‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’: science, perversion, psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical examination of the contemporary imperative to ‘trust science’ from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It begins by putting contemporary scientific research in the twentieth-century historical context of the ‘military-industrial complex’ (D. Eisenhower) in which science and technology become symbiotically connected to the military. It then examines the psychic structure driving the military-industrial complex in which science (perversely) instrumentalises itself for military purposes. This structure is crystalized in two statements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal investigator of the Manhattan Project. In these two statements, Oppenheimer describes this singular invention in terms of being ‘good’ and having ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, which is then bound to an identification with ‘death’ and total destruction in his famous citation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The article then proposes that the psychic structure underpinning this claim corresponds to the Kantian notion of diabolic evil, and then goes on to further conceptualise structure under the concept of ‘bureaucratic science’. The article concludes by showing how such a self-instrumentalization of science does not correspond to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, as is usually implied, but rather to the superego defined by Lacan as the ‘imperative to enjoy’.

KEYWORDS:

• Bureaucratic science
• atomic bomb
• perversion
• death drive
• superego
• diabolic evil

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Arthur Bradley and Adrian Johnston for their invaluable comments and suggestions on early versions of this article, as well as for many discussions on this theme. I am also grateful to JCR editors Mick Dillon and Scott Wilson for considering this article. I am particularly indebted to Scott Wilson and two anonymous reviewers for their pointed comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. A special thanks goes also to Giovanni Bettini, Peter Klepec, Alenka Zupančič, and my wife Jerneja Brumen for many discussions on topics closely related to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Boštjan Nedoh is a Research Fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy. He works at the intersection between contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, biopolitical theory, and political theology. He is a co-editor (with Andreja Zevnik) of the volume Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and author of the book Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019).

Notes

1. I owe this insight to Arthur Bradley. Moreover, as Bradley himself suggested recently in his brilliant Unbearable Life, Robespierre and the Jacobins’ conception of politics was exactly the opposite of contemporary depoliticisation, namely, they conceived politics as a kind of groundless decision, taken in a void, that is, in a space devoid of any external principles or ‘guarantees’ (Bradley, 2019a, pp. 136–139).

2. To be sure, although there is indeed a tectonic change in scientific research represented by the emergence of the ‘scientific-military complex’, some germs of this ‘militarization of science’ can be found already in the late nineteenth century paradigmatic shift in physics, where modern physics (relativity, radiation, the subatomic realm etc.) replaced a classical (Newtonian) paradigm that had been in force until that point. I owe this point to Adrian Johnston.

3. To the best of my knowledge, Cory Han-yu Huang’s contribution (Han-yu Huang, 2009) is one of the rare attempts to systematically conceptualise Arendt’s insights on the banality of evil not by directly referring to Kant’s concept of radical evil, but instead along psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the structure of perversion, including the concept of superego, as conceptualised by Lacan and then Žižek – that is, as an imperative of jouissance.

Additional information

Funding

This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 ‘Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’, the research project J6-9392 ‘The Problem of Objectivity and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy’, the research project J5-1794 ‘The Break in Tradition: Hannah Arendt and Conceptual Change’, and the research project J6-2589 ‘Structure and Genealogy of Perversion in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Art’, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.