like dead leaves…torn away from the branches….Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of coloured glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colours, like bits of shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes…Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out! – for nowadays the world is lit by lightening!’  March 3rd 2008 According to Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘the analyst is the shepherd of the Real’ (quoted by Žižek), paraphrasing Heidegger’s, ‘Man is the shepherd of Being’. (see “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, p234) He is the shepherd, the one who must preserve and watch over Being. Heidegger portrays Dasein as ‘ek-sistence’. Ek-sisting consists in being attuned to the voice of Being. It is a ‘standing in’ in the sphere of Being. It consists in Dasein’s openness to Being. Maybe Miller envisages a larger role for the analyst than our current fetish - the repressed unconscious. Winnicott distinguished between Being and Doing, with Being being linked to liveliness and spontaneity, for him the outcome of an analysis. Roustang spoke of “life” – the symptom being an important bit of dead-life that was trapped (encycted) by consciousness, causing anxiety, requiring more representation (though analysis) before it could rejoin the stream of life, of the Real. A shepherd on the other hand minds sheep, protecting the flock from predators and has a link back through history six millennia. February 26th 2008 Surveillance, Jonathan Raban, Picador, 2006. As its title suggests, close-up spying, and being spied upon, is the contemporary theme. As Tad Zachary puts it squarely: ‘We're all spooks now. Look at the way people Google their prospective dates. Everybody does it. Everybody’s trying to spy on everybody else…Most people are in denial’. Tad is gay, HIV-positive, grieving his partner, Michael, living in the same apartment block, the Acropolis in Seattle, as Lucy Bengstrom, a journalist, commissioned to write a piece on August Vanags, whose Holocaust memoir Boy 381 has been a bestseller. She and her young daughter, Alida, travel to Useless bay to interview Augie, who as it turns out has been hidden away by his publisher fearing he will damage his own work by speaking. Tad and Augie never meet, but politically are on opposite extremes of the security-surveillance question. Tad inhabits the ‘virtual counterworld, in a community of people hidden behind pseudonyms…post-sexual…disembodied’. He feels a visceral anger at what the Government is doing, ‘you think you are living in a democracy, then one morning you wake up and realise it’s a fascist police state’. Like many, Tad, ‘didn’t want to rescue the administration from the folly of its ways: he wanted to see it blown to atomic dust…how dare they so fuck with the world’.     Augie, however, warns of the terrible dangers we face: ‘You have any idea how incredibly fragile the infrastructure of this country is – how easily it can be paralysed by the enemy’? He warns, ‘Civilisation is just twelve, maybe fifteen hours away from barbarity…less than a day is all it takes to turn a great city into a hell-hole…Yesterday you were living in the world’s finest democracy, today it's Mogadishu’. However, it transpires Augie may have his own secrets. There is question mark about the authenticity of his book. In Boy 381, he recounts an atrocity which bears a strong resemblance to one already reported in The Pianist, by Wladyslaw Szpilman. Later, spying on Augie, looking at the Amazon reviews of his book, Lucy comes across a woman in Norfolk who is certain that the photo on the cover of the book is of a little thin (coeliac) boy, Juris Abeltins, that her family fostered on their farm during the war. Maybe Augie has re-invented himself.     Lucy, who has grown fond of Augie, gets round this difficult question of truth in a thoroughly post-modern way, declaring that her article will be, ‘snapshots, nothing more, disjointed from one another like the capricious rag-bag of images (some more in focus than others) that every camera-toting traveller returned with from a trip. They wouldn't add up’. Lucy, the uncommitted one, refusing truth, like Raban himself, who expresses both arguments, Left and Right, symmetrically. However, unlike Lucy’s piece, this book is not disjointed, but rather too polished, too neat and lacking gravity even as it studiously refuses conclusions.  There are other contemporary touches too, about the policing of the little things, where there is no confusion. Alida, a delightful daughter, thinks of emailing her mother about her drinking, ‘editing it many times, trying to make it more loving and less stern’. Smoking is also frowned upon – taking pleasure in the view from her window is ‘a selfish indulgence like smoking’. A man ‘make his smoker’s stink’, on the open deck of a ferry. Alida’s school has sent out a booklet to parents on understanding children and Lucy wondered if the pupils got a similar one – understanding Parents. However, this book obviously hits the spot. One critic went so far as to suggest that it should be in a time-capsule. However, maybe the high point in the book is the quote from Gaston Bachelard at the beginning, where he anticipates, surveillance of surveillance…(surveillance)2, then the surveillance of these systems, (surveillance)3.  February 23rd 2008 Just posted this review of Martin Amis, The Second Plane. See also here. His chief complaint: the religious mind is “dependent” and “incurious”, due to indoctrination through fear. Terror lies at the heart of religion, being behind such notions as, ‘Once a Catholic always a Catholic’. Catholicism marks your very being. It strikes you out, leaving you dependent and incurious. However, like many so-called “in-dependent” minds, how does Amis consider those who arrogantly shrug-off religion, with no knowledge of the tradition and even less respect for the transcendent, in these post-Christian times? Enter the small church at the centre of any small European town or village and be awe-struck by the simple beauty and reverence past worshippers must have had for the mysterious power beyond reason. Here, in Paul Tillich’s words, Revelation breaks into Reason.  February 20th 2002 Suicide is ‘not an epidemic’ (The Moral Maze), although it is the biggest killer of young men, exceeding those killed in car accidents. Most suicides are done by people who have a definable mental illness. People who are rescued are often subsequently pleased that they have been rescued.  Social isolation is a key cultural factor. Clare Fox suggests that removing the taboo on suicide and talking it up too much, becoming self-obsessed and self-absorbed, might be mistaken for endorsing suicide. Currently, the emphasis is rightly, no fault, no stigmatisation, no question of “sin” - burying people at the cross-roads with a stake though their heart, but how then do we communicate that it is wrong for healthy young people to commit suicide? A slippage is occuring in the unacceptability of suicide. For instance, there is an increase in support, now 82% (in Britain) for assisted suicide. Is there not a contemporary mood of depression, the “futility of life” and a glamorisation of suicide? We live in a misanthropic age, with anti-humanist currents, wondering, for instance, whether or not life is worth living, amidst a “culture of death” (Pope John Paul II), instrumentalisation of life, body parts for sale, embryo research, abortion on demand, and so on.   It is worth noting that suicide has subtly shifted its location from the Real to the Symbolic/Imaginary and thus it has “moved” from the absolute margin to become “reasonable”, amenable to therapeutic intervention, even desirable, as well as part of the Imaginary – a gruesome spectacle that grabs headines. Once is the Symbolic, it becomes a matter of choice and a matter of exchange: what is my life worth?   February 18th 2008 A discussion on Woman’s Hour, about the closing down Iran’s leading feminist magazine, Zanan, and the conditions for women in Iran generally, reaches quite unreal proportions. Although 65% of women have university degrees, “stoning” still exists. But be reassured is the tone. There is a ‘Campaign against stoning’. People are calling for the abolition of stoning, presumably against those in favour of this nasty little bit of Sharia. ‘We have seen very little stoning going on the in Muslim world at large’. ‘There is a lot of working being done in regard to stoning and its prevention’. You can nearly see the posters: Stop stoning now! Women against stoning. Or, there must be advocates of “safe stoning”.  February 9th 2008 Forgetting Freud, p182. 'Pitilessness extends to the interstices of the social, where the key signifier is “abuse”. Everyone claims abuse: someone is hurting me. What first appears as a loss of trust between people develops into the second phase, a loss of pity. The distrustful/paranoid view of pity is that, like compassion, it is patronising/soffocating/abjecting. The third stage is pitilessness, a coursening of the social, marked by random violence. Just as loss of piety leads to impiety firstly against religions, then towards all former belief systems, and finally, towards all otherness. The assertion of Rights is coincident with the final phase of pitiliness and impiety. It leads to the creation of a level killing field. February 8th 2008 What is Psychoanalysis? A short quote is required by the Review journal of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Ireland. ‘We’ll be sorry, I told my students, if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain the pressure of reality...But, they asked, isn’t life a story? No, I answered, and touched my earlobe, life is the absence of story’.(p85). Then three of the students ask: ‘if souls already exist, can they be lost? Of course they can, I said, although a soul that remembers can never be lost. Don’t all souls remember, they asked, surprised. Some of them don’t, I said, some try to forget. (p160, italics mine). From D. Albahari. Gotz and Meyer. 1998. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac. London: Random House, 2004. February 6th 2008 Jackie Hayden’s book, A Man in a Woman’s World, (Killynon House Books Ltd., and Hot Press Books, 2007), the book ‘that many would have preferred not to have been written’, carries its complaint right there into its title. Having signed up as a feminist and spent 8 years on the management committee of a Rape Crisis Centre, Hayden becomes increasingly alarmed about the ‘anti-male bias’ that he carefully documents, which he says is rampant within this organisation. On his own amongst women, did he ever wonder why there were no other men involved right from the beginning? One wonders what sort of modest hero he thought himself to be right there on his own surrounded by women, who might even be falling around his feet in gratitude. Realising it was, ‘a woman’s world’, could he not have anticipated a secret surplus of pleasure that might be enjoyed at the expense of men? Instead, he acts surprised and indignant: ‘I also began to ponder, for the first time, whether the entire feminist movement had been fuelled by anti-male sexism, rather than any genuine issue of equality’ (p240). This is after 8 years! He must have been a slow learner. He is so shocked: ‘for years we’ve been peddled the lie that women are by nature morally superior to men when it comes to violent behaviour’. (p229). Yes, maybe, but who really believed this? And he says, ‘I have tried all my adult life not to do or say anything that might be deemed sexist…I think I have succeeded reasonably well’. (p215). Obviously, the women have not been policing their thoughts quite as well, or at all, and now he resents this. SCUM – the Society for Cutting Up Men; “maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples”; “the only problem with women is men”; “If you catch a man throw him back”. He misses this one: “Grow your own dope, plant a man”. The gloves have been off for a long time now, and the thing that is worth pondering is why men have not been fighting back and getting their hands dirty. Instead, they seem to skulk in corners and sometimes complain about their victimhood in an unfair world.  January 31st 2008  Neuroscience again has provided a neuronal basis for psychoanalytic insights. For instance, analysts understand that remembering the past in all its complexity enables us to imagine a future. This is the rationale for psychoanalytic recall in the couch. The archaeological approach is not for its own sake, but for the sake of a possible future. Several studies during 2007 have shown that neurones, in the hippocampus, a crucial memory centre, are also involved in imagining. For instance, patients with amnesia caused by damage to the Hippocampus had problems imagining simple hypothetical situations, like planning a trip, compared to normal control subjects. In April, a brain imaging study with healthy volunteers found that recalling past life experiences and imagining future ones activated the same network of neurones, including neurones in the hippocampus. Apparently, rats, confronted with a fork in their familar maze also rely on neurones in the hippocampus for "planning" which branch of the fork to take. Some researchers propose that memory systems in the brain may join together remembered fragments of past events to construct a future. (From Science Vol 318, Issue 5858, p1849. 21.12.07). January 28th 2007 No Country for Old Men, is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.  The film opens in desolate West Texas in the early 1980s. The voiceover of the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), tells of the changing times as the region becomes increasingly violent and anarchic. The psychopathic antagonist Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) strangles a sheriff's deputy, escapes custody, and steals a car by using his trademark bolt pistol to kill the driver. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting near the Rio Grande, comes upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. He discovers a case full of dollars in which, unknown to Moss, has been hidden a radio transponder, enabling Chigurh, who is hired to retrieve the money, to track Moss as he goes from motel to motel. Chigurh kills anyone who gets in his way, occasionly allowing his victims fate to hang on the toss of a coin. But it is the Mexicans who kill Moss in the end, with the Law and Sheriff Bell unable to save him.    Bell finally retires. He recounts a dream. He and his (deceased) father were riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. Bell says his father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed by Bell with his head down. Bell then relates that his father was ‘going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire’ in the surrounding dark and cold, and that when Bell got there, his father would be waiting.    A comforting wish fulfillment in a bleak darkening landscape of criminal immigration, drug gangs, random killings, fire-fights in the street, and ‘young boys going grey’. The shadow of ‘Nam hangs over this film as both Moss and Chigurh served there. The latter smiles as he aims his weapon to kill, never needing to hurry and it is he who walks off at the end, injured in another random event, before the authorites arrive.  January 23rd The Moral Maze (BBC, R4) discusses the crisis in youth in Britain today. Clare Fox (The Institute of Ideas) and Frank Furedi (Professor of Sociology, the University of Kent) are the best contributors, by far. They speak of the alienation of youth, some of whom feel they don't count and have nothing to contribute. The British don’t like the company of children, unlike other Europeans. Here, children are either demonised (for antisocial behaviour) or idealised (School councils, Childline, Kidscape, Childrens’ Rights, etc.).  They point to a disconnection, a serious breakdown in adult confidence around children, a fear of children and of other people’s children. Adult authority has ceded itself to children. There is an erosion of solidarity, where adults are likely to spy on each other and are increasingly afraid to ask other adults to mind their children.  Adults are no longer allies, but people we mistrust as potential abusers or predators. One statistic was cited where a majority (75%) of men surveyed said that they would not intervene to help a distressed child that wasn’t their own. Children are taught to be suspicious about adults, who, in turn are frightened that children will be believed and that they will be found guilty. Children are uncontained because parents are afraid or feel awkward about telling children how to behave. They have abdicated responsibility. There has been an intergenerational breakdown of the informal rules governing behaviour and a failure of adults to contain, teach and confront children. For instance, children will not help ageing adults, like offering them a seat on a train or a bus. In other European countries they will. During the early 1980s rules were developed, for the first time, about how adults should behave around children.  This is the point of dramatic reversal. Children make the rules; adults must obey. Adults now defer to children. Adults must be seen and not heard. Children are responsible; adults irresponsible and unreliable, even dangerous and predatory – particularly the ones you know best, the ones you live with.   January 22nd Getting our bearings. The Cold War (with Putin) has gone into its virtual phase. The two other geopolitical groupings for the 21st Century want a decisive return, a great leap backwards, to Medieval times – the Islamists and the Dark Greens. They have common cause in hating the achievements of liberal capitalism. January 20th 2008 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, directed by Cristian Mungiu, is set on a single winter’s day in 1987, in Ceausescu’s Romania. Two students, Otilia and Gabita hire a hotel room and arrange for a meeting with the menacing Mr. Bebe. Gabita is pregnant and abortion is strictly forbidden in the communist state, forcing the young women to turn to the black market. Mr Bebe was cheaper than a woman abortionist who was recommended. His insistent questioning of Gabita reveals that she is four, not two months pregnant which leads him to make a sickening demand to both women. If they wish him to continue with the illegal termination, it has to be much more money, more than they agreed at first and can afford. He insists he could go to prison for ten years if he is caught. So he demands sex as well, there and then in the hotel room.   Otilia’s boyfriend, unaware until later of the events unfolding, wants her to come to a big family birthday party later that day. She has to leave Gabita alone in the hotel bedroom for a perilously long time as his parents want her to stay for the whole birthay meal.   The film is filled with the immediacy of the menace of a country that is bleak, cold, decaying and inhuman. However, the student themselves offer hope. The camera follows Otilia closely and shakily as ahe arranges everything for her friend. She is always in danger of being exposed to the authorities, particularly when she has to dispose of the foetus in her own bag that she throws down the rubbish chute of one of the communist high rise blocks. She appears to be weeping; it was nearly five months old.   January 18th 2008 In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film, Blue, Juliette Binoche plays the part of Julie Vignon de Courcy, the lone survivor of a car accident that killed outright her husband, a renowned composer, and their young daughter. Julie's grief is profound. As Žižek says, ‘the coordinates of her whole life are shattered in that moment’, on the misty French road as the family car smashed into the tree, at the moment (we later learn) that the father was telling a joke, without getting his usual chance to repeat the punch line. The use of blue imagery is elemental and cold, this colour being associated with grief, emptiness and depression. Julie swims in the blue pool, alone, using vigorous or violent strokes, occasionly submerging herself, as if dead. The blue crystal mobile that once hung in her daughter's room symbolises the fine threads that connect her to her former life. She takes it with her when she abandons her country estate and her possessions, including her husband’s musical scores, which she throws into a bin lorry. Locked in a grievously enigmatic silence, signs of re-connection fleetingly appear. She refuses to sign a petition to get rid of a prostitute in her block of apartments. There is a flute player outside the café who plays some themes from the composer’s score. Her husband’s mistress is pregnant with his child and Julie gives her her house. Her husband's business partner, Olivier (Benoit Regent), who has always loved Julie, searches here out, offering a means of paying tribute to her husband's legacy by collaborating on his unfinished reunification symphony. The film ends with the St. Paul’s, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, which accompanies the re-composed music. This film is radically unsentimental. There is absolutely no hint of the clichéd forms of “healing” or “closure”. Instead, as Žižek reminds us, her task, her struggle alone, is to reconstitute a “fundamental fantasy”, that will give meaning to her life, in a meaningless universe. January 7th 2008 Andrew Marr’s Start the Week programme, BBC Radio4, discusses what promises to be a key book, published today – Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, by Damian Thompson. The point he is making is that previously unthinkable theories can make great headway, even entering the mainstream, because of the freedom and free market in ideas fostered by the internet. He cites the international publisher Penguin that has published a book, Talisman, by Graham Handcock and Robert Bouval, connecting 9/11 with ancient Egyptian religious cults.  Or, to take some of his other examples, the US Government was behind 9/11, a Chinese fleet reached America before Columbus and the structure of a cell is too complex to have evolved through natural selection. He argues, we're facing a pandemic of spurious claims and unproven theories, blurring the distinction between truth and fiction to dangerous effect. The real cause of cancer. Real cures for disease.  Each theory can have its own huge and loyal following without any checks and balances. Pseudoscience can be presented as real science. There is an “epistomological bubble” to suit every life-style. His plea is for sound common sense and science based knowledge. He says we have well developed scientific techniques for testing truth claims. However, over recent years science itself has become discredited. For instance, where are the half million vCJD cases that were predicted? What about the millennium bug that was to bring nothing short of disaster and global recession? The common sense is just what has broken down in postmodernity. It defines our era. Who could have imagined a few short years ago that creationism could have made headway against evolution, sponsored mainly, according to Thompson, by Islamic fundamentalism? 95% of Muslims do not believe in evolution. I wonder why we always blamed just the evangelical Christians from the US? Who would have ever believed that Holocaust denial would be gaining currency, and then, only be opposed rigorously when propounded by white neo-Nazis, but not questioned when it is of Arab origin? The sign on the back of a car reads: this car is protected by angels. Maybe a joke, maybe ironic, maybe the driver believes it!  January 3rd 2008 Two mental health moments. Crossing O’Connell Bridge a large elderly man dressed spectacularly as a woman in red tights and blond wig screams at the waiting crowd of sales goers the command: WALK! WALK! when the little green man appears indicating we can cross. Later, in a pub a stranger comes up close, taps me on the arm and says, hi, as if he knows me well, like a long lost friend! For a second, I wonder if I have misrecognised someone I know. When I tell him I’m reading, he asks me where I am from. The barman intervenes and asks the man what he wants. He says he’s meeting friends, but then abruptly leaves, muttering, oh I’m reading….I’m reading….in a posh English accent. December 20th 2007 Brick Lane, by Monica Ali. Black Swan, 2003. A moving story of a young Bengali woman (Nazneen) moving to Tower Hamlets in London’s East End trapped in an arranged marriage with Chanu who is twice her age. The sense of dislocation is strong (see also December 6th). Chanu has ideas, is always reading, studying and making plans. But he ends up becoming a taxi driver, longing to return with his family to Dhaka, which he eventually does, on his own, right at the end of the novel. There, he will start up a soap business, longing for his family to join him, knowing that they never will. Earlier, he tells his elder daughter: ‘I don’t know Shahana. Sometimes, I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don’t notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime has finished. Then it hits you – the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by in the other direction. I’ve been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full’ (p320).     Nazneen remains behind in London with her two daughters, Shahana and Bibi (a firstborn son had died). She is gradually adjusting to her alien host culture (of drink and football) with the help of her new found friends, Razia, Sorupa, Jorina, Nazma and Hanufa, with flash backs to her home and especially her sister, Hasina, who writes long letters about her difficult life. Nazneen manages to send her money, in spite of  trying to pay back the greedy moneylender, Mrs Islam. Nazneen changes during the progress of the novel, becoming her own person, for the first time sensing a certain limited freedom. ‘When she had come she had learned first about loneliness, then about privacy, and finally she learned about a new kind of community’ (p182). From their small flat, she struggles to make sense of her new life and to remain faithful and dutiful to her husband, accepting her fate and even coming to love him. ‘She saw only the flats, piles of people loaded on top of the other, a vast dump of people rotting away under a mean strip of sky…’ (p364). Racial tension is escalating, drug abuse and anti-social behaviour increasing, 9/11 happens and into Nazneen’s life comes Karim, a cool British born Bangladeshi in jeans and trainers, an organiser of protest marches, with a leg that bounces hyperactively – ‘she took her pleasure desperately, as if the executioner was waiting behind the door…into her recklessness she drew him like a moth to a flame’ (p299). Remember, she reminded herself, you are nothing, you are nothing.  December 17th 2007 I come across an article in Democratya by Fred Siegel, which he concludes: ‘Apologists for Islamism argue that, if only we can resolve the conflicts in Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir, Nigeria, Southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, East Timor, and the cities of Europe for that matter, all will be well. But what’s at the heart of the Islamic conflict with modernity is the unvarnished political theology of Islam, which assumes that Muslims are destined to rule the earth. Hassan Butt, a former British Islamist, explains in his memoirs: ‘When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network . . . I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings, and 7/7 was Western foreign policy … they also helped draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.’ Who does one meet today from the liberal classes who would endorse this view? Alas, virtually no one, such is the strength of a generalised virulent anti-Americanism, which when it is voiced by individuals in the media is still regarded as "courageous"! December 8th 2007 Questions of identity. Graham Fellows becomes John Shuttleworth – he has even shopped as John. Ken Worthinton, Brian Appleton, Dave Tordov are other alter egos, all with slightly different strong Sheffield accents and idiosyncratic linguistic usage, or in the case of Tordov, a Polish-Sheffield accent. He acknowledges that he can almost be taken over by these and has to pull himself back. Paul O’Grady has dealt with Lilly Savage by banishing her to a convent in France. There’s John Darwin who fakes his own death in a canoeing “accident” and assumes a new identity in Panama. There is David Abrahams who hides large donations to the labour party by giving through various surrogate identities. The uncanny “reality” of these alter egos brings to mind the psychoanalytic notion of the provisionality and mutability of what we think to be stable identities. However, we can theorise this mutability too far, to the degree that, ethically almost, there should be no “me”. Graham Fellows remains a strong enough centre of identity, as does Paul O’Grady and so on, unless one is psychotic and then nothing rests anywhere for long. December 6th 2007 The emigrant experience. ‘The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often she tried to see and could not. It was as if the village was caught up in a giant fisherman’s net and she was pulling at the fine mesh with bleeding fingers, squinting into the sun, vision mottled with netting and eyelashes. As the years passed the layers of netting multiplied and she began to rely on a different kind of memory…It was only in her sleep that the village came whole again…’ Nazneen in Brick Lane by Monica Ali. p217. November 27th 2007 It is wonderful to read John Waters' (The Irish Times, November 26th) deconstruction of  the Ombudsman for children, Emily Logan's patronising affirmation of the totally obvious! "At a time when Irish society is changing dramatically, and families are facing significant challenges, it is particularly encouraging that children view the family as being of such critical importance". Against all the odds, this statement is still true, although, as Waters points out, the ballot of the children was skewed to make it seem less true. Children have been increasingly required to take control of their own "liberation" with both the Left and the Right conspiring to undermine parental control and promote "freedom". Children are deemed to be consumers with rights to demand and choose - their drugs, sexuality, education, health, consumer products, etc. Once everything about childhood is made transparent and virtual, this is the end of childhood. Ideologically, to paraphrase Lacan, the child no longer exists. With the brakes off and increasingly uncontained, children must assume the burden of their "independence". The only forces that still stand in their way: the family and the Irish Constitution. November 26th 2007 Channel 4 Boy A. A powerful feature length drama, based on the novel by Jonathan Trigell, brought to the screen by director John Crowley. Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield), formerly Eric Wilson, has a new identity, by which he must conceal, or cover over, his appalling past crime.  When he was 10, he and his psychopathically tough friend Philip (Taylor Doherty) murdered a girl of about the same age beside a railway line. We get glimpses of their escalating crimes and Jack’s very bleak early life, bullied at school, at home his mother is dying of cancer while his father spends the day drinking and watching daytime TV. Philip is being raped by his older brother and will later hang himself in prison. The parallel with John Venables and Robert Thompson and the murder of Jamie Bulger are present and distracting. More than ten years on and apparently rehabilitated, Jack has a fresh start, with a job in freight transport. He shows a simplicity and excitement at being out in the world together with a fear of being discovered.  When he and work colleague Michelle (Katie Lyons) fall in love, he desperately wants to tell her who he is – but is advised urgently by his case worker Terry (Peter Mullan) that he must never tell anyone. In the meantime, the press are on his trail, with rewards (£20k) being offered for anybody who could identify him. Jack seems remarkably “soft” after being 14 years in a secure unit. Coming upon a car accident, for instance, he saves a little girl’s life –  an illustration of how much he’s changed. What makes this drama stand out is the commitment, solidarity and love that develops between Jack and three key figures, Michelle, Terry and his fellow truck driver, all of whom create a space for Jack to find real life worth living. Until that is, the evil of the original crime and the evil of the tabloid press close the circle that we know will shockingly reveal the true identity of Jack. As his supports fall away in a catastrophic instant, when suddenly no one answers his urgent calls, Jack/Eric becomes zero – Boy A. Plunged into renewed and total isolation, all the more painful for the humanity and friendship he has been shown, he escapes from the house and the journalists camped outside, via a fan-light, hurts his leg in the fall from the roof and hobbles off through the backstreets of Manchester and takes the train to Blackpool. Even here, a kind old lady tells him that this is ‘the end of the line’. At the end of the line, at the end of the pier, he briefly hallucinates his friends who indicate that they might forgive him in due time, but not before he exits the scene.  November 23rd 2007   The panel discussion* centred around the lack of provision of mental health services in Ireland and psychotherapy in particular. Although large sums of money are available to high profile groups like Accord (relationship counselling), grief counselling, bereaved by suicide, sexual and violent abuse counselling services, if you don’t fall into these categories or cannot claim some kind of specific “victim” status there are virtually no public services available to you. As regards psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, opinion remains very divided as to whether or not we should be represented within the system (at primary, secondary and tertiary levels) or remain outside. Or whether, once inside, we would be able to "adapt" ourselves to cooperate with other health professionals as part of care teams with a very different paradigm of human well-being. If we remain outside, psychoanalysis will certainly atrophy with time and many people who could have benefited will have be denied access. At present, many people arrive in psychotherapy after going down the medical route, or, maybe erroneously seeking to avoid any kind of medical intervention and/or drug prophylaxis. People agreed that it was crucial to educate the public about the value of psychoanalysis and its role in ‘letting the subject speak’. To do this, however, to get inside the media-system, it is now regarded as essential to pay an “insider” to do the PR work. It is as if the media, plus the vast medical-techno-system, is so hermetically sealed against “outsiders”, which we all are, that one has to virtualise oneself in order to be (mis)represented with it.   *The account given here is entirely selective. Other members of the panel were, Alan Rowan, Dr John Hillary, Colm Massey, Dr Anne Byrne Lynch, Derval Ryan. November 17th 2007 I am asked to go on a panel later this month at the APPI conference, to talk about ‘the talking therapies in contemporary Ireland’. I will be with various health professionals, so what might be said that is in anyway worthwhile? Maybe, that therapies represent a sponge, or a tourniquet to arrest or mask the haemorrhage of the social, while at the same time, paradoxically, facilitating that breakdown in the name of "liberation" from social ties, obligations and duties that were the burden of all previous generations bar one. A vast narcissistic logic stretches all the way from the pampering therapies through to counselling for “empowerment”, to the more radical psychoanalytic end of things, having to do with loss. As large holes open up in the social fabric caused by a number of competing nihilist forces that hide under the rubric of development and modernisation, therapies can move in to create new virtual social "bonds" analogous to those virtual communities/networks on the net that are replacing the real of the social. Therapy, therefore, is now structurally implicated in the logic of globalisation, where the only relationship that is “guaranteed” is the one you pay for. Or, more ironically, all relationships must be therapeutic, i.e. must ‘do something for us’. You don’t do anything (therapeutic) for me, So I’m out of here! And all relationships tend to become provisional, contractual and negotiable, like the therapeutic one.   Way beyond, the me-first preoccupations of urban culture, globalisation and mass migration have been ushering into our midst, the excluded other (Homo sacer): victims of torture; of physical and sexual abuse; war crimes; trafficking; poverty; racism and all manner of dysfunctionality. Here is the real of what Levinas calls, ‘the naked face of the other’, overwhelmingly beyond any narcissistic logic, beyond anything but listening and hospitality.   November 12th 2007 I am surprised how many Lacanians do not realise the revolutionary nature of the project, that Jacques Alain-Miller calls a war. Just imagine the damage they could inflict if they actually had an army! And because it is a war, anything is justified by the Cause, any exclusion, any betrayal, any extreme. True disciples will surrender themselves, their reason and their (former) values for the Cause and regard their “decisions” as ethical in the radical Kantian-Lacanian sense that regards the mere other, the neighbour, the colleague, the friend, indifferently.  As in any cult, obedience is key. Here, obedience plus transference equals obsession. Anyone who falls short in this respect, or calls anything into question, will find themselves cut-off and cut-out, without explanation.  All those, over the years, who have been thus “remaindered” like so much shit from the System must undergo their “subjective destitution” offline, as it were. Meanwhile, as Lacan said, if you want to be a Lacanian, well go ahead! It must be said, however, that it was not always like this here in Ireland. In the early days, back in the '80s and early '90s, there was a rich pluralism and genuine intellectual pursuit from which everyone gained. Then came fractalisation. November 4th 2007 Two good things on television. Britz (Peter Kosminsky), a Channel4 drama about an Asian family in Britain, split, in an all too formulaic and very unlikely way, between the British born son, Sohail (played by Riz Ahmed), who becomes a spy for MI5 and a daughter, Nasmina (played by Manjinder Virk), who becomes radicalised into a suicide bomber. What the film shows (not mentioned in the blurb), is the extreme brutality of the Jihadi indoctrination as well as, at the local level, the brutal racist killing of Jasmine’s black Christian boyfriend in Pakistan, as he tries to rescue her from an arranged marriage to bring her back to the UK to finish her medical studies. Viewers comment appreciatively that this programme is “balanced” showing the British authorities targeting and rounding-up Muslims, followed by the "inevitable and understandable" reaction, the suicide bombing by Jasmina, disguising her bomb through appearing to be pregnant – pregnant with death, a fitting symbol that Islamists might applaud without hesitation. At one point the Imam asks Jasmina to go around for a day dressed as a Muslim and see for herself how she is discriminated against (and maybe to forget her promising medical career provided by that same country). The same Imam only a few minutes earlier had forcibly ejected her boyfriend from that same meeting because he was a non-Muslim! He then goes on to preach racist hate against all unbelievers and the West.   There is a link here (between old and new pre-modern death cults) with Steven Poliakoff’s, Joe’s Palace, BBC1. Here Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), the “weird kid” on his estate acts an unlikely concierge in the large, empty, sad Mayfair mansion of billionaire, Elliot Graham (movingly played by Michael Gambon). Graham wants to give away his money, to do something useful with his wealth. He forms friends with the lonely souls around him, especially Joe whom he wines and dines, as well as Richard (Rupert Penry-Jones), a young cabinet minister, and his secret lover Charlotte (Kelly Reilly). But Graham is troubled and depressed throughout, unable to fathom how his father came upon his excessive wealth. Here is the link. Graham discovers after extensive research, confiding in Joe, that his father forged business links with very successful Nazi firms in pre-war Germany. A letter is discovered revealing that back then, one sunny afternoon, while walking in a city park, with his new found business colleagues, Graham’s father witnesses the truly shocking sight of German police rounding up a group of Jews at random, ordering the men and boys to strip naked and crawl like animals on all-fours along the path and ordering the women and girls to climb the nearby trees and utter sounds like birds. Graham’s father does nothing after witnessing such humiliation, only commenting later in a letter to a friend, with masterly ethical relativism, that ‘they certainly seem to do things differently here’. It is Graham himself who makes atonement, after Joe intervenes to prevent him shooting himself. October 31st 2007 Teaching Melanie Klein in both University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin makes one think of both matricidal and infanticidal fantasies as being the hidden dark core of the Real of her unique thinking and theorising, quite beyond the pale of much contemporary psychoanalysis and therapy. Put this alongside the 6million abortions carried out in Britain in the 40 years since abortion liberalisation. 6million is a figure we associate with an exemplary slaughter by which the last century will be remembered. There is no precise equivalence, it must be said, but there is a comparison. Not one that will be made, however, because we prefer the idealisation of the feminine as the cure and consolation for the alleged millennia of patriarchal violence. However, with scientific proof that foetuses can “feel”, that they are indeed sentient beings, the massive and collective disavowal of the last four decades is becoming less and less tenable.    October 23th 2007 An article in the journal Science (Vol 317, p796. 10th August 2007) reports on an ice core (of 3.26km) drilled in Antarctica that provides the longest continuous record of climate, encompassing 11 glacial cycles entending back 800,000 years. Isotopic measurements taken along this core has enabled the team to examine millennial-scale climatic events affecting the Northern and Southern hemispheres and to reliably calculate the temperatures changes involved. The warm periods were as much as 4.5C warmer and the cold periods as much as 10C colder than preanthropogenic Holocene values. Our current warming is at about 0.8C. So much for the "hockey stick". So much for the hype around unprecedented warming.           October 22nd 2007 Paul Williams (crime correspondent of the Sunday World) has it absolutely right, after yet another gangland murder (27year-old John Daly) and the recent increase in drug-fuelled violence. Young thugs, out of control, are able to terrorize the Finglas area of N. Dublin and they are now largely untouchable by the Law enforcement agencies of the State. The Gardai, under-resourced and more worried about their own internal investigations, have all but lost the will to defeat these criminals. When charged, they get bail and are able to use the legal system to their advantage, frequently filing complaints of abuse. Witnesses are too afraid to give evidence. Even if they are jailed, they can orchestrate more crime, including contract killings, from within the prison. Since the Peace Process, it is no longer possible to “export” our violence, so now it circulates within our own jurisdiction like a virus for which we have no antibodies. October 17th 2007 Martin Amis was in discussion with Andrew Anthony at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (October 13th 2007). The subject: On writing and radical Islam.  Amis was so exasperated by the betrayals of principle that he asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they considered themselves 'morally superior' to the ‘sexist, racist, homophobic, totalitarian, imperialist and psychopathic Taliban’. A mere thirty per cent of the audience raised their hand. Amis appears to console himself by saying that he at least feels morally superior to the Taliban. Why such a low turn out for opposition? Maybe people fear being branded “Islamophobic”. Maybe people do not want to believe the facts, comforting themselves with the fantasy that the “facts” are an invention of the western media. Western liberals only understand their own violations and moral lapses, abu ghraib, the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, and so on. In a kind of reverse racism, they can ignore the Orient as not being expected to play by the rules, implicitly justifying any amount and kind of barbarity. We don’t need to take those people seriously. Similarly, we have no understanding of “death cults” or indeed the death drive – rejected by many of Freud’s followers as a speculation too far. The west believes that anything and everything should be understandable and ultimately reasonable, even terrorism. Nothing can exist beyond reason; it is just not possible. This is the lie that we comfort ourselves with – the true mark of our own unacknowledged superiority which masquerades as being “for peace”. We are so superior, we refuse to fight! We say: ‘I don’t believe in violence’. First we “missed” Fascism and the death camps, then the gulags, the show trials, Mao, Pol Pot, now finally Islamism.             October 13th 2007 The Archive Hour (BBC R4): Historian Orlando Figes reveals the secret histories of Stalin's Silent People. He uncovers life during Stalin's reign of terror, drawing on the archives and interviews he has gathered for his new book The Whisperers. Figes and his colleagues from Memorial (a movement which arose in the years of perestroika, whose main task was the awakening and preservation of the societal memory of the severe political persecution in the recent past of the Soviet Union), spent five years going across Russia recording memories of survivors of Stalin’s terror. Until very recently people were afraid to speak. Stories have been kept secret for fifty years, for fear, even now of been taken off to prison. People didn’t even tell their own children what happened to them. Twenty-five million people were repressed under Stalin - shot,  jailed in the gulags, or exiled. One million people were shot in the 1937 purges. They believed what they were told about the trials in the communist media. They had to. It made it easier to accept the punishments that they had to endure. People suspected friends and neighbours, even denouncing family members. Children even came to believe that their parents must have been arrested because they were ‘enemies of the people’. Figes understands this terrorism as the communist ‘war against the family’. Communism was to replace the family. However, he stresses that forms of communal life and village life were less resilient than family life. In the end, family life was the only institution you could trust.     October 7th 2007 Maureen Gaffney, a clinical psychologist and chairwoman of the National Economic and Social Forum, is quoted in The Irish Times (29.09.07) about a survey of Irish women's attitudes: "I think the poll is fascinating because it shows that, while women were always very conscious of quality-of-life issues and the need to make choices to maintain balance, they have finally linked up those choices with financial independence. They now see the necessity of being autonomous so that they can make meaningful choices about how to live their lives," she says. "The most important thing about this is that they are showing realism, and are thinking of life in a long-term way." It is not enough to be liberated, women must now manage their own liberation. They must labour away at freedom in the new universe of disconnection and negotiated relationships. Nothing can be taken for granted, particularly in the area of dependent relations. The message is clear: do not depend on anyone or let anyone depend on you. This new realism has been preceded by a very long softening up process, of getting even, now largely over, in which anything less than rational “autonomy” with its, non-gendered rhetoric of, quality of life, quality time, choice making, balance, harmony, etc., has been eclipsed. Wasn’t it Mary Robinson herself who said that women who didn’t work outside the home were “selling-out”? Such a transparent rationale benefits a small elite of urban middle-class women, who have always done well, who are the same people who are the opinion-formers and policy makers. The rest live in the real world without protection, where the gloves are off and there are no rules.  September 29th 2007 We go to see Atonement, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan. Atonement is the story of a single, tragic error: an error on the part of someone who is almost, but not quite, too young to know what she is doing, which radically alters the destinies of three adults. The three principals in this tragedy are firstly, Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley). She is a beautiful young woman who is whiling away the baking hot summer of 1935 in the grounds of her family's spectacular mansion. Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of the local groundsman, a bright lower class boy whom Cecilia's father helped after Robbie's father ran out on them and his mother. Robbie is clearly in love with Cecilia. And then there is Cecilia's bright younger sister Briony, who has a secret crush on Robbie. At 13, she is played by Saoirse Ronan; at 18, by Romola Garai; and then, as an old woman, by Vanessa Redgrave. She sees an argument between Robbie and Cecilia, in which Cecilia dives into water to retrieve something. She carries a note of apology from Robbie to Celcilia, but it is the “wrong” note, full of his explicit sexual longings (the Lacanian letter always finds its destination!). She interrupts Robbie and Cecilia having sex in the library, where they have already confided their love fore each other.  Briony wickedly accuses Robbie of being a sex maniac for which he goes to prison and then is given the choice to either stay locked up or fight in the war. The two sisters train separately as nurses and tend the war wounded being evacuated from Dunkirk. Robbie is killed during the evacuation and Cecelia is killed taking shelter in the underground. Briony, filled with remorse, spends the rest of her life trying the write her novel - Atonement. This is a story of epic dimensions along Oedipal lines, where the excluded Briony “separates” and “kills” the lovers and then like Oedipus spends her life bearing an impossible guilt. September 28th 2007 A few notes on: Forget Foucault. J. Baudrillard. (1977) Semiotext(e) 2007. This small early book encapsulates Baudrillard’s unique complex theory of simulation, of a world grown so artificial that it excludes the real. For instance, the dissemination of the real of power and sexuality indicate that these are already dead, although they continue in a simulated form. ‘When one talks so much about power [and sex] it is because it can no longer be found anywhere’ (p64). He quotes Apollinaire: ‘when I speak of time, that’s because it’s no longer there’ (p31). It has been lost in representation, lost in translation into the verbal media zone. Baudrillard believes that psychoanalysis, for instance, has put an end to (the mystery of) the unconscious and desire, via simulations that double the “originals”, that were “there” before they were named, or sometimes Baudrillard will point out that the originals never existed, which is true in the sense that something that it is not represented may not even exist. How would we know of its existence? By explaining what was hidden about desire, the unconscious, etc., Baudrillard refers to psychoanalysis’s ‘evangelical racism of truth’ (p42). The total realisation of, let us say, the social, politics, history, the erotic, and so on, their pro-duction, i.e. their visibility and transparency that signifies their end. So for Baudrillard, Marxism, for instance, put an end to the class struggle through just this hypostatization, this excess of making real, generating the hyperreal – the more real than real. Maybe pornography, for instance, reactivates the lost referent via a grotesque hyperrealism of sex. ‘To produce is to force what belongs to another order (of secrecy and seduction) to materialise’ (p37). He understands repression not as repression OF sex, but repression THROUGH sex – ‘the grid of discourses, bodies, energies…imposed through sex, in the name of “the talking sex”’ (p36). Repression by means of sex, by means of confession! Everything is gathered, indexed and registered via the Law – the opposite of seduction. Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation, he says. Baudrillard refers to the contemporary as “montage”, no more than, ‘a simulacrum which experience has forever crossed up, baffled and surpassed, as in any system’ (p43). ‘Sexual discourse is invented through repression [which] speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse’. Its very confinement gives it a mythic [secret] stature and therefore, ‘its liberation is the beginning of its end’ (p48). Repression and speaking are linked, just like the DNA double-helix of the Law and desire that spiral around one another: ‘schemas of desire and schemas of control are everywhere’ (p47)*.   For Foucault what is occluded (left untouched?) by this modern sexual confessional discourse is the body and its pleasure (beyond the subject and its repressions and divided desires) – seduction, voluptuousness, charm, sensuality – terms that even psychoanalysis has not yet annexed.. However, Baudrillard thinks it is worse than Foucault imagines. Just as the capitalist economy puts an end to the distinction between “exchange value” and “use value” (‘use value [of the product or of the body] is the ultimate alibi in sex as well as production’), Baudrillard concludes that “pleasures” in Foucault’s thinking are still opposed to (and therefore escape) the exchange value [commodification] of sex, insofar as pleasure constitutes the use value of the body.   Power, or our simulacrum of power, ‘fabricates the real (always more and more of the real) effecting a quadrature, nomenclature and dictature without appeal; nowhere does it cancel itself out, become entangled in itself, or mingle with death’ (p50). And yet, there is also resistance to this power, the silent resistance of the object (later called, ‘the revenge of the object’), of the masses, of seduction, that are the undoing of this power simulacrum. Power seduces by this very reversibility of power; it depends on that which resists it. Just as sex is obscenely resurrected in parodic mode via pornography, so Fascism is the obscene hyperreal form of political power, ‘to assume power unto death’ (p65).  The emptying of meanings, the loss of the real, Baudrillard likens to an ‘irreversible coma [where] everything continues to function all the same, and eventually can even seem to amount to history’. However, after a while, we maybe unable to tell the difference between life and the comatose condition. ‘It’s possible that everything is no longer real or true. In any case we would no longer be in a position to decide on that’ (p72). Baudrillard understands that it is extremely rare for something to escape the ubiquitous chain of cause-and-effect (meaning and exchange value) and actually appear. This rare escape, for Baudrillard, is of a different order, the order of the fatal, of “Symbolic exchange”, which Baudrillard opposes to exchange value. Against ubiquitous exchange, Baudrillard posits “impossible exchange”: strangeness, illusion, ‘objective chance’ (see October 18th 2006, below). Like poetry, where words ‘do not go through meaning. One word calls forth another in a catastrophe of charm’ (p92). This is not the irrational or the unconscious, but a fractal zone, of shifting plates. *Think for instance of the “liberation” brought about by the mobile phone. At the same time our calls can be used to locate us at every turn. Sexual freedoms are hedged around by the complexities of sexual hygiene and the vagaries of “consent”. Faster and faster cars liberate speed as speed limits are more and more strongly imposed. September 27th 2007 An Israeli Captain sums of the problem of asymmetric warfare. The calculus was simple: 1) launch a rocket from within a civilian population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. 2) If the Jews hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s a victory. 3) If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid to hit civilians, that’s a victory. 4) Now repeat the process until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in so doing kill more Lebanese civilians. That’s the ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just those chords exactly what music the press will play. September 26th 2007 At lunch we sit next to a terribly obese teenage boy who has a massive slab of a cream cake before him! His mummy sits opposite watching him tucking in. Is this one of the terrible effects that occurs when you release the brakes? Is this the sense of the “unreality” that characterises the postmodern that Baudrillard referred to? Or, maybe a latent oral sadism of the mother who fills her son up to bursting point? There is definitely something obscene in this hyper-presence of the body falling about in its clothes, overflowing every container. Anyway, it must be one version of de-subjectivity, a ironic form of disappearance. Baudrillard list three ways to disappear. 1) Organically via death. 2) Metastatically via cloning. 3) Ritually, via a challenging, like a duel to the death, your opponent, the Real. The obese are challenging the real of biological limit, pushing it beyond itself. We have gone beyond meaning, cause and effects, into a catastrophic zone. September 23rd 2007 Apparently, in Ireland, you can earn €16k per day selling cocaine due to excessive use of the substance by the wealthy Irish middle classes. So when Foucault famously said, pleasure is an event outside the subject, we have here a good demonstration, as if we need another.  September 10th 2007 On the day when we are remembering the suicide bereaved, consider the story of Andrew Smith (Taken from, “Broken pieces of a lost life” by Ariel Leve. The Sunday Times, Magazine Section. Sept 2nd 2007), the man who disappeared, who belongs to no one and knows no one. His body was discovered in his flat in North London by a neighbour, someone he had never talked to, who smelled the decomposition and phoned the police. This was an estimated two months after he had died There were no details of Andrew Smith’s next of kin and nothing to identify him with anyone, family or friends. He was buried with no one to grieve him. Leve follows up the lost details of his life. She discovers he had been fostered by a working class elderly couple who already had two biological children. His foster mother died of cancer in 1978 when Andrew was only 13. He lived with the father, but gradually and unaccountably withdrew from family and friends who in turn lost contact with him. He was last seen by his sister in December 2004. In 2004, there were 7m people living alone in Britain, four times the number recorded in 1961. By 2021, it is estimated that 37% of all households will be single occupiers. The figures for aloneness are rising 20-30% faster in the 22-44 age group.  September 6th 2007 Here is Zizek’s examplery (radical, revolutionary, Lacanian-ethical) notion of an Act (capital A).  There is a will to accomplish the 'leap of faith' and step outside the global circuit at work here [in the Canudos community], a will which was expressed in an extreme and terrifying manner in a I well-known incident from the Vietnam War: after the US Army I occupied a local village, their doctors vaccinated the children on the left arm in order to demonstrate their humanitarian care; when, the day after, the village was retaken by the Vietcong, they cut off the left arms of all the vaccinated children. . . Although it  is difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow, this complete rejection of the enemy precisely in its caring 'humanitarian aspect, no matter what the cost, has to be endorsed in its basic intention. ( in Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Verso. 2004: 83) Oliver Marchart, criticises this example, as ‘difficult to sustain for an emancipatory project of the Left’ with its absolute rejection of the enemy, its ‘sanitory effort at purification’ (see Marchant, ‘Acting and the Act’ in The Truth of Zizek. Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. Continuum 2007, p110). However,the criticism here is really only one of tactics for the Left, and especially for Marchart. Zizek’s notion of the Act, which is central to his whole philosophy, that is so radical (crazy?) that it finds (by definition) no support in the Symbolic order, is a leap too far for Marchart. Crazy, self-destructive, a pure ontological act, but absolutely no mention or no criticism of the barbarity of the Vietcong in their “counter-vaccination” anti-American programme. As far as Zizek and Marchart are concerned, the Vietcong were/are acting ethically in their total break with the enemy. Similarly, in Iraq, they would see the counter-insurgency Acts of bombing innocent civilians at random, ‘although difficult to sustain’, as "ethical" nevertheless.  September 3rd 2007 In relation to sexual abuse and memory, Geraerts et al (Psychol Sci, 18. 564 [2007]) have attempted to discover whether recovered memories of sexual abuse are as reliable as continuous (never forgotten) memories of abuse, where reliability is defined as the success with which independent interviewers were able to elicit corroborative evidence from another victim of the alleged perpetrator, from the actual abuser, or from a contemporaneous confidant. In a sample of 130 adults (recruited via advertisement) with either discontinuous or continuous memories of abuse, they found no difference in the figures of around 40% corroborative evidence of abuse for both groups. The only exception was where discontinuous memories were recovered during the course of therapy. For these 16 cases, it was not possible to substantiate the recalled events. The authors propose that expectations or suggestion arising during therapy may have contributed to the “recovery” of false memories. August 24th 2007 On Chesil Beach is another hand-crafted obsessional piece, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, 2007), set in 1962 in the Chilterns and Oxford and the wedding night of Edward and Florence in a Georgian hotel overlooking Chesil beach. It all goes wrong as Edward ‘arrives to soon’ and Florence’s visceral horror of sex becomes manifest. In the face of mutual humiliation they part forever. Earlier there had been another parting, when Edward beats up a rocker who had physically attacked his bookish friend, Harold Mather, without any provocation. Instead of showing gratitude to his friend, Mather withdraws from Edward, shocked by his evident capacity for violence. In both these decisive moments, set at the beginning of that revolutionary decade, we might discern a few contemporary interlinked themes: the ease of taking offence; the readiness to break off relations; the revulsion before the real of the body; the taboo on retaliation. August 2nd 2007 Zizek’s recent theorising on the Lacanian Real is not that it relates to some pre-discursive unknown “reality” or essence beyond the Symbolic register. Instead the Real is the gap that opens, the crack that appears in the Symbolic when constituted as such. The real refers to the real of conflict – irresolvable conflict which is the kernel of psychoanalytic understanding and sets psychoanalysis apart from all other therapies and counsellings involving re-covery (of the gaps and antagonisms). Not that some problems cannot be solved or healed; of course this is possible and must be attempted politically and/or therapeutically. Then, however, the real of antagonism moves elsewhere! What Zizek calls, the ‘fundamental social antagonism’ never appears as such, in its essence, but is always politically mediated (economically, ethnically, legally, etc.). The Real is the disavowed X, the traumatic Thing, that distorts our perception, the gap that we jump over to oppose the other. There is not only the gap of the sexual relation, but he cites Freud’s dream theory and the gap between the latent and manifest content of the dream. There is no simple interpretive movement: from the manifest to the latent to the dream’s “true” core unconscious wish. Instead, there is this gap created by the “dream work” which masks its message, ‘the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking’ (p245, in The Truth of Zizek, Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, Continuum, 2007). The dream’s “secret” is in the very process of distortion, just as there is many a true (traumatic) thing spoken in jest, successfully distorted by the “joke work.”  July 31st 2007 I like Martin Amis’s note on pain. ‘When you are old, noise comes at you as pain. Cold comes at you as pain. When I go up on deck tonight, which I will do, I expect the wet snow to come at me as pain. It wasn’t like that when I was young. The wake-up: that hurt, and went on hurting more and more. But the cold didn’t hurt. By the way try crying and swearing above the Arctic Circle, in winter. All your tears will freeze fast, and even your obscenities will turn to droplets of ice and tinkle to your feet. It weakened us, it profoundly undermined us, but it didn’t come to us as pain.’ (p10).  Further on, he is describing the current fashon for the “shat-myself look”, ‘…with all the loose jeans sagging off the rump; and the eviscerated trainers. That’s a prison style: no belt or laces – lest you hang yourself with them. Looking at those boys with their sheared heads, their notched noses and scarified ears, I felt myself back in Norlag. Is this the invention of pain? Or a little re-enactment of the pains of the past? The past has weight. And the past is heavy.’ (p57). From, The House of Meetings. Martin Amis. Jonathan Cape, 2006.  July 26th 2007 Of increasing medical interest is the way the body’s immune system, repelling otherness, can turn against its own tissues in autoimmune disease. The current issue of the Scientific American (July 2007) explores how chronic inflammation contributes to heart disease, Alzheimers and a variety of other diseases including cancer, schizophrenia and depression. While the immune system can identify and destroy tumour cells, what is now becoming clear is that ‘a tumour protects itself by recruiting the innate [immune] system to enhance its development’. Genetic damage is the cause of cancer, it ‘lights the fire of malignancy, and inflammation is the fuel that feeds the flames’ (p46). Sites of infection and/or wounds that are normally the focus of much immune activity can also be the sites of tumour development. Inflammation can in itself spur genetic changes in cells that lead to cancer development, by, for instance, releasing free radicals that damage DNA. So much for this article in Scientific American. Autoimmune conditions indicate that even at the level of the body there is potential division. A system devised to protect us from otherness (like the death drive turned outwards from the self) can and does turn against the biological self. At the psychological and at the biological levels of organisation there is a paradoxical division, a divided self, where one side attacks the other to the point of destruction and death. The psychological component is variously referred to as the severe superego or the “internal saboteur” (Fairbairn), or the counterpart (Lacan). The link between the two levels of organisation is quite unclear although that has not stopped many from making dangerously facile assumptions along the lines of ‘self-hate leads to cancer’. What is clear is that psychological insult (especially death and bereavement) does have unpredictable immune and autoimmune effects.   July 15th 2007 Viagra, over the last decade, has ratcheted up male penetrative sex to new heights of the instrumentalisation of  pleasure: ‘You get an erection and you are desperate to do something with it. You ejaculate and soon you want to do it again, and again…If the woman you are with is not up for it, things can get very unpleasant. You can end up having a steaming row and still having a hard on’ (The Sunday Times, magazine section. 15 July 2007). Lacan says ‘Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure…everyone is invited to pursue to the limit the demands of his lust, and to realise them’  Seminar VII. (1959-60) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Paris: Edition du Seuil. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge. 1992. p79. July 13th 2007 There is widespread concern in the armed forces of western countries about the increasing rates of suicide stemming from the traumatic effects of the horrors experienced and maybe perpetrated by combatants during tours of duty in war torn areas, like Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, one might ask, does the iconic image of asymmetric warfare, the suicide bomber, and children and young people signing up to become martyrs, especially in Iran and Palestine not have a further corrosive effect on western troops to the extent that some might identify with these “volunteers”? Furthermore, beyond suicide websites, does not the support in some quarters for suicide bombers and their martyrdom instantly conferred, create seductive effects amongst youth in many countries, increasing suicide rates dramatically? Is this one further factor that should be considered?  July 10th 2007 Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is peopled by characters who are light and disconnected after the mass trauma of 9/11. Keith survives to walk out of the Towers impregnated with shards of glass clutching a briefcase that belongs to another survivor (Florence Givens), whom he meets and eventually has sex with. His estranged wife Lianne looks after him after a fashion. Memorable, however, is the account of “organic shrapnel”    "Where there are suicide bombings”, says his doctor. “Maybe you don't want to hear this." "I don't know."     "In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber's body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who's in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.'' He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith's face.     "This is something I don't think you have," he said. (p16)    Later, DeLillo’s account of "the falling man". David Janiac re-enacts the trauma of the people falling from the Towers. He appears dangling above the street or other public place, upside down. He wears a business suit, tie, dress shoes and has one leg bent up, arms at his side. He is suspended by a crude safety harness. He is characterised as, heartless exhibitionist or brave new chronicler of the age or terror.    Not withstanding the gritty dust filled descriptions of the escape from the towers, DeLillo, can’t resist the swipe at America through the words of Martin, Lianne’s elderly mother’s lover, who was a terrorist in an earlier incarnation. “We’re all sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates us….For all the careless power of this country, let me say this, for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant. Don’t you believe this?....It is losing the centre. It becomes the centre of its own shit. This is the only centre it occupies’ (p191). July 3rd 2007 Ireland is the hub. Yesterday's accidential seizure of 100-200m euros worth of cocaine in W. Cork was destined for the Irish market and Europe. Ireland is the narcotic gateway to Europe. Last century Ireland was the terrorist gateway to Europe and beyond, exporting/importing men, materials and expertise. Meanwhile Ireland is "for peace" and "neutrality". Like the calm in the eye of the hurricane, Ireland has suffered no terrorist attacks since 1970. And most people behave as if there's no drug problem. June 30th 2007 A man sets himself alight with petrol after crashing into the airport terminal. He causes himself 90% burns in spite of being hosed down by a fireman at the scene.On June 16, 1963, a Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in Saigon. Quang Duc was actually protesting religious persecution under the Diem regime, not the war. However, the Diem regime would not have been in power had it not been for U.S. intervention in Vietnam.For both men, religion against hegemonic power - the ultimate in "non-attachment"and "desirelessness". June 9th 2007 Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the Abbey. It is a powerful production. It demonstrates the violent power of ideologies to root out opposition, evil - witchcraft in this instance. Eventually the ones accused, a band of young girls found dancing naked in the woods, want to drag others with them to punishment. So by the end many normal good folk are being accused of witchcraft and of being in league with the devil. No one is spared suspicion.  The play turns around John Proctor, a “good” man, who "fell" once in the past when he got too close to the leader of the witches, Abigail. She wants him found guilty by the court. His wife, who has also been accused falsely, when asked by the court, cannot, in honesty, name her husband as a “lecher”. If she could have done, Abigail’s plot would have been exposed as false. Instead, it looks like John Proctor who is lying and who has manipulating his servant Mary to expose the other girls who are driving the whole hysteria in Salem. So Proctor goes to prison with the others. On the morning he is due to be hanged, the Court gives him a  last chance to save himself, if he will admit to being in league with the devil and to sign a confession. The Court itself is worried about its credibility when it is accusing all these good people of wrongdoing. They would dearly like an admission. Proctor is reluctantly willing to go along with this, thinking of his pregnant wife and his children, until he realises that his name will be posted in the village along with his "confession", which for him is a step too far, too appalling. So he goes to his death.                May 20th 2007  Have finished Milan Kundera’s The Curtain. It concerns the novel as art form. Here are a few random notes on this work. The curtain in question is ‘the curtain of pre-interpretation…hanging in front of the world’ (pp122-23), which needs to be torn, so that we can reach ‘into the soul of things…of all things human’ (p128). We need the Cervantes-like courage to tear the curtain. ‘And the conformists won’t be the only ones fooled; the rebel types, eager to stand up against everyone and everything, will not realise how obedient they themselves are; they will rebel against only what is interpreted (or pre-interpreted) as worthy of rebellion’ (p92). In the modern world, as he says, ‘abandoned by philosophy and splintered by hundreds of scientific specialties, the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole.’ (p83).  The novel arises at the same time as rapid historical change, where every object ‘was stamped with its imminent disappearance’. Thus begins the art of description and, ‘compassion for the ephemeral’ (p14). The everyday can be raised to the level of beauty – ‘a strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment; the wind rattling the window-pane…inimitable singularity’ (p20). “One must be absolutely modern” (Arthur Rambaud cited, p55). But as history accelerates, everyone becomes modern – the status quo is rapid change therefore the progressive is a conservative at the same time, a rebel and a conformist at the same time! When Camus was attacked by Sartre for being a reactionary, Camus criticised those, who merely, “set down their armchairs facing in the direction of History.” (cited, p56). He notes also the radical contingency of what is called the “self”: our belief in its autonomy through different circumstances. Instead, ‘[w]e are all hopelessly riveted to the date and place of our birth. Our “self” is inconceivable outside the particular, unique situation of our life.’ (p62). In this connection, he follows the theme of identity and "the other" that we once were: how could I, for instance, have followed that religion, politics, married that person? Youth is extremism; youth follows youth, whereas the old are isolated yet free, ‘versperal freedom’.  Bureaucracy is another of Kundera’s themes; our conflict with an enormous administration, the theme in Kafka. The archaic world was that of the Epic, one of freedom, struggle, dignity, adventure, which gave way, in the modern era, to the State and omnipotent administrations. Max Weber saw that modernity was also the ‘bureaucratisation of social life’, which has become omnipresent. Everywhere we move, we confront administrative bureaucracies, large or small, which may conflict with each other, that work to their timescales, which are not of the order of the human, and where ‘bureaucratic error becomes the only poetry (dark poetry) of our time'. Another theme is humour: ‘the humour that Octavio Paz saw as modernity's great invention, due to Cervantes and the birth of the novel. I shall never cease to wonder at that enormous idea of Paz: that humour is not innate in man, but is an acquisition of the culture of the modern era (which means that even today it is far from being accessible to everyone, and that no one can foresee how much longer that great invention will be with us). Humour is not a spark that leaps up for a brief moment at the comical dénouement of some situation or story. Its unobtrusive light glows over the whole vast landscape of life’. (p109). Against this, there are the “agelasts”. The term agelasts, which is a neologism Rabelais coined from Greek to describe people incapable of laughing. Rabelais detested agelasts, because of whom he came close to never writing another jot. People for whom life is sacred react with irritation to jokes, for any joke is an affront to the sacred nature of life. Unless we understand the agelasts we cannot understand the comical. Their existence gives the comical its full dimension, shows it to be a wager, a risk-taking, and reveals its dramatic essence.    Against the simplistic notion of Evil, he posits Hegel’s theory of the tragic. ‘The story of Antigone inspired Hegel to his magisterial meditation on tragedy: two antagonists face to face [Antigone and Creon], each of them inseparably bound to a truth that is partial, relative, but, considered in itself, entirely justified. Each is prepared to sacrifice his life for it, but can only make it prevail at the price of total ruin for the adversary. Both are at once right and guilty’ (p110). (my italics). This analysis, to my mind, is a recipe for lazy relativistic thinking and no-fault criminality.  Finally, Kundera’s preoccupation with forgetting. ‘…the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)’. (p148). And further on, ‘The perceptual activity of forgetting gives our every act a ghostly, unreal, hazy quality. What did we have for lunch the day before? What did my friend tell me yesterday’. (p149). March 20th 2007 I have been reading Nick Cohen and the reviews of his book, What’s Left, where he is criticising left-liberal opinion for its non-interventionist stance in Kosovo and Iraq, to name just the recent examples. This new-Left would prefer to attack the US and UK for its “imperialist/neo-colonial” ambitions rather than support the victims of barbarous regimes, out of so-called respect for “difference” and “ethnicity.”  You must not tell others how to live, or less so intervene, even when their “traditions” might flout the most basic interpretation of Human Rights. Enlightenment values are for us only, it seems, and we have no right to impose these on others no matter what the suffering, for fear of causing offence. What Cohen is describing is the shift from Modernist universalism to Postmodern relativism and indifference. There is a parallel here in psychoanalysis, where the whole question of “caring” represents the interventionist approach, and has been replaced especially in Lacanian circles, by a radically non-interventionist approach. The patient simply “speaks,” and one has no right to care, to help, to advise under any circumstances it seems. Now with individual cases (as against the wider political scene), this can be very necessary, giving time and space for things to unfold. But there are more urgent situations, where the risks of simply “listening” are too high. March 8th 2007 Here is a snippet from Jacqueline Rose (author of The Question of Zion, Princetown University Press, 2005) who is critical of the militaristic identity of Zionism, while being understanding, in a sense, of its historical roots. She believes that they are repeating the trauma visited upon them during the Holocaust, but denied and repeated now, handed on, as it were, with the Palestinians as the victims. A Palestinian woman with a sick child denied access to hospital by the Israeli security apparatus, whose child dies as a result, is the same as a Jewish woman at the edge of a pit in the Camps.     ‘Israel is now the fourth most militarily powerful nation in the world,’ emphasises Rose. ‘It is a nuclear power. It is not in danger. The fear that Israel will be destroyed is groundless. But that does not mean that it isn’t real. The fear is real and it is understandable the difficult territory: you have to say both things at once. But, as I said earlier, when the fear becomes an identity that justifies itself by a violence that cannot acknowledge itself as violence, something has gone terribly wrong.’     Rose is arguing for an “open identity”, typical of the psychoanalytic notion of identity as fleeting and uncertain. But here is our problem with psychoanalysis – saying both things at once! The allegedly “groundless” fear that Israel will be destroyed is at the same time “real.”  The psychoanalytic view is that this real is grounded in phantasy – the apocalyptic phantasy inherent (but allegedly denied) in Zionism. It is so real that it might bring self-destructive end about by its own unacknowledged aggression. The failure to distinguish between phantasy and reality on the part of psychoanalysis itself and Rose in particular, is laughable if it weren’t so tragic, for the demise of the Israeli state and Zionism is eagerly awaited, has been eagerly awaited for five decades by its Arab neighbours as well as those in high liberal places in the West, such as Rose herself. Israel does not exist on the maps of Arab schoolchildren. What is Rose’s comment on this denial of identity (Homo sacer), this failure of registration?      The question that a psychoanalyst might ask in relation to Zionism is precisely this: how is it possible to go on living after the Holocaust? How is it possible to live, let alone prosper after such a radical evil, knowing as, Saul Bellow’s Revelstein says that ‘more than half the world hates you’ and knowing as we do that a second Holocaust is being prepared which will indeed bring about the apocalypse, but not a the fulfilment of a phantasy somehow engineered by the Zionists themselves, but as real perpetrated against them as we in the West (with the exception of the US) looked the other way.      February 12th 2007 I’ve finished reading John Updike’s Terrorist which centres on a lone Arab adolescent, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, a student in Central High School, in rundown New Prospect. He is seduced by Joryleen Grant and victimised by her brute of a boyfriend, Tylenol Jones. Central in his life are three men. His absent Egyptian father,but whose name (Ashmawy) he takes, the school’s career counsellor, Jacob (Jack) Levy and Shaikh Rashid, the imam at the mosque, his teacher of the Qur’an, to which both are devoted above all else. Also present are Jack’s obese wife Beth and her sister Hermione who married to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Ahmad’s single mother, Terry, is Irish born, a nurse and an artist, who has stood by her son and who has an affair of sort for a time with Jack after he had called to their home to advise Ahmed’s mother of her son career potential beyond being a truck driver which all becomes part of the terrorist plot. He finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese (the Chehabs), the threads of a plot gather pace, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.  The plot is to drive explosives into the Lincoln Tunnel in the large furniture type lorry that young Charlie has helped Ahmed to master and detonate its explosives at its weakest point. But to quote the Qur’an: 'Of those who plot, God is the best'.  The book says as much about the tired decadence of the West as it does about the blinkered one dimensionality of evil which is the Jihadi teaching. What is critical is that Ahmed has three “fathers,” no less. One absent, but ever-present via his name, one of shockingly imaginary proportions, the imam at the mosque, and finally Jack Levy who like a real father is deeply flawed, but nevertheless saves Ahmed from his own death.   February 7th Last month there were a record six thousand abortions done in the UK. The excess is down to a “boozy holiday period”. There is no disapproval of this. Six thousand women “choose” to end the life developing within them. The only complaint seems to be that some women suffer undue delay in accessing abortion services. On does not have to be a Catholic to pause here for a moment at this statistic. A figure of casual violent efficiency.      January 29th 2007 At last I have written the paper on crime for February 3rd. And today, I was listening to a consumer programme for the disabled (I should say people with disabilities) and there was a good example of this new legalistic postmodernity that I have been writing about. A blind person with a guide god was forbidden to bring their dog into M and S as it's against "Health and Safety." The person appealed to the manager of the shop but with no success. Apparently, there are many examples of this replicated across the country, even though M and S do not have such a policy. But consider the coarse inhumanity of those on the ground who refused entry rule or no rule.   January 17th 2007 An amazing programme on RTE, Hidden Ireland, by veteran journalist Cathal O'Shannon documents how the Irish State granted refuge for Nazi war criminals escaping Allied justice, while at the same time refusing to admit Jews fleeing from Nazi Europe. De Valera saw fascism as merely German nationalism, not too much unlike any other nationalism, and the Nuremberg trials as simply 'victors’ justice', nothing more or less. In the aftermath of WW2, the State gave safe haven to some of the Nazi regime's most notorious collaborators and war criminals. Protected by Church and State, many made their homes in Ireland, or used it as a staging point for escape to America. Cathal O'Shannon joined the RAF in WW2. But after the war had ended, Cathal suggests that the Irish State seemed to give a greater welcome to former Nazis and their collaborators than they did to returning war veterans.  Andrija Artukovic, Nazi Minister of the Interior in Croatia and the man responsible for the deaths of over a million people in concentration camps there, found his way to Ireland at the end of the war with the active filmed collaboration of the Catholic Church. His time here is shrouded in mystery, as the Department of Foreign Affairs still refuses to release the file on this man. He lived under a disguised name in Rathgar. Celestine Laine was leader of the Bezen Perrot, a Waffen SS unit, in nationalist Brittany (with links to the IRA) responsible for the torture and murder of resistance fighters in occupied Brittany. Pieter Menten, a Dutch businessman, who became a Nazi was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jews in Poland. According to eye-witnesses interviewed by O'Shannon, he personally supervised the killings, forced other villagers to watch, while he sipped brandy and smoked cigars. He ordered the mass graves to be covered over before the killers left, so some of the victims were actually buried alive. Menton came to live in Co. Waterford after the war and was known for his extreme wealth and amazing art collection. When his war record was exposed, he was finally banned from living in Ireland. Some of the local people told O'Shannon that ‘they didn’t know about his past and anyway his wealth gave some much needed employment in the area’. Why was the Irish state prepared to harbour men such as Artukovic and Laine, while Jewish refugees were refused asylum? We see Ben Briscoe talk about his father’s friendship with Peter Berry, the minister responsible for deciding on the Jewish asylum issue. Berry promised Briscoe’s father that he was doing everything he could to help the Jews seeking asylum here. It was only after Berry died that Briscoe discovered archived memos blocking asylum for Jewish immigrants. He reports that he was greatly relieved that his father died never knowing this deceit. In Programme Two, O'Shannon investigates how the cold war opened new channels for Nazis seeking sanctuary here. He tells the story of 'the most dangerous man in Europe' and Hitler's favourite soldier - Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny, who famously rescued Mussolini from an isolated mountaintop fortress. Skorzeny effortlessly infiltrated the Dublin social scene. Helmut Clissmann was the man who spied for the Nazis in order to recruit the IRA for their war against Britain – a task that failed by all accounts, also found sanctuary here. Cathal moves on to investigate the Flemish nationalists who became Nazi collaborators - men like Albert Folens, who went on to become a successful publisher of Irish schoolbooks, Albert Luykx, who fled justice in Belgium and later conspired with Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney to import arms for the IRA, and Staf Van Velthoven, the last surviving of 'Ireland's Nazis'. The Catholic Church was instrumental in finding safe houses and safe passage to Ireland.   December 18th 2006 The loss of the social continues apace. In the W. of Ireland, rural post offices have been closing, so have the local corner shops, and now with random breath testing, many small rural pubs are facing closure, not to mention some of the local schools. There was a lovely piece this afternoon, on RTE, interviewing postmen nearing retirement in Donegal. People were delighted to see them as they cycled through wind and rain and often they were given their lunch or a cup of tea.   December 13th 2006 The two day conference questioning the Holocaust which has just ended in Tehran takes Postmodern confusions to a new and unbelievable level. To question the truth of the death of 6m Jews six decades ago is really only the logical and ultimate extention of the cultural relativist ethic that we can be certain of nothing, and whose truth is it anyway? Less seriously, more and more people believe in Creationism, over and against Evolutional Theory. Similarly, aliens, guardian angels and the like.    November 25th 2006 Here are some very incomplete notes from our Lacanian conference, held here in Dublin. Bill Richardson continues his quest for a subject that is not “empty” or “fading”, a subject that can be effective or creative must be more than the Lacanian "barred subject" ($). Ed Robbins speaks about a very interesting case of a traumatic accident (details withheld here). He tells us that, like all his patients, he asks them to write a dream diary and bring it along to the sessions. He takes us carefully through a number of dreams (plus the dreamer’s drawings of them) and shows how they develop and gradually become more discursive. Traumatic dreams change into more oedipal ones, signifying the shift from a traumatic neurosis to a hysterical one. Paul Verhaeghe in his own paper, ‘Apology for the symptom’, quotes Freud, on Dora’s cough. Freud writes,  ‘[I]n the lowest stratum we must assume the presence of a real and organically determined irritation of the throat - which acted like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl’ (Freud, 1905 [1901], p83). In Lacanian terms, there is a kernel of the Real beyond every signification. The Real is part of every symptom. The Real equals the drive or the ‘little o object’. The symptom defines mankind. In other words,there is no subject without a symptom. Lacan uses the image of the jar or pot, whose material shape encloses an empty space (the Real), while the jar itself acts as a container or creator of this real with its signifiers, or signifying material.  Analysis is therefore a “sounding” (of this jar?). As we no longer believe in simply resolving the symptom through analysis, the question arises as it does in the RSI Seminar, of what to do with the symptom? You can either “believe” in it, believe that you can indeed resolve it with a “final” signifier, or you can “identify” with your symptom, now rendered by Lacan as a sinthome, some way of living your own unique enjoyment. Verhaeghe goes on to talk about contemporary mental disorders, now quite unlike Freud’s descriptions of the psychoneuroses. Panic attacks, stress disorders, addictions, cutting phenomena, suicide, promiscuity, somatisations, all have much in common with Freud’s descriptions of the “actual neuroses”. They are action oriented, with the focus on the Real of the body and of the drive, the here and now with no meaning or historicisation. The transference is likely to be, not just a negative transference per se, but an immediate challenging of our position as analysts. These patients do not have a jar, they do not even believe in a jar maker. These people have not constructed symptoms that repress the drive, they haven’t the luxury of a sinthome, they are now over-exposed to the drive and under exposed to the Other. So what position must the analyst adopt, he asks, to cope with this change in patient presentation? He suggests, none other than the therapeutic alliance and attempting, in various ways, to ‘create a jar’, to provide ‘a coating for the drive’. People comment, that the Lacanians are now nearly where many other analysts have been for a long time (and which the Lacanians have constantly derided) – entertaining notions such as containing, working alliances, borderline conditions, etc. Verhaeghe acknowledges that maybe more recently these analysts have been working with ‘people from the street’. The implication is that the sole emphasis on the signifier may need to change. They are at least two decades behind.   November 21st 2006 Culturewars publish my review of the Ferguson book   Novermber 20th 2006 I came across this interesting discussion on The Institute of Ideas website, where they are criticising and questioning therapy culture: On the point of valuing “peer pressure,” and informal relationships, Frank Furedi says, ‘Do you trust other human beings, or do you trust the professional educators or the professional counsellors or whatever, to put things right? That’s the choice you’re confronted with time and time again, and I think debating these issues and confronting these issues in that kind of upfront way is likely to work along with Sally’s empirical evidence having quite a nice impact'. The Sally in question is, Sally Satel, and her book is One Nation under Therapy. Michael Gove speaks about "atomisation": ‘it’s undeniably true that we are more atomised. Individuals are more likely to die further away from their place of birth, more likely to divorce, less likely to nurture the children that they were brought up, the more likely to change employment, to be starved of some of the factors that gave them a collective identity in the past’. But Furedi questions this: ‘Are we more atomised? That’s an issue that’s raised time and time again. I wouldn’t disagree with the point that Michael just made earlier on. In one sense, we are more atomised, but in a sense we’re not. I think as a sociologist I’ve come to be very suspicious of the before and after depiction of reality’ Furedi goes on to make a key point, I think, ‘the experience of atomisation is something human beings have lived with for a long, long, long time – something that therapy culture doesn’t really understand. You see, if you think of your parents, grandparents and their parents’ generations, it wasn’t really the case that because of strong communities and networks, peoples’ personal lives were terrific, that all there problems were sorted out because they got all this support. 50. 60, 100 years ago, you still had to work very, very hard to make a good friend. Good friends did not drop out of heaven. You still had to work very, very hard to have close, intimate relationships. Lovers did not drop out of heaven. You had to work very, very hard to get that kind of very rare experience of passion. In other words, you had to work hard to cultivate a close, strong, supportive network around you. …We don’t get friends by just wanting one. We have to go out and cultivate close friendships. Really rewarding friendships need to be cultivated as do our husbands, wives or partners. We need to cultivate all these support networks for us. And I think what therapy culture does is it makes that very difficult. I think it distracts us from the task we all have to undertake of making friends, finding lovers, finding support, creating an informal network around us – things we need in order to be strong as individuals. To be a strong individual you need to have cultivated this relation of dependence and that’s no more easy or difficult than it was for my mum or her mum or anybody else. That’s important to firstly realise. And the reason why it’s important is that we need future-oriented solutions and part of a future-oriented response to the things we’re discussing is that we do undertake these particular tasks. Instead of saying ‘It’s impossible, I cannot do that, I’m lonely and isolated, please help me, call the helpline’, the answer lies within our hands as potentially autonomous individuals. Instead of dismissing that possibility as something you could do in the past but no longer today, we should look at the creative potential we all possess to find answers’. All practitioners should read this!   October 29th 2006 Ipnosis (Journal of Independent Practitioners) is against state regulation of psychotherapy and counselling in the UK. Seeing Like a State, by J. Scott, is a key text. Briefly, according to Scott, the state is for techne, scientific and evidenced based practice and regulation, and against Mêtis, that local and contingent “knowing” appropriate for the unique interpersonal encounter. ‘Mêtis far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic local and divergent. It is in fact the idiosyncrasies of mêtis, its contextualness and its fragmentation that make it so permeable, so open to new ideas. Mêtis has no doctrine or centralized training; each practitioner has his or her own angle’. Sensing ‘colonisation’ of the psyche by techne, one of Scott’s contentions is that ‘states often feel driven to colonize areas of daily life that are perceived as wild or which elude their jurisdiction’.   Ipnosis continues, ‘Doesn’t the use of “objective” show that Foster, and the great and good on the list of people who signed off his report are ignorant of, or more likely in institutional denial of the hard won understanding that claims of objectivity are instruments of coercion and subordination; power words that are intended to enforce compliance and conformity?’ We might add that absolute subjectivity is also problematic and the free play of Mêtis without values (apart from the value of absolute freedom), equally dangerous and coercive.      October 30th 2006 With all the talk on climate change, there is less concern about the parallel climate change in the social (drug abuse, mass fatherlessness, mental illness, promiscuity, over-consumption, etc.). Just as each of us leaves a "carbon footprint" connected to our consumption, so too do we leave a social footprint connected to the number of relationships we break. Just as there will be a carbon tax to reduce these devastating changes in the atmosphere that are forecast, the more relationships we consume, the more we will be forced to pay, by way of a "hate tax" - that is a tax levied on those who create the most hatred. The breaking of social bonds releases hate (depression, anxiety, sense of betrayal) into the social atmosphere with all the consequences we have seen already. The trouble is there are still people who deny any sort of climate change and think we can go on as we are!    October 19th 2006 This letter is published in The Irish Times. I write in support of Fionuala Christodoulide's letter (October 16th) criticising the constant emphasis on girls' academic achievements to the detriment of boys' with headlines such as 'Gender gap: how girls outperformed boys'. This, she believes, creates a situation that may lead to the feeling that 'there is no use in working hard, in doing their best at school, because they are constantly being told (and in big headlines) that girls do better? This is a very dangerous message to send out to young, impressionable and vulnerable boys'.   However, I believe the problem is more serious. The "deconstruction" of males values gathers pace. Culture is everywhere becoming more feminised. Male psychology is frequently deemed inherently aggressive and reactionary, the source of violence in the home and in culture generally. Physical strength, reserve, stoicism, control, objectivity must cede ground wholesale to emotivism, subjectivity, feelings and communication skills in an age of networking and interactivity.There is an unquestioned assertion that masculinity is a "social construct", that can therefore be re-constructed, re-branded in a much more feminised version. Seen from a long trajectory, this is a very radical and successful project that is now in an advanced stage and probably unstoppable. All that may be possible now is to enable men, though "masculinity programmes" to manage and negotiate more gracefully their own disappearance. Has this process got anything to do with male suicide running at four times that of female suicide?   October 18th 2006 Here is a delightful passage from Baudrillard’s Cool Memories IV. ‘The one fantastic moment is that moment of first contact, when things have not yet noticed we are there, when they have not yet fallen in with the order of analysis. It is the same with language when it has not yet had time to signify. Or with deserts: when their silence is still intact and our absence has not had time to dissipate…But that instant is ephemeral; it is gone in a trice. You would have not to be there to see it. Perhaps only ghosts experience that exceptional pleasure’. p52. He speaks of the unsullied moment prior to representation then evaporation via the symbolic. The world before the banality of human contagion. Language when it is still just materiality, before meaning. The key equation is our absence and the generosity of the world.    October 6th 2006 Feston in the Gate theatre. This is an explosive version produced by Selina Cartmell of Vinterberg’s original film, created by the Dogme 95 film movement. Part of their manifesto, their “Vow of Chasity” states for a director: My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.  Christian (Ronan Leahy) confronts his father, Helge (Owen Roe), at the exciting moment of his sixtieth birthday celebrations, with his crime of sexual abuse that has contributed to the death of his twin sister Linda by suicide. Both are visibly anguished and distraught, everything goes to pieces. At the end of the performance, after the audience’s great appreciation, I overhear an American woman behind us saying: ‘That’s it! You have to tell the truth – that’s what we’re here for!’ She doesn’t sound quite as chaste as the Dogma 95 movement, but it all seems so simple – tell the truth! But look what happens when we tell the truth – an explosion and everything unravels, the family is destroyed.     September 13th 2006. I finish Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam. I have been reading this book for a month, but no time is too long for this beautifully written book. Aslam took eleven years to complete this work, so it has been very worthwhile to spend time on it. ‘Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love…even the trees were in love. The very stones sang of love. Allah Himself was a being in love with His own creation’. (p64). These characters here are lost lovers. They are all lost, unhappy and increasingly so as the story unfolds. They are part of a close-knit Pakistani community in an English town, that they have re-named along with all the streets that they call, not by their English names, but familiar Pakistani ones so that they can always be reminded of home. The community is strongly Muslim, orthodox, in-turned against the host community (England regarded as ‘a dirty country, an unsacred country full of filthy people with disgusting habits’ p267) and above all pathologically moralistic and hypocritical: ‘family life frequently reduced to nothing more than legalised brutality’ (p210) most especially against women. A line from a poet. I did warn: the prison out there has been expanding slowly, and now its walls have almost reached your garden (p211). Aslam, however, is deeply sympathetic to his own people and steeped in their ways and contradictions which gives the writing its power. The couple, whose brutal deaths haunt the book, are the lovers Jugnu and Chanda, who were killed by her brothers (now in prison), because they were living with each other without being married, thereby bringing dishonour to Chanda’s family who own a shop in the town. Jugnu was a lepidopterist, whose hands glowed in the dark, making them irresistible to his moths. One summer in the States, apparently, he had painted radium onto clock dials and his hands have glowed ever since. Jugnu was much loved brother of Shamas, who is the book’s central figure – a Pakistani, who had to leave his home country because he was a Communist. He is married to and progressively estranged from Kaukab an uneducated orthodox Muslim, and a warm good woman, who hates her English alien environment and who feels she has “lost” her three children (Ujala, Charag and Ma-barin)  to the moral corruption of the whites, and blames Shamas and his brother with their modern views. Shamas falls in love with Safeena, secretly (because there is such danger that they might even be seen together), a woman who is estranged from her husband back in Pakistan, who has kept their only son. She cannot see her beloved son again until she has remarried and divorced and then may go back to her husband and son, whom she misses terribly. She wants to marry Shamas, partly because she loves him and partly to further her plan of retrieving her son. But he cannot add to Kaukab’s mental pain. At one point his wife, despairing over the loss of faith around her, tries to commit suicide. Safeena gets pregnant by Shamas and disappears for a time. Shamas is badly beaten up by a Pakistani gang (not white racists), perhaps because of this relationship with Safeena, may be because of his brother’s adultery, or may be because of his discovery of child sexual abuse by an Imam at the mosque, or other reasons, including his secularism. Later, thinking Safeena may be dead, he discovers she is married and the husband will think that the child is his own. The book ends with the horrific forensic details of Jugnu’s and Chanda’s killing, told with hindsight gained from the revelations at the trial. Finally, the death of Shamus in the snow, ‘someone quite prominent and respected it seems’.       September 5th 2006 Volver. Pedro Almodovar. A Review.  The film opens with the women of the village cleaning and polishing the gravestones in the windswept La Mancha graveyard. There is nothing maudlin or sad about this scene. It merely acknowledges that the dead still live among us, even if only in our memories. The wind is the same wind that fans the flames of a fire that is believed to have killed the parents of  two sisters, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Duenas), whom we meet visiting an elderly eccentric aunt, Tia Paula (Chus Lampreave). She is on the point of death, yet incredibly manages to be able to look after herself and who even has an exercise bike in her house! It is said locally that their dead mother is “helping” her sister. Early in the film, Paula (Yohana Cobo), the adolescent daughter of Raimunda, stabs her mother’s low-life husband, Paco, accidently after he had tried to sexually assault her. Raimunda takes immediate charge, hiding the body in the freezer of the local restaurant that she has temporally taken over in the owner’s absence. To make money she agrees to feed a film crew who are working locally. Paco is later buried secretly, still in the freezer, beside a river, a favourite place of his, we are told. A friend of the sisters, Agustina, is dying of cancer. Before she dies, she wants to help look after the sisters’ aunt, because she has no mother of her own to care for. Her mother was a hippie and disappeared without trace some time before. Agustina, however, feels the sisters have some knowledge of her mother’s disappearance. Then the sisters’ mother’s “ghost” (Abuela, played by Carmen Muara) appears to Sole and the story of the fire in the house and the secrets it concealed unravels. Abuela and Raimunda were estranged for many years before Abuela “died”. The appalling truth is that Raimunda’s father made her pregnant (with Paula) and Abuela did nothing to prevent the abuse. Also, her father had been having an affair with Agustina’s mother. Abuela, in a rage, set light to the house and the illicit couple were incinerated within it, the wind insuring that nothing remained of the occupants. Abuela was gone and it was easily understood that she was the one who had died along with her husband. Instead however, she had gone into hiding in her sister’s house, helping her when she became too ill to cope. The film ends on a moving and reconciliatory note with Abuela caring for Agustina as she lies dying.   As Almodovar says: ‘It is a movie about the culture of death in my native region, La Mancha. The way in which the dead are still present in their lives, the richness and humanity of their rites makes it possible for the dead to never really die. ‘Volver’ shatters all clichés of a dark Spain and shows a Spain that is as real, a white Spain, spontaneous, fun, fearless, fair and with solidarity’. This is dramatically shot during Agustina’s funeral, where, seen from above, the mourners move like bees as they  express their condolences.  We might, however, add a darker note, a subtext to this film which is a film about women, three generations no less, who are open and free in spirit, if poor in reality. The title translates as “coming back” and this returning occurs on many levels – coming back from the dead, coming back to each other, coming back in friendship and love across the generations, women coming back to each other. There are no men, barring the restaurant owner and the leader of the film crew. The men do not come back: two have been killed; one is an abuser; the other an adulterer; the third, the estranged husband of Sole, whom we do not see. This is world that works well, really well, without men. This creates a celebratory edge to the film, a release, an excitement and escape, a “coming back” to the Real of the wind and dust that covers everything.      August 30th 2006 The British Fertility Society has recommended that obese women ‘must lose weight’ before being given fertility treatment. But what they also suggested is that lesbians and single women be allowed the same access to IVF as heterosexual couples. The current guidelines refer to "the need for a father" in deciding who is eligible for free treatment. Caroline Flint, the public health minister, told MPs last month that the Government was likely to scrap this requirement. Added to the controversy about the increasing instrumentalisation of human sexuality, is the deletion of the requirement for male influence beyond the presence of sperm. All that is required, so the report goes on, is a “loving family”: marriage is not required; a sexual relationship is not required; a father is not required. We have gone so far down the road of  “equal rights”, that even fatherhood has become an optional extra of no ultimate importance. What signal does this send to men, to real fathers, to sons? What kind of child abuse and child neglect does this represent?    August 21st 2006 A quote from a Melanie Phillips’ article in the National Review. 'Many of these young people [Muslims] live in a kind of cultural limbo, stranded between the repressive culture of the Asian subcontinent and the debauched and degraded culture of Britain. And the terrible message of the jihad is a siren song for those who have been abandoned in a psychic desert and who search for a meaning to their lives. It gives them an identity which provides self respect because it casts them in a heroic mould: fighting to ‘defend’ the kingdom of God. It is an identity built on undiluted hatred, on lies, on paranoia, on mass murder and even attempted genocide. These are ideas that kill. And because they are ideas, some of the most significant recruiting grounds are not the backstreet mosques and madrassahs but those seats of intellectual inquiry, the universities. Britain’s campuses are now the prime hunting grounds of the jihad'.   On the one hand, moral relativism, indeterminacy and the empty void (psychic desert) that lies at the heart of postmodernity, into which many young people, not just Muslims, are likely to fall. On the other hand, something which is utterly non-indeterminate, non-relativistic – the Real, which is totally complete in itself and needs nothing. The irony is that much intellectual and political thinking on the jihad seems to be the same old postmodern thinking. The jihad becomes just one more subject position to be included, to be listened too, to be fostered, as if it were part of a grand dialectical process of becoming. Our elites are largely unaware of the brutal real of the Real here, believing that writers like Phillips are mired in a fatal imaginary, conjuring up phantoms to attack.                 July 24th 2006 My letter to the Irish Times gets published today!   I hope others will be roused to counter the sheer moral inversion of your distinguished correspondents (July 21st), John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter and Jose Saramago with their predictable outrageous attack on Israel and its self-defence. They speak of 'the liquidation of the Palestinian nation', when it has been publicly and proudly proclaimed by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, other Jihadis and their fellow travellers that it is Israel that should be 'wiped off the face of the earth'. It is of tragic significance that our intellectual "leaders" on the Left should continue to support the genocidal pronouncements by Arab militants, support illegal incursions, kidnappings, justify or overlook any outrage in defence of  'the disinherited and crowded poor', always portraying the Palestinians as passive victims of Israeli and US aggression and injustice. No mention of the violent intimidation of their local populations by Hamas and Hezbollah, no mention of the total unaccountability of these militia to anyone, no mention of the targeting of civilians to spread terror, suicide bombings of buses, the deliberate location of combatants and their vast accumulations of munitions, hidden in basements in residential areas, endangering their local populations whom they claim to defend, no mention of Sharia, no mention of rampant anti-Semitism taught in schools, appearing daily in the Arabic media. It is a supreme irony that some sections of the Left, by embracing "Islamic resistance", put themselves on the same side as neo-Nazis, totally beyond the pale of Western values. Shameful moral bankruptcy.   May 15th 2006 Poor old Frank Gardiner, lucky to survive the attack on him by Islamic militants that killed his Irish born cameraman and left Frank wheelchair-bound, has written a book, Blood and Soil, where he praises the huge generosity of ordinary Arabs and how much they would hate what the militants are (driven to) doing in their name. He is especially impressed by feast of Ramadan and the sharing of food and celebration and how Islam informs generously every detail of life. He is making the contrast with what he calls the “excessive privacy” of British life, saying that when he lived in the Middle East, he could truly say that the only thing he missed was his parents. Here is the familiar idealisation of the other and the what we have lost, which is so strong that it can even overcome murder. For, why should he have been attacked? Why should his cameraman have been killed? What harm did they do precicely to the Muslim world? Brian Friel’s Translations comes to mind where some of the British soldiers, mapping and re-naming everything in the West of Ireland during the colonial period, fall in love with the peace and simplicity of the place and the love of the people and end up getting murdered by the infamous Donnelly twins. At the very least we could say that idealisation is blind.     April 26th 2006 I have been reading through Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Vol 1: 1906-1908. Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn. International Universities Press 1962. Here is one of the clearest definitions of what analysis is about, in Freud’s words: JANUARY   30,   1907   Therapy is powerless as far as the single symptom is concerned. It is the goal of the technique (as Sadger has said) to have the patient develop everything himself. The task of the therapist is always only to remove the resistances.(18)   The nature of therapy could be characterized in various ways: (1) as filling the gaps of memory (which have come about through repression); (2) as removing the resistances; (3) as replacing the unconscious by the conscious. All of this is really the same. There is only one power which can remove the resistances, the transference. The patient is compelled to give up his resistances to please us. Our cures are cures of love. There would thus remain for us only the task of removing the personal resistances (those against the transference). To the extent that transference exists—to that extent can we bring about cures: the analogy with hypnotic cures is striking. It is only that in psychoanalysis, the power of the transference is used to produce a  permanent change in the patient, whereas hypnosis is nothing but a clever trick [Kunststuck]. The vicissitudes of the transference decide the success of treatment. The only thing the method still lacks is authority; the element of suggestion must be added from without. But even so, the need of the unconscious for liberation meets us halfway. The neurotic does not fall ill again because we have made conscious the  unconscious  infantile   contents   (the  other  factor  in  symptom formation, in addition to the repulsion of repression).       18. Even at that time, treatment was not aimed at the symptom as such but at the total personality as well as at the overcoming of resistances.       April 8th 2006 I attend the presentation of a paper (organsised by the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland), entitled “Lost in translation” by Dr Ian Parker (Manchester), in which he briefly refers to the film of that name before going on to speak about the question of the translation by the coloniser of the colonised and the resistance offered by the latter to being translated into a foreign language. He then speaks of the translation of Lacan’s seminars and the questionmark that has always existed over the authenticity of the “original” transcripts from which the translations have been made. Maybe there was no original text. We also have in mind Cormac Gallagher’s translation – word for word – of the seminars upon which so many rely for an accurate reflection of what Lacan said. The question about interpretation and translation is central to the psychoanalytic project. Nothing should be taken for granted in this respect. Parker also refers to Jacques Allain Miller’s so-called ‘reconquest of the Freudian field’ following his father-in-law’s declaration of June 21st 1964 and its continuing reiteration today, ‘constituting one single worldwide movement whose vitality demonstrates that the desire of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which wished to silence the analytic descendents of Jacques Lacan by declaring his excommunication, has not been accomplished’. I have taken these words from the Asosiacion Mundial de Psicoanalisis.   http://www.wapol.org/en/escuelauna/escuelauna.asp?preambulo.html. As part of a response, I refer to George Steiner’s reference to translation as inevitably being an act of violence. I then go on to raise the question of the Lacanian translation of psychoanalysis into “Lacanese” and the attempted erasure of all other forms of psychoanalysis which are non-Lacanian. After all, I continue, amidst somewhat derisive but not altogether hostile laughter, are not words like “reconquest” the words of the imperialist attacker? I am totally wrong comes the reply. I’ve got it completely wrong. It was they (the IPA analysts) who didn’t and still don’t listen to the Lacanians; it is they who are the oppressors. I said, surely it’s quite the reverse. All non-Lacanian approaches to psychoanalytic practice are out! I suggest that now with the popularity of Lacanian psychoanalysis worldwide, it is they, the Lacanians, that look like the oppressors of all former ideas. They have not only translated Freud, but eliminated all other psychoanalytic languages as well.       March 31st 2006 People are staying away from wild birds and not feeding them, taking down their loving erected bird tables and feeding boxes, banishing birds from their gardens, because of the fear of bird flu. The RSPB has responded urgently, saying that the risks of catching bird flu are miniscule and that there’s a real danger to the bird population and many well known species if we stop feeding them. Why is this such a troubling turn around? That we should desert our friends at the merest threat to our precious narcissism? March 26th 2006 We must agree with Nick Cohen at http://www.nickcohen.net/ commenting on the release of the Peace Activist, Norman Kember and concluding the following: 'at least Kember and his colleagues made a commitment to Iraq. They may have done no good, they may have put better and braver men in danger, yet they strike me as preferable to the majority of European liberals who have sat out the conflict.  Civilians are massacred at random: silence. Al-Qaeda hits as many Shia mosques as it can in the hope of provoking a civil war: silence again. No condemnations of barbarism are offered for fear of giving the smallest support to George W Bush and Tony Blair.  The price that has already been paid is a shrivelling of the liberal conscience. If you refuse to take sides in Iraq, you can't take them anywhere else. From Burma to Darfur, crimes against humanity that would have produced outrage in the Nineties are met with indifference today’. Indifference is the hallmark of postmodernity, under the guise of the "freedom" of personal and national sovereignty, a generalised "hands-off" approach. Indifference, no difference, no discrimination, generalised equality - our contemporary slogans. The tension between Good and Evil is resolved, in favour of the Good which sits so easily with the liberal conscience: all is good. If, however, you point up anything that might not be good, there's a squinting (Baudrillard calls it a "strabismus") and a, "well..maybe not good now...but soon will be..." response. Indifference, no. You'll be told..."No [pause]... bad things can still happen..."  The liberal conscience and its unconditional love.   March 24th 2006 An excellent article. Alan Johnson the editor of Democratiya has written an essay called “Camus Catch: How democracies can defeat "Totalitarian Political Islam”. http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=25. Citing Camus, he says: ‘Camus warned us. As he predicted, the plague, after lying dormant for years in furniture and in linen has woken its rats and sent them to die in a happy city’. Johnson goes on: ‘In their response to the threat some on the left are reminiscent of the Chelmite villager of Sholom Aleichem's parable, "The Right Spot". When they made the world the angels sprinkled souls in equal proportions. A handful of wise, another of the foolish. But over Chelm an angel's sack was caught on the top of a mountain and out spilled all the foolish souls over Chelm. A Chelmite once went about on the outskirts of the town, searching for something on the ground. 'What are you looking for?' a passer-by asked him. 'I lost a ruble in the synagogue courtyard, so I'm hunting for it.' 'You poor Chelmite,' the stranger mocked him, 'why are you hunting for it here, when you lost it in the synagogue courtyard?' 'You're smart, you are!' the Chelmite retorted. 'The synagogue courtyard is muddy, whereas here the ground is dry. Now where is it better to search?' ('The Right Spot', from A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg) He goes on to assert, that many on the Left are searching for their answer in their own “dry ground” of anti-imperialism, anti-war, victory to the resistance, “blowback” against Bush/Blair. He engages in a necessary political analysis of totalitarian Islam. 1) A once complete integral religion refused to reform, innovate and self-interpret and separate religion and politics to accommodate to modernity. 2) Elites in Islamic countries failed to develop and modernise. Instead, they become corrupt and stagnated. 3) Middle class became panicked by competitive pressures and the breakdown of old social relationships. 4) Liberal elites in those countries trail after the failed state elites and thus became discredited. 5) The working class is weakened through economic decay and the failure of Ba’arthist/Arab nationalism and Stalinism to deliver. 6) So the middle class remnants (shopkeepers, merchants, artisans, peasants, frustrated students) and the working class, pauperised by primitive capitalist accumulation, are all ripe for indoctrination. In summary, Johnson acknowledges: ‘Totalitarian Political Islam appeals to a bone-deep sense of humiliation’. Commenting on the eyes rolling, the sneering, the scoffing, the changing of the subject, of the left, of the ‘reactionary anti-imperialists’, he quotes Camus again: ‘On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself’ (Albert Camus’, The Rebel). He goes on to quote the Arab socialist, Salah Jaber, 'the fundamentalist movement is, in fact, more backward than was fascism' - it drives the historical clock backward to a reactionary utopia with more faith and zeal than the classical fascists. Where it differs from fascism is its anti-imperialism, whereas fascism was the brutal guarantor of big capital in the face of mass workers’ movements. Here, Jaber saw a great danger of the left’s compromising: 'any compromises proposed by the fundamentalists … pose enormous dangers for all sections of the left, both moral and physical'. It is, Jaber goes on, 'absolutely and under all circumstances necessary to combat its reactionary and medieval influence.' Even the so-called 'anti-imperialism' of the Fundamentalists, Jaber observed, represents an inchoate reactionary hostility to 'all the political and social gains of the bourgeois revolution'. Instead, Johnson is following Camus, who says he learnt all about morality through football. Especially, the “goalkeeper”, who doesn’t take his eye off the ball! Rejecting any use of torture in the long fight against political Islam, Johnson says, ‘Terrorists seek to strip off the mask of law to reveal the nihilist heart of coercion within, and we have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalty we seek that the rule of law is not a mask but the true image of our nature’. It is also about a battle of ideas. Islam, says Rushdie, must be prised free from 'the hands of the literalist Islamofascists' who have imprisoned Islam in their 'iron certainties and unchanging absolutes' (Times, August 11, 2005). However, in 1989 Sir Iqbal Sacranie (MCB) said 'Death is perhaps too easy' for Salman Rushdie. Today, Sacranie rails against the perversion of homosexuality and urges Muslims to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day. We urgently need an alternative intellectual and cultural model to the Zealot, on the one hand, and our contemporary post-modern philosopher, the Deconstructionist, on the other. The Italian democratic political philosopher Norberto Bobbio wisely called on us to adhere to 'the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgement, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things'. This mentality we must pit against what Paul Berman has called 'the paranoid and apocalyptic nature of the totalitarian mindset'. There is room for some hope. For instance, the 2006 manifesto 'Together Facing the New Totalitarianism', the authors - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq – express the most precious idea: this is a fight of all democrats against Totalitarianism. They write: After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: - Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations, nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats. …nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred….We reject 'cultural relativism', which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of 'Islamophobia'. Johnson continues: ‘These terrorists do not hate what is worst in the societies they attack, but what is best. They despise individual liberty, critical thought, gender equality, religious tolerance, the rights of minorities and political pluralism. They do not criticise democracy because it sometimes fails to live up to its principles; they oppose those principles’. However, Johnson does make the argument more complex: ‘The idea that capitalism has created a world in which workers have 'nothing to lose but their chains' is plainly wrong. But the idea that capitalism has created a world which is, in important respects, inhuman remains valid. Anthony Giddens has called ours a 'runaway world'. The democratic socialist Max Shachtman expressed a similar thought in the late 1950s when he said that 'capitalism is … increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems of society, of maintaining economic and political order.' Continuing, Johnson says, ‘Alongside its surging productivity and ceaseless innovation – the growth in wealth, income and life-expectancy cannot be ignored - a voracious and out-of-control economic system threatens to eat up the resources of the planet, churn up communities, exclude the 'redundant', corrode social institutions, and overwhelm representative democracy. Many fear that everything it touches – and it touches everything – is being turned into a commodity to be bought and sold, priced but devalued. We feel cheapened by that. And we feel insecure and harried - at the mercy of forces we have created. And, we must not forget, in many parts of the world basic human needs remain unmet on an appalling scale. Sen reminds us that despite 'unprecedented increases in overall opulence', the world 'denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers – perhaps even the majority of people.' However he is clear: ‘Totalitarian Political Islam offers no real answer to any of this – it brings penury to any society it controls. But it feeds on moods of ennui, anomie, frustration and discontent. And, within Europe, racism and the failure to accept and integrate Muslim minorities makes it easier for a new Jihadist identity and imaginary to fill the void’. Advocating a Third Way, Johnson points out what is already happening, I think: ‘if liberal education is being eased out of the academy by postmodern relativism and contentless 'critique' then it will have to be taught outside the academy by online universities, alternative school curricula, reading groups, and through new media, such as blogs, online intellectual journals, and forums for democrats fighting the battle of ideas’.    March 5th 2006 A film: Gideon’s Daughter, by Stephen Poliakoff. Gideon (played with haunting sadness by Bill Nighy) is a PR man and the widowed father of a sullen teenage daughter (Emily Blunt). He has been driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by her emotional detachment from him: she is still resentful that he has been a serial adulterer and that he was out of the room calling his mistress on the public phone as her mother lay dying, and at that moment actually died, in the hospital bed. She also feels that his love for her is suffocating. To underline their distance, she is about to take up a place at university in Edinburgh. However, Gideon is hiding his pain and to the outside world nothing seems wrong with him. In fact, quite the contrary: New Labour politicians and influential media players are queuing up to court him. Even though he is thoroughly disillusioned with the manipulative world of spin and focus group, Gideon is viewed as nothing short of a PR genius. He can only really express his agony to a fellow soul in torment. Stella (portrayed with poignancy by Miranda Richardson) is mourning the death of her young son, killed while out riding his bike for the first time. Afraid of sleep, she is working in an all-night supermarket where she keeps guinea pigs in the back. Gideon does not meet Stella in auspicious circumstances. They bump in to one another when Stella's ex-husband tries to accost one of Gideon's clients, a New Labour minister, about the Government's lack of response to their son's death. He is holding up the traffic on the road where his son was killed, getting in the way of the photo-call. In retrospect, this is a profound moment in the film as it shows this desperate man being roundly ignored by the important PR business of the day. Anyway, Gideon and Stella soon find a real bond, brought together by a shared sense of grief and loss. The writer-director succeeds in talking about the way society has evolved over the past eight years. Poliakoff conveys the social developments of the last decade. So the particular story of Gideon has a wider resonance and says something about the way we have been governed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.   "The film is trying to open a door onto the world and make people see the very recent past in a different light," Poliakoff observes. "By telling a very visceral, personal love story, it aims to throw light on how we as intelligent adults feel about the world." He goes on to muse that: "In the summer of 1997, the seeds were sown for today's worship of celebrities and the way in which the Government manages surfaces. Gideon is this PR guru, and everyone believes that he can solve their problems. He is a mixture of a psychiatrist and a priest. He stops listening, but the irony is, the less he listens, the more people want him and take what he says as Gospel. Presentation has become so much more important than ideas. We've now had eight years of a New Labour Government, and no one can point to a Big Idea. All they can point to is a massive amount of presentation." We would have to agree here with Poliakoff – no big idea anywhere. "People have lost faith in their political leaders, and they are constantly searching for different solutions in everything, from right-wing religion to alternative thinking. Gideon is gripped by a sense of spiritual emptiness that is only redeemed through his relationship with Stella. That removes him from the shallowness of his professional life." The writer-director took the Millennium Night celebrations as his starting point for his exploration of society's fixation with spin. "Why was Millennium Night such an unmitigated disaster when so many clever people had been working on it for so long? It was the same with the Millennium Dome. It was meant to be about the future, but it served up such a sterile vision. Poliakoff continues: “Everyone is either a son or a daughter or a parent, and the film reflects every parent's fears for their children. The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place. Moving on and thinking positively have become the great clichés after a bereavement," Poliakoff reckons. "When Stella erupts with grief at one point in the film, she cries, 'You can see in people's eyes that they're thinking, 'Surely it's time to move on, surely it's getting less'. Sorry, but it isn't getting the slightest bit less.'” He continues, "Everything is over so quickly these days. We move on, we move on, we move on because communication is so quick and people are hungry for the next thing. That is reflected in the Government's obsession with presentation. People in power think nothing hangs around for very long. They have bought into the idea that there's an official short-term memory.” In the most moving scene in the film, to my mind, his daughter says in sorrow to Gideon: ‘I just have to get you and your thoughts out of my mind dad, I just have to do that, can you understand?’ This man is suffering from all the emptiness that is around him and that he has been part of and now he knows he has to lose his daughter as well.