One of my fans ;) told me that it could be a real possibility that Iran or some other country would provide a real threat and that we just had a war with Iraq. I want to assure her that the Iraq war was not a real war (as Baudrillard and others have pointed out). The casualties were really only on one side and the US's withdrawal has shown that there was no intention to 'conquer' in the sense that would make it a war. Instead, Iraq has important contracts with U.S. companies to clean up and to form new business models, the Middle East region has Al Jazeera linking it together instead of news coming from smaller units, and it will maintain the appearance of cultural self-governance. The last statement refers to the idea that business interests and not the interests of a dictator nor religious groups will consolidate power.
The Nazis had conquest in mind and would have brought their religion, values, and aesthetics to the conquered. It may be possible for another country to launch a bomb at the U.S. and it is quite possible that it will lose it's economic dominance but the idea of another country conquering the US is absurd.
My reader also asked me to say more about love in marriage as a radical proposition. I think it is clear that love has been the motivating force in marriage for a very short time and that arranged marriages and informal use of marriage for group bonds has been dominant throughout history. From the psychoanalytic view point love, as a drive or ideal to recapture the lost object (the mother), will naturally find new objects when the current beloved can no longer be idealized. Love and idealization can stay as long as the beloved continues to grow and can renew that transference. The fantasy of eternity which I drew attention to is a pre-oedipal one (i.e. Persephone and Hades) and only shows up in individuals with schizoid fixations. I don't see people getting married out of strength and wanting to grow with each other. I see individuals getting married out of ease, desperation, inertia, etc. They usually have already repressed their ideals before they turn to marriage and are in need of meaning or security.
In addition, the representation of the cultural Other, as necessarily mediated by language, is also related to feminist notions of woman as the Other sex and censure of psychic bisexuality for mere anatomical distinction. Narcissism, in definition, is self-love and in what was presented in a previous post on the father complex as 'duty' can also be stand in for love when a man feels part of his duty is to be a protector of the Other/"weaker" sex.
Reich's Listen Little Man is a very good romp through this terrain.
Orpheus can never look back at the real woman trailing behind him out of hell, the woman that anybody could see with ordinary eyes. Orpheus must keep his eyes firmly fixed on the imaginal Eurydice before him, towards whom he has struggled all his life. She is not imaginary, not at all, but realer than any mere apparency, than any momentary act of seeing. He must move always towards that perfect image of his wife, and so sustain himself and his song. If ever he turns back, that is, regresses into seeing his wife as an ordinary woman, she is lost. And he is lost.
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