The fol­low­ing excerpt is from the remark­able essay The Ser­ial Killer as a Type of Per­son by Mark Seltzer, a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. (The high­light­ing is my own.)

Obey your thirst!

There is an empty cir­cu­lar­ity in the notion of the kind of per­son called the ser­ial killer lift­ing itself by its own boot­straps: the con­cep­tion that there is noth­ing more to the sub­ject than what he makes of him­self. There is an empty cir­cu­lar­ity, too, in the notion of the social con­struc­tion of the social: the strictly ‘his­tori­cist’ con­cep­tion that there is noth­ing more to the social order than its struc­tur­ing of itself by itself. These two notions are not merely par­al­lel con­struc­tions: they are at once rad­i­cally insep­a­ra­ble and rad­i­cally incom­pat­i­ble. The expe­ri­ence of social con­struc­tion at the level of the subject–to the very extent that it is expe­ri­enced as a social man­date: ‘be your self’–in effect evac­u­ates the sub­ject it man­dates. The law of self-realization is a law that aborts itself. The injunc­tion to real­ize your­self, to desire your­self into being–to enjoy your self–is at the same time imposed as an injunc­tion from with­out. If the for­mula of the first is ‘be your­self,’ the for­mula of the sec­ond is ‘Obey your thirst!’ (Sprite) or ‘Enjoy your symp­tom!’ (Slavoj). ‘Lift­ing one­self up by one’s own boot­straps’ is the logic of the self-made man and the logic of addic­tion both. The thirst of the self-made man to real­ize him­self is at the same time his obe­di­ence to the com­mand: ‘thirst.’ On the addic­tive loop of user and used, substance-abuse and self-abuse, the self-made sub­ject is sub­jected to an end­less drill in self-making that becomes indis­tin­guish­able from a repeated self-evacuation.

Toc­queville antic­i­pated this drill in enjoy­ment of the self-made man (the man who gives birth to him­sef) in the self-legitimated demo­c­ra­tic state (the notion that gives birth to itself) in Democ­racy in America:

The type of oppres­sion which threat­ens democ­racics is dif­fer­ent from any­thing there has ever been in the world before.…It likes to see its cit­i­zens enjoy them­selves, pro­vided they think of noth­ing but this enjoy­ment. It gladly works for their hap­pi­ness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it. It pro­vides for their secu­rity, fore­sees and sup­plies their neces­si­ties, facil­i­tates their plea­sures, man­ages their prin­ci­pal con­cerns, directs their indus­try, makes rules for their tes­ta­ments, and divides their inher­i­tances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trou­ble of think­ing and all the cares of living?

The threat of a total­i­tar­ian con­for­mity of desire and thought in mass cul­ture (oppres­sive enjoy­ment, repres­sive desub­li­ma­tion) has by now become one of the com­mon­places of mass cul­ture (the emperor reveals that he has no clothes — so much for demystification!).

It is pos­si­ble pro­vi­sion­ally to set out a basic impli­ca­tion of this bor­der­ing of the social on the psy­chi­atric, this social­ity bound to pathol­ogy. In the most gen­eral terms, we can detect here one of the con­si­tu­tive ‘psycho-social’ para­doxes of lib­eral soci­ety: a para­dox­i­cal sit­u­at­ed­ness within power (social con­struc­tion) that is at the same time a require­ment of rad­i­cal auton­omy (self-construction). It is the unre­lieved inhab­it­ing of this para­dox that casts the lib­eral sub­ject into fail­ure: ‘the fail­ure to make itself in the con­text of a dis­course in which self-making is assumed, indeed, is its assumed nature.’ This fail­ure inten­si­fies in ‘late mod­ern sec­u­lar soci­ety, in which indi­vid­u­als are buf­feted and con­trolled by global con­fig­u­ra­tions of dis­ci­pli­nary and cap­i­tal­ist power of extra­or­di­nary pro­por­tions, and are at the same time nakedly indi­vid­u­ated, stripped of reprieve from relent­less expo­sure and account­abil­ity for them­selves’ (Bacon: 1995, 67).

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sub­scribe to my RSS feed!