Living in Catastrophe
Réginald Blanchet
“War is divine [...].”
Joseph de Maistre
The state of war today can be summarized as follows, as reports Claude Serfati: “Since 1991, armed conflicts have persisted and proliferated. In 2020, the UCDP/PRIO Institute counted 34 armed conflicts in the world. It is estimated that 90% of the deaths caused by wars during the 1990s were civilians. In 2000, the United Nations counted 18 million refugees and internally displaced persons, and by 2020 there will be 67 million. The majority of these conflicts are in Africa.”[1] They have been called “civil” or “ethnic wars.” Since 24 February 2022, the Russian-led war in Ukraine has been unique in a number of ways. First of all, for its political character: it is a war of independence. It pits a free state against a neo-imperialist Russia led by Vladimir Putin. Secondly, its military and geographical character: it is a “total war” and of “high intensity” taking place in the heart of Europe. Its operations aim at the destruction of the invaded country and they will continue until it submits. It is a hybrid war that combines the classic means of military combat on the battlefield with remote warfare through the use of bombardments and unmanned drones. Finally, it threatens to use atomic weapons. This is the novelty. The Ukrainians, army and civilians alike, who are defending their lives, their people and their country, are not taking it lying down. Their exemplary courage has been lauded; their fearlessness and endurance as well. Nor, in this case, is there any in fatalism or resignation.
But then comes the fear. The panicky fear of nuclear war is creeping into Europe. Whether we confess to giving in to it or to resisting it, it is spreading. Apocalyptic anxiety about the end of the world is indeed tormenting us Europeans. We try to ward off the danger. But here, there is no absolute weapon that works. And in the absence of such a weapon, it is the certainty of the world’s annihilation that prevails. We know Raymond Aron’s answer: Nuclear war? Unlikely but not impossible. In contrast to the reasoned optimism of the great Clausewitzian theorist, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy has tried to theorize an “enlightened catastrophism.” It asserts the certainty of atomic confrontation. This must be admitted if we want to be able to avoid it validly. To do so, it will be necessary to trick necessity. The inanity of the so-called nuclear deterrence strategy is obvious. If we fail to go down the path of the destruction of nuclear weapons, tragedy will occur. If it has not happened so far, it is by sheer luck. It will therefore be the effect of an accident: strictly contingent. For it is the very existence of nuclear weapons that constitutes the danger. It is unstoppable.[2]
Pierre-Henri Castel is undoubtedly more radical in asserting the inevitability of the nuclear catastrophe.[3] It will not be accidental. It is written into the very nature of things. “It is the very functioning of civilization, even the means of its peaceful prosperity, that seem to conspire to its own destruction.”[4] Even living quite normally and quietly will lead humanity to its ruin. Everything today allows us to conjecture this, indeed to know it with certainty. But this knowledge is rejected: we do not want to believe it. “Although the worst is certain.” The visionary psychoanalyst points out, however, that this will take “several centuries” and at the cost of many “apocalyptic wars (nuclear, biological, chemical, etc.).”[5] But a greater evil than “the Evil that is coming” will be the “perverse jouissance” that some people would take in it, “deriving all possible jouissances from the very disaster that is about to happen.”[6]
Could this be the reading of the end-of-time-orgy that Christian Salmon evokes in connection with the “great sex party” to which all of Kiev was invited last October?[7] The organizers intended to “deploy the weapon of sex against the nuclear weapon,” whose threat Vladimir Putin had just renewed. Could this be perverse jouissance and the perversity of jouissance, or a declared affirmation, no doubt irony pushed to the limit, of the pleasure of living opposed to the forces of death? The disaster scenario of the nuclear bombing turned into a salacious parody. It became background music conducive to intermingling, and a festive nose-thumbing mockery of a sad fate. The outlet and the fantasy that were given free rein were not, in this case, calls to the voluntary death that both took a malicious surplus jouissance in mocking. It was to say no to sacrifice – unlike Joseph de Maistre, who remained subjugated by the fascination that blood held for him. Here we can see the effect of the object that was embedded in the war and gave it the aura of divine mystery.
To the question that arises, with the acuteness that we can measure from the anguish proper to the time of war, of how to make a world out of the impossible of the world, the Lacanian gnomon indicates, by way of an answer: the filth – the im-monde – and the cardinal place that should be given to it.[8] “Demonstrating the impossibility of living in order to make life a little possible” is how Lacan defines the psychoanalyst’s profession.[9] This is his ethic, and his politics. It is not just a matter of the psychoanalyst witnessing and interpreting his time. It will also be the activist psychoanalyst that Jacques-Alain Miller was the first to institute as the promoter of the Lacanian action in civilization, which is nothing less than the refraction of the analyst’s desire for life.
References
[1] Serfati, C., “L’État radicalisé, la France à l’ère de la mondialisation armée,” Paris, La Fabrique éditions, 2022, p. 10.
[2] Cf. Dupuy, J.-P., “On peut ruser avec le destin catastrophique,” Critique, Penser la catastrophe, No. 783-784, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, August-September 2012, and “La guerre nucléaire qui vient,” AOC, online at https://aoc.media/opinion/2019/02/26/guerre-nucleaire-vient/ 26 February 2019, republished on 28 February 2022.
[3] Cf. Castel, P.-H., Le Mal qui vient, Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 2018.
[4] Ibid., p. 15.
[5] Ibid., p. 27-8.
[6] Ibid., p. 20.
[7] Salmon, C., “Ukraine: une partouze contre les ogives, farce ultime de la guerre,” Slate, 9 November 2022, https://www.slate.fr/societe/backstage/ukraine-guerre-peur-bombe-nucleaire-orgie-geante-farce-monstre-partouze-kiev-sexeSlate.fr,
[8] On this point, see Daniel Roy’s argument of the 2023 NLS Congress, “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilization,” https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Argument-FINAL-VERSION-DISCONTENT-AND-ANXIETY-IN-THE-CLINIC-AND-IN-CIVILISATION.pdf
[9] Lacan, J., “François Cheng et Jacques Lacan” , L’Âne, Le Magazine freudien, Issue 25, February 1986, p. 5.