God Without The Sacred
Franco Fornari was an Italian surgeon, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who served as director of the Psychology Institute of the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the State University of Milan. His interests included group dynamics and social conflict, leading him to research war. In The Psychoanalysis of War, Fornari located the anxieties and psychotic fantasies that govern the behavior of individuals in groups. War, he said, arises from the external projection of an internal danger in the face of an alleged external persecutory entity, which compels individuals and societies to destroy in order to survive.
“War is a spectacular establishment of a general human situation whereby death assumes absolute value: the ideas for which we die have a right to truth, because death becomes a demonstrative process. This situation opens the chapter of the peculiar psychological problem of death as a criterion of truth, to which we shall have to return in order to clarify the mysterious epistemology of war, based on the postulate that what we die for is true, which is, however, contradicted by another postulate, namely, that what is victorious is true, whereby the victory is equated with what is true and right, and the vanquished with what is false and wrong – Fornari
Syria is a site of for global antagonism. Not war. But of an ideological kind. Yes, let’s be frank, vulgar tragedies are unfolding daily. People are dying. Life is being reduced to fear and mourning. Politics are taking center stage, up and over the value of human life itself. But Syria cannot be reduced to a civil war and having some perverse relationship with Hezbollah (intra-funded through Iran). This is also about the historical antagonism of America’s involvement in global affairs. How will America respond?
America sales herself wherever she goes. Liberty dresses in a short skirt and shows her thighs and the rest of the world swoons. Democracy dresses in a nice suit and tie and everyone wants a piece of that American apple pie. The thing is, no matter how altruistic the decision is to ‘go in’ and ‘help’ the people of Syria, America will be bringing its product catalogue with it. Its token dreams of freedom, democracy, equality and the ‘The American Way’. Don’t get me wrong though, I am not a good ol’ fashion liberal and think we should just sit back and let people kill each other. I don’t think murder enhances human life, it diminishes it. And the problem within the global infra-structure resides in this pornography of rights; whereby we as humans have come to a place in history where territories (is not that what a civil war implies? fighting over lines of demarcation?) supercede the value of human vitality.
Where babies and toddlers might not live past the age of 5 years old, if that. I am endorsing an ideology of shame here, lets’ be clear. But let me define shame, so we are on the same page. Shame is the ability (feeling?) to know when we have done something wrong. We feel guilty. Guilt is the residual effect of shame. It causes us to re-assess our past choices in light of the consequences. Some spiritual people might use the word repentance here, however, I think this is too soft of a word – because taken to the extreme end of its idea, we are met with people who might feel a momentary shame but change nothing; like an abusive husband who constantly says ‘sorry!’ but returns to the scene of the crime to repeat its offense. This cycle is inevitable if we continually live as we do as a human race. We are fated to not fully embrace the other (sometimes known as: the enemy), we only choose who our neighbors are. Where we are simply ants who work to support the structures in place as if they exist to save us from ourselves, when in reality they exist so alienate us from one another.
Notice in the narrative of the biblical story, The Good Samaritan, that each pedestrian did not get to choose who the man lying on the floor was, but rather had to make a choice whether they were going to pass by them or not. Whether or not they were going to turn a blind-eye to someone near-death. America has a choice, not as a religious nation, but as a nation to not listen to its past – to re-invent the future. There is a fate worse than death here, never learning from the ghosts we help make.
To not be caught up in binary apparitions If there is war to be had it is against the binary structures (i.e., us and them, black, two options vs. a third option). It is the metaphysical constraints of existence that inform all of our tactics, and yes, ultimately our ethics. In a world where duality reigns supreme, we will always need an enemy to define ourself against. I don’t know what America should do (I think that happens in radical discourse), I just know that Americans should stop listening to the ghost of America past. When that happens, fate steps in, and we continue the cycle of nothing new.
Sarin is the chemical compound that has been used recently in the chemical bombs. It is invisible to the human eye and is extremely volatile on contact, and can stay on the clothes for over 30-minutes, effecting all those around. The long and short of this weapon is that it dismantles the nervous system until the victim is left to asphyxiate. It is an evil to be eradicated. It quite literally, in a medical sense, turns the body against itself. Much like the chemical compound, America is its own worst enemy.
Right now,” democracy is at a stalemate” (John Caputo), although I would claim the experiment failed a long time ago. Much like the nature of this compound, the residual effects of American foreign policy have left much damage in their wake.What we need is a third option, not a synthesis of the binary (i.e., do we go in, do we not go in). I think it arises out of a new form of conscious subjectivity. Which disavows rights-based thinking and starts looking at human relations as a responsibility. That we are responsible for one another. That the continental drift away from one another (See: Pangea) does not have the last word. Maybe the biggest error in Biblical history is when everyone was scattered. I am not speaking against diversity, but am speaking of unity. I am also not an idealist, I think the war in Syria is because of idealism and people attempting to impose their ideals from one-group to another, no idealism is one of the issues at hand. We need a third pill, rather than being zombies who listen to the voices outside of us (i.e., history, America (as personification)) that only tells us what we already know we want. But rather begin to not wrestle against flesh and blood but work together to attack the systems that think for us on our behalf and create a new kind of world where atrocities arent’ the only ‘good’ thing that makes the news.
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