Silverman, K. (2008). Moving beyond the Politics of Blame Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Edited by Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller, pp. 123-146.
Moral sadism is my name for the erotically charged pleasure we derive when we are
able to treat someone else in the way that our super-ego usually treats us.
The super-ego is created through the introjection of the paternal law—the
voice that says “thou shall not commit murder,” and backs up this prohibition
with the threat of punishment.
But no sooner is it created than it begins to measure us against the standard of the ego-ideal and to berate us for our failure to approximate it.
Because the super-ego reaches deep into the unconscious, it is also able to ferret out desires that are so deeply repressed that we do not even know that we have them.
Cruelly, it refuses to distinguish between them and the desires that we act upon; as far as it is concerned, the unconscious wish to commit murder is murder. And since the super-ego’s life-blood is aggression, the more we resist the temptation to direct ours outwards, the more violently it treats us.
No one can tolerate this pressure forever. Sooner or later, we all succumb to the temptation to rid ourselves of it by re-exteriorizing our aggression.
Now, however, we no longer recognize it as aggression, because it has been “sanitized” by its detour through the super-ego. We are not injuring others; we are — rather — protecting the oppressed, and punishing their oppressors.
We are more in need of psychoanalysis today than we ever have been before, not just as a therapeutic practice and a powerful hermeneutic, but also as a corrective to the dangerous fantasy that if human beings try hard enough, they can achieve absolute “goodness.”
We also need to make room in our politics for the messiness of human desire, both because blame is an atomizing force, and because, in spite of all of its ambivalence, it is within Eros that our transformative potential resides.
Our best guide in this domain is not, I suggest, Freud or Lacan, but rather James Agee, a leftist writer who looks at the problem of Southern poverty from the dual vantage point of psychoanalysis and his own mortal and guilty subjectivity. The resulting book—his and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—not only takes the blame out of leftist politics, it also replaces it with something that isn’t “supposed” to be there: libido.
[Beethoven Seventh 7th Symphony, Schubert C-Major Symphony.