2025
The journey to better understand Jacques Lacan’s system of thought continues.
In a few days we will turn the page on 2024. 2025 brings the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th.
The first quotation featured in today’s post reminded me of the President elect. Our institutions proved hollow, without power to incarcerate him for crimes he committed in full public view.
The second quotation touches upon my binge watching the drama series The Walking Dead which was introduced in 2010 and ran for eleven seasons. Based upon a comic book written by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, the story portrays life in the months and years that follow a zombie apocalypse. The zombies shamble about, the shell of individuals they once were, animated by a brain stem that allows the body to remain vertical and haltingly move. Reason has been destroyed by the virus, the dead show no empathic evidence of human personality. The already dead lurch ahead seeking uninfected humans to prey upon.
They are obscene, as is their reflexive behavior to cannibalize the living. The zombies behave as though under an evil spell.
What if we have
a perpetrator for whom
public confession
of his crimes does not give rise
to any ethical catharsis in him,
but even
generates an additional
obscene pleasure?
In [the] awareness of [the] already dead
there is no fear,
the ability
to cast away shame
–the superego pushes them
with the obscene injunction
to enjoy.
They are compelled
to engage in obscene activities.
Are they not under the spell
of an evil God?
-Jacques Lacan
