> For example, he attacks cultural theory's preoccupation with the
> human body, but then he comes to the depressing conclusion that the
> real problem is cultural theory's inability to confront the body's
> mortality and decrepitude. So he complains that 'the body is a wildly
> popular topic in US cultural studies - but this is the plastic,
> remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that
> sickens and dies' (9). Are these really our only two options?
We do inevitably sicken and die. It's possible that fear of this is the ultimate source of all fear and that failure to master it is the source of all irrationality i.e. of most if not all of what stands in the way of a good life.
That, at least, is the claim made by Melanie Klein and Kleinians such as Wilfred Bion. They claim that personalities who feel that true joy would accompany mindless hateful murderously sadistic violence unleashed against "imagined" enemies are the product of a failure to master fear of death, in particular that they are the product of the dominance in personality of psychotic defenses - splitting and projective identification - against this fear.
As the passage I recently quoted from Bion claiming that psychotic features are present in orthodox science indicates, irrational aspects of "theory" can be explained in this way. Keynes's biographical sketch of Newton's personality is meant, I think, to indicate this.
Keynes makes the avoidance of fear of death through denial the source of capitalist "purposiveness." This explains his judgment that it is "a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease." He looked forward to a time (2028 actually) when:
"All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
"Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth - unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall enquire more curiously than is safe today into the true character of this 'purposiveness' with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The 'purposive' man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat's kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of catdom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality."
(Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in Collected Writings, vol. IX, pp. 329-30)
Something similar is found in Marx who has taken from Hegel the idea that the full development of a capacity for "love" understood as "mutual recognition" requires rational overcoming of the fear of death.
Ted