The self-styled realists are the truly insane ones
Evidence
How could madness not result when we are invited to consider America’s consuming of $600 billion a year more than it produces “realistic”? (As opposed, so we are told, to Europe’s “unrealistic” social welfare programmes.) Make no mistake, the realists are insane, which more than ever reveals the force of the slogan, “the Real is the impossible, but the impossible which happens”. Ecological catastrophe and mental illness are present in capitalism’s wrap-around simulation as warps, unassimilable discontinuities, that which cannot be but which, nevertheless, cannot be extirpated. Perhaps these negative Reals — these dark shadows which allow us to see Kapital’s striplit mall of the mind for what it actually is — have their complement in a positive Real, an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in and re-define everything. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1410
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEEPTHINKING: Caps the chapter’s argumentative arc by fusing Lacanian Real, ecological catastrophe, psychic illness, and a revolutionary ‘positive Real’ into one closing figure.
Related
Broader Connections
- High authoritarians maintain inflated self-images by avoiding unpleasant truths
#corroborates(0.78) - The paranoiac reduces all reality to his own fixed self-image
#qualifies(0.72)