ABOUT THIS BOOK"Davis writes with fervor, vision, and keen moral appreciation of our condition. He encourages us to see what we fear to see, to say what we fear to say. This book is illuminating, challenging, fierce." Michael Eigen, author of The Sensitive Self, Rage, Ecstasy, Toxic Nourishment, Damaged Bonds andThe Psychoanalytic Mystic
Why is fear a dominant emotion in contemporary society? Why are politicians using words like 'terror', 'evil' and 'fundamentalism', and what effect is it having on public consciousness?
Answering these questions, Walter A. Davis taps into the cultural psyche to explore the link between ideology and emotional and psychological manipulation. Starting with the three topics that have preoccupied social discourse since 9-11 -- terror, evil and fundamentalism -- he shows that the Bush administration has been hugely successful in controlling and developing a new political climate through the creation of an almost hypnotic mass consciousness.
Davis's findings take us to the heart of the ideological paralysis of the Left, while offering an innovative approach to understanding contemporary history.
Davis fuses a psychoanalytic and philosophical framework to explain the relation between culture and political events, from the sado-masochist hysteria of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ' to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison; and from the genocidal use of depleted uranium in Iraq to the apocalyptic language driving the Christian Right's assault on basic human rights.
He exposes the motives and belief-systems of this new American psyche and shows how it sustains the Bush administration's agenda. Illuminating how psychological needs govern political action, Davis reveals why the relationship between politics and public consciousness has massive implications for all of us beyond America's borders.
Walter A. Davis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of six previous books, including Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY Press, 2001).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYWalter A. Davis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of six previous books, including Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY Press, 2001).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE BELLY OF THE BEAST 1
1 911-America 3
Ground Zero as Image 4
Mourning vs Evacuation 5
The Psyche That Dropped the Bomb 6
After Such Knowledge,What Forgiveness? 8
2 Living in Death's Dream Kingdom:
The Psychotic Core of Capitalist Ideology 11
Ideology as Delusional Fantasy 11
Capitalism as Fulfillment of the Ideological Enterprise 16
3 Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib 23
The Misfit's Dilemma 23
Movie-goers in the Hands of an Angry Film-maker 25
The Non-Accidental Tourist 30
The Principle of Hope: or, The Late, Late, Late Show 39
Endgame: The Christ of Abu Ghraib 42
4 Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq 45
Laugh-in Brings You the News 45
Appointment in Samarra 47
The Fatal Lure of Guarantees 48
The Nuclear Unconscious 52
The Fantasmatic Becomes the Real 56
A Billet for Dubya 59
Final Jeopardy 63
5 A Humanistic Response to 9-11:
Robert Jay Lifton, or the Nostalgia for Guarantees 67
History With and Without Guarantees 67
The End of Humanism 71
6 A Postmodernist Response to 9-11: Slavoj 2ilek,
or the Jouissance of an Abstract Hegelian 75
The Pleasures of Ideological Criticism 75
How to Become a Critical Critic 87
The Missed Encounter 93
PART TWO: TO THE LEFT OF THE LEFT 119
7 Bible Says: The Psychology of Christian
Fundamentalism 121
Literalism 123
Conversion 128
Evangelicalism 133
Apocalypse Now 136
Sexual Roots of the Fundamentalist Psyche 144
8 The Psychodynamics of Terror 151
Home Brewed 151
Evacuation Through Projective Identification 154
The Perfect Murder: Soul Murder 156
Thanatos: The Pleasure of Terror 159
Patriot Games 160
9 Evil: As Psychological Process and as
Philosophic Concept 165
Ordinary People 165
Radical Evil 185
Systemic Evil: The Psycho-Logic of Capitalism 198
10 Men of Good Will: Toward an Ethic of the Tragic 219
The Ethical Significance of Pat Tillman 219
Psychoanalysis and Ethics 220
The Apostle of Duty and the Subject of Existence 223
The Choice on which Ethics Turns 230
Toward an Existential Ethic 235
The Value That Admits No Equivalent 238
Tragic Situatedness: A Modest Proposal 240
Singing in the Hard Rain 244