Abstract

Psychoanalysis knows two things at least. First, that all human endeavour and all human failure is imbued with anxiety, and that, therefore, to diagnose human endeavour, or to diagnose failure, is to locate the nature and origin of anxiety. And second, that anxiety itself amplifies the need to “diagnose” human being, and human beings. Psychoanalysts, in other words, know that for them to be able to do the work of psychoanalysis, they need to be (cultural) anthropologists first. In this contribution an attempt is made to sketch out the broad outlines, and the deep anthropological backdrop, of a cultural undercurrent which has come to dominate Western culture in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Building on Peter Sloterdijk’s work, and using the image of the ‘line of anxiety’ as a heuristic tool, we’ve named this cultural undercurrent radical bastardy, i.e. the aspiration to live as sovereign—absolutely sovereign-a life as possible. This cultural trend-which has a long history, and which many are now drawn to- is, however, shot through with anxiety. To live the life of an aspiring sovereign is to live a life in nagging anxiety. It is to live a life of unrelenting attempts to “diagnose” anything that even vaguely resembles law, or code, in order to avoid it, elude it, keep it at bay, or, if necessary, eradicate it.