And isn’t it perhaps obvious that democracy is fated to win, screwing
all ethics as well as humanistic and romantic aesthetics, finally impos-
ing a new aesthetics made of Texas-style houses, lawn gnomes and
fake-marble fences?^1
In the behaviour of the vast majority of contemporary humanity, we
must not see a superficial effect, as political ideologies or movements of
opinion used to be. We must see the behaviour as the sign of an irre-
versible mutation that invests the social psyche and the very forms of
cognition. We must see it as the effect of psychic, linguistic and cog-
nitive automatisms that in no way can be contrasted or corrected
by political action, civic edification or humanistic-humanitarian good
sentiments. Human mutation simply makes humanistic universalism
obsolete.*****Today, the ethnic conflicts generated by the displacements of mass
populations, the political crises that result from them, the emergence
of forms of racial, religious and national aggression seem to be retrac-
ing the path of events that in the first part of the twentieth century
brought about the emergence of Nazi totalitarianism, the exterm-
ination of entire populations, and war. But what is happening today
is a much larger extension of what happened in the 1920s and
1930s because the phenomenon concerns the vast majority of the
world population. And in contrast with that era, it is not a ques-
tion of a phenomenon provoked by the political will of fanatical
groups.
Fanaticism has become a psychic automatism for the great majority
of people. Psychopathology has become common sense.*****This is why the crisis of psychoanalysis may be understood as a deci-
sive moment of passage. To get beyond this moment, I see the neces-
sity of rethinking psychoanalysis as schizoanalysis, that is, an analysis
that takes the singular and proliferating viewpoint of innumerable lin-
guistic agents. In a certain sense, the cure for mental suffering and the
interpretation of psycho-semiosis are becoming the new form of pol-
itics, the ultimate adequate politics in the productive post-industrial
universe in which the mind is directly put to work and thus submitted
to pathogenic regimes and rhythms.Chaosmosis 1179780230_221192_12_cha11.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 117