Top Highlights

• We live in an extraordinary era in which there is no tradition on which we can base our identity, no frame of meaningful universe which might enable us to lead a life beyond hedonist reproduction. Today’s nihilism – the reign of cynical opportunism accompanied by permanent anxiety – legitimizes itself as the liberation from the old constraints: we ...
• radical alternative to this madness appears to be the even worse madness of religious fundamentalism, a violent retreat into some artificially resuscitated tradition. The supreme irony is that a brutal return to an orthodox tradition (an invented one, of course) appears as the ultimate ‘prodding’ – are the young suicide bombers not the most radical...
• This logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment – recall, for example, the growing financial industry of paying damages, from the tobacco companies’ deal
• This notion of the subject as an unresponsible victim is driven by an extreme narcissistic perspective in which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance;
• the ideology of personal freedom could silently merge with the logic of victimhood (freedom being reduced to the freedom to bring out one’s victimhood).