generates anxiety and panic: the paranoid obsession with order tries to reduce the horizon to repetition, belonging and identity.
Power is based on the hypostatization of the existing relations of potency, on the surreptitious absolutization of the necessity implied in the existing rapport de force. Force crystallizes in a paranoid fixation to re-compact the world through rituals of identification. The relative necessity of the rule is arbitrarily transformed into absolute necessity: absolute capitalism is based on this deceptive trick of logic. Accumulation, profit and growth are surreptitiously turned into natural laws, and the field of economics legitimises this deception.
When society enters a phase of crisis or approaches collapse, we can glimpse the horizon of possibility. This horizon itself is hard to distinguish, and the territory that borders this horizon is hard to describe or to map.
The horizon of possibility can be best described by the words of Ignacio Matte Blanco in defining the unconscious: ‘The unconscious deals with infinite sets that have not only the power of the enumerable but also that of the continuum.’10
The explosion of the semiotic sphere, the utter intensification of semiotic stimulation, has provoked simultaneously an enhancement of the horizon of possibility and a panic effect in the social neuro-system.
In this condition of panic, reason becomes unable to master the flow of events or to process the semio-stimulations released into the Infosphere. A schizophrenic mode spreads across the social mind, but this distress is double edged: it is painfully chaotic, but can also be seen as the vibration that precedes the emergence of a new cognitive rhythm.
According to D.E. Cameron, schizophrenia may be defined as an over-inclusive mode of interpretation.11 Schizophrenic thought, in fact, appears to ‘over include’ various irrelevant objects and environmental cues in the interpretation of an enunciation: the schizo seems to be unable to limit attention to task-relevant stimuli because of an excessive broadening of the meaning of signs and of events.
This is why Guattari sees the schizo as the bearer of paradigmatic change (of ‘chaosmosis’, in Guattari’s parlance). The schizo in fact is the person who has lost the ability to perceive the limits of metaphoric enunciation and tends therefore to take the metaphor as a description. The schizo, then, is the agent of a trans-rational experiment which may lead to the surfacing of an entirely new rhythm.
We may call this dimension ‘chaotic’ because it does not correspond to the existing laws of order, nevertheless the possible emerges from this sphere of chaos.
The intuition of an infinity of possibility is the source of contemporary panic, what can be described as a painful spasm. In Guattari, however, the spasm has a chaosmic side: from chaotic hyper-intensity, a new cosmos is poised to emerge.
In the first part of this book, I retrace the modern genealogy of the concept of potency, starting from the present condition of prevailing impotence of the action of men. I start from deciphering the meaning of Obama’s trajectory. With all his extraordinary intellectual and political capabilities (certainly superior to those of the average specimen of the US political class), he has attempted to demonstrate that reason and political skill have the potency to implement hope, and to heal the wounds of American society and of the world. The final lesson of this experience, however, is impotence. Impotence is the keyword of this book, because impotence is the shape that potency takes in the age of technical and geopolitical hyper-complexity.
The re-emerging cult of nation and ethnicity, as exposed by the ascent of Donald Trump and the proliferation of machofascist dictators worldwide, is the backlash of the perception of impotence. Violence is replacing political mediation because political reason is determined to be devoid of potency.
The white middle class is unable to understand and control the hyper-complexity of financial automatisms, and this fuels sentiments of social impotence.
At same time, the military systems of the West are unable to defeat or contain terrorism. The sense of impotence is expressed by a frightening rise in white supremacism, melded with frustrated supre-machism: ‘Make America Great Again’.
In this first part of the book, I retrace the philosophical genealogy of the present depression of the Western mind: after reading Schopenhauer and Heidegger from the point of view of white male decline, I try to situate the narrative imagination of Houellebecq in the same framework.
And finally, I try to elaborate on the senescence of the Western population, in which the energy-centred style of modernity is replaced by impotence and a sense of inadequacy.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
The Exorcism That Failed
I had trusted Obama. At the end of the summer of 2008, when the order of the world was shaking – the Bush wars were turning to catastrophe, and the big banks were collapsing – I thought that the new American president was heralding the emergence of a new possibility, a new future. I’m not so naïve as to believe in fairy tales, and I knew the cultural background of Barack Obama as that of a reasonable neoliberal who belongs to the privileged elite. But as I compared him with the ignorant, cynical clan of warmongers who had been in power before him, I thought that his ideas and his agenda were poised to open the way for a new age of peace and social justice.
The world had come to be acquainted with the young Obama in 2004, when he dared to say no to the Iraq War. His face, his nonchalant look, his alien beauty, his elegant multiracial lineaments made me think of a post-political leader, of an American intellectual announcing
