Everything May Happen

…Not only did event occur but they concatenated according to a surreal logic.

“The unconscious is structured like a language.”

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”

Psychoanalysis was the last assertion of this antemosaic world.

We now face the post-humanist dystopia.  Events cease to speak to us.  Of their original meaning they retain only a shell—the function of their contingent possibility.  Everything may happen.  This phrase is the illusional phrase of power.  Of course it is not true.  But to the degree that its illusion can be held as true, all possible resistance to power becomes futile.  The hypothesis of hegemonic power, of power without location, is an ingenious ruse, not so much because it is fundamentally true, but because it becomes true by its assertion.  In a similar manner the hypothesis of the weakening of reality becomes true by its assertion.  It is not that critical thought has become too weak but it has become too strong.  But this too is a ruse in the sense that critical thought is most powerful in its power to deconstruct.  The scent of deconstruction indicates an alleged locus of power.  Yet power has already vanished from the structure to be deconstructed. Perhaps there is a fundamental choice between a desire to constantly say something new in the ecstatic process of deconstruction, or the desire to repeat those all too solid critiques whose target is the true locus of power, not the various bogies and shells deployed continuously in an act of false creation to  shield power.

Everything may happen––the phrase is similar to the Lacanian dictum everything must be enjoyed.  Zizek presents this as the workings of a false liberation from the problem of the superego. Everything may happen—the teleological end of a false objectivity, the veil behind which  power as pure negation hides.