There are time periods, public figures, and political and social events that seem more “deranged” than others. They make us wonder—not all of us, to be sure, but still—how can this be happening? The status quo is breaking down, which, at least for those trained in the critical tradition, is not in itself a bad thing. But what we see emerging from this breakdown certainly appears troubling. Deranged times, or times that are “out of joint,” call for analysis, including psychoanalysis. Not that we can simply treat society, politics, and politicians as analysands in a clinical setting. Yet, not least because the individual and the social cannot be separated, psychoanalysis provides conceptual tools that can be invaluable for mapping our situation, recognizing its symptoms, and understanding the functioning of some of its mechanisms—in short, for diagnosing our reality.
And perhaps it is here, too, that the limits of such an endeavor become apparent: A perceptive critical analysis of our circumstances, including the ways in which we actively participate in them, remains largely powerless when it comes to shifting the mechanisms at work within them. Both socially and individually, we may hate our symptom, yet we would often rather lose everything than give it up. (The symptom is the form in which we hold on to our enjoyment.)
While psychoanalysis and analytic intervention ideally have other means at their disposal for working through, affecting, and shifting the mechanisms of our troubled functioning, and for interrupting the enjoyment that sustains them, sociopolitical analysis appears to possess no comparable means. One of the principal reasons is that the “we” required for any serious social change does not yet exist. If the subject of analysis (the analysand) is in fact produced within the analytic process itself, rather than simply coinciding with the individual who enters analysis, we see no equivalent collective subject emerging from our critical efforts. No such “we” is produced by, or emerges from, our acts of diagnosis. An ethically or politically prescriptive approach (“we should do this”; “we should not do that”) does not get us very far.
We are thus left waiting for something to occur that breaks a status quo whose maintenance is becoming too costly for the system itself. This kind of break is, I think, what Gramsci was referring to in the famous lines from his Prison Notebooks which, for good reason, are frequently quoted these days, since we seem to be in a similar predicament: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
This is, in fact, a popular paraphrase of Gramsci’s original formulation: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena [fenomeni morbosi] appear.” (“Morbosi” could also be translated as “perverse.”)
Besides the reference to “morbid” or “perverse phenomena” (rather than “monsters”), the original wording contains another important term: “interregnum.” In ancient Rome, “interregnum” referred to the period of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of a sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his successor. The declaration of an interregnum was accompanied by the proclamation of justitium, since not only sovereignty but legality itself was suspended.
This certainly resonates strongly with our present global geopolitical situation and the collapse of the world order based on the idea of international law as existing beyond and above individual states and their interests. (We know that the system is flawed and has not always functioned, but the very existence of international law as the supreme instance, and the maintenance of the appearance of its functioning, have been crucial for the so-called global world order.) Now, all the big-bully countries are openly mocking and defying international law. The symbolic power and efficacy of the latter are being challenged, mostly on the grounds of immediate, direct, empirical power: “We are too big and powerful to be bound by any of this. We are not obeying the rules because, as the greatest power around, we should be the ones setting the rules (for others).” (Something similar is taking place within many individual countries: not only specific laws but also the very “rules of the game” are being changed on a whim, through decrees and executive orders imposed by those “in power.”)
In a word, “interregnum” (“suspension of legality”) does indeed describe very well the strange situation in which we find ourselves.
When we are not fully swallowed by it (as people are in some places), we are struck by a sentiment of doom and bewilderment in response to the series of crises and profound tectonic shifts taking place in what we perceive as “our world.” The world is changing dramatically before our eyes, often in surprising and not entirely predictable ways, and part of this change seems indeed to be the appearance of Gramscian “monsters”—strange creatures or strange phenomena that, not so long ago, we would have called illogical or utterly impossible.
But we should take a step further here and raise a rather unsettling question: What if the “time of monsters” is not merely a transitional phase but the new world itself? What if there is nothing “on the other side”? How can we be sure that there will be a passage beyond, and that this interregnum is not itself a new regnum (or a new version of the old)? How do we know that this is not it—that we are not, in fact, already inhabiting the destination? As a matter of fact, we don’t know.
Let us keep in mind that the time we were waiting for has arrived, namely the end of the status quo. What is coming to an end is not simply a particular geopolitical arrangement but the symbolic coordinates that made that arrangement appear natural and self-evident. This is precisely why the present moment is both dangerous and unpredictable. The future is no longer given in advance; its coordinates are, we could say, once again up for grabs. It is also the moment when critical analysis can acquire a certain efficacy if combined with political struggle. At the very least, it can provide some orientation in a thoroughly disorienting landscape.
I will, very modestly, attempt to sketch one such point of orientation in relation to the mantra that everybody seems to agree with these days, namely that this is the end of the old world order, and that we need to adapt to the new reality. The proclamations of the end of the old world order come both from the side of those actively involved in putting an end to it (à la Trump and his political allies or, perhaps less vocally, Netanyahu, Putin, and to some extent China), and from the side of those (also big) powers who are struck and surprised by this end, that is to say, the end of the old rules (of hegemony). Canadian prime minister Mark Carney proclaimed this end in his speech in Davos; later on, German chancellor Friedrich Merz did so at the Munich conference. And now everybody seems eager to adapt to the new world order, to the new configuration of powers and of rules.
So I am tempted to exclaim, naively, perhaps: Stop, wait a minute! What exactly are we adapting to?
If we stay a little longer with direct political examples, Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich conference in February makes this quite clear. After Trump’s chaotic attacks on Europe, repeatedly insulting it and, so to speak, hurting its sensibilities, Rubio’s speech was widely described as an attempt to extend a friendly hand to Europe. Many seemed relieved, even reassured by this gesture. So, we are once again on the same side; we simply need to make a few adjustments.
And what are these adjustments? Rubio mentioned, among other things, Europe’s bowing down to a “climate cult,” the expansion of welfare states at the expense of national defense, and the embrace of “a world without borders in which everyone would be a citizen of the world.” (These were all declared big mistakes of the past world order.) In other words, Europe is invited to give up virtually everything it claims to stand for—or at least everything it stands for on paper.
This is not an adaptation to any reality, but a very specific political agenda of the alleged new world, with the following priorities: no welfare state, no taking climate change seriously, an increase in military budgets, and the implementation of a violent anti-immigrant politics. And we are asked to adapt to this agenda.
It is not that we are facing a new world or a new reality; rather, the worst of the old world order is trying desperately, and violently, to survive its own break. And to get the most out of its end, to prolong it ad infinitum. This is what I think the title of a Romanian movie articulated as an ingenious warning: Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
There is nothing to adapt to. Things are out there, of course; there is “reality.” But this reality does not constitute a thing. And it is not enough to say that our actions now will determine what we will have been adapting to. We have to add that the reality out there, invoked to legitimize the calls for adaptation, is thoroughly contradictory, heterogeneous, and fragmented. In this sense, the “new reality” is that there is no reality—not even the appearance of reality that ideology traditionally summoned us to accept (or adapt to). The appropriate answer to the recent ideological injunction that we should wake up and adapt to the new reality would be something along the following lines:
First, we cannot wake up, because we are in a nightmare. And the main characteristic of a nightmare is not simply that terrible things take place in it, but precisely that we cannot wake up and escape into reality. A nightmare is essentially defined not just by the traumatic content of the dream, but by the fact that, as much as we would like and want to, we cannot wake up. In this sense, it would be possible to say that it is precisely in a nightmare that we are fully awake, as awake as it gets. We cannot wake up (in the sense of awakening to reality), because we are already fully awake. A nightmare is not a lack, but a too-much of reality. Which is why we tend to feel such dread and powerlessness.
We can thus reapply here Lacan’s thesis that, when we find ourselves in a nightmare, we wake up in order to be able to continue dreaming, that is, to continue to exist untouched by the real of the nightmare. If we can.
Now, just think of the onslaught of crises that the “world” is going through, crises hitting us one after another, faster than we can keep up: brutal geopolitical conflicts and wars, genocide, economic turmoil, epidemics and pandemics, deep structural changes in the functioning of capitalism itself (some speak of neo- or techno-feudalism, combined with the explosion of AI), strange political “revolutions” (à la Trump), and the accompanying rise of the proto-fascist far right—each of these unfolding under the long, looming shadow of global warming and the accompanying extreme weather events. Moreover, (almost) none of them really ends; there is no end or “solution” to these crises. The only end is the next crisis. Instead of what is loosely called “closure,” we just get the next crisis, and then the next. As you can see, “ending” has a very specific modality here: The crisis goes on, but its symbolic status changes considerably. It does not really end; it disappears from the front pages and is no longer considered the crisis. It does not end—it un-ends. One crisis is killed by another crisis. Pursuing this semantic register of killing, we could also say that a crisis is not dead, but becomes undead. The stuff of nightmares, precisely. This could, in fact, be a good definition of a nightmare: an undead crisis.
All of the above perhaps demands that we reverse the perspective and stop using the term “nightmare” only in a metaphorical sense. We are, in fact, living in a nightmare. The “no escape” is real, much more real than our provisional awakenings.
This brings me to the second part of what the appropriate answer would be to the recent ideological injunction that we should wake up and adapt to the new reality—there is no (other) reality to escape to, and particularly no “new reality.” We switched from a (symptomatic) dream to a nightmare, and there is no outside. But even if we accept that this crazy nightmare is in fact our only reality, the question still remains: To what part of this new reality should we adapt? For, again, this nightmarish reality is highly contradictory, fragmented, and composed of multiple “micro-realities” that are mutually exclusive. Which is what makes it so chaotic, lacking any symbolic frame.
Perhaps, instead of trying to wake up, we should do the only thing we actually can: remain in the nightmare and invest in a different segment of its reality. But then again, who are “we”? Is there a “we”? If there is a “we,” it can only be found within this nightmare itself. Not as a prescription and not as a romantic silver lining amidst all the calamity, but rather as the darkest corner of this same calamity.
If a collective subject is to emerge, it will not emerge from a shared perception of reality. Reality itself has become fragmented and contradictory. Nor will it emerge from agreement about what is happening. The more pertinent question is whether a “we” can emerge from a shared practical relation to an impossibility.
The following joke points toward such a possibility. (It is a joke drawn from the arsenal of old Yugoslav-Bosnian jokes about Mujo and Haso.)
Haso is describing to Mujo his adventures in the Sahara.
—I’m walking through the desert. Nothing but sand around me, not a living soul, absolutely nothing … The sun burning in the sky, and my throat burning with thirst. Suddenly a lion appears in front of me. What to do, where to hide? I climb a tree …
—Wait a minute, Haso. You’ve just told me that there was nothing around but sand, so where did the tree come from?
—My dear Mujo, you don’t ask such questions when a lion appears! You run away and climb the first tree.
At stake here is by no means a disavowal of human reality and its limitations, but rather a full recognition of the real of human desire, capable—if needed—of effectively climbing a tree that is not there. Or of suddenly making a tree emerge in the middle of the desert.
Desire is not the same as need, so at stake here is not simply survival in the sense of “mere survival.” Human survival is dependent on desire, not just on physiological needs and biological reproduction. But desire is also not simply something on top of a need.
The joke cuts across the usual alternative presented to us. On the one hand we hear: “Life is not worth living if you lose all reasons for living” (“There are more important things in life than life itself”). On the other hand, we are repeatedly told that first one has to have life in order to make something worth living out of it, that life is the necessary condition of everything else.
Sergio Benvenuto (and, after him, Žižek) recently reminded us of something Ernst Bloch once said: “People do not live on bread alone—especially when they do not have it.” This crucial addition twists the pathos of statements such as “what is the point of living if your life is not worth living?” At the same time, it avoids the trap of replying: “Yes, but first you need life in order to make it worth living.”
What Bloch’s formula suggests is something different. When life itself is threatened, survival is no longer simply a matter of satisfying a need. If your life is suspended or under threat, your only chance of surviving is to make it worth living.
This is the point at which even the most fundamental need becomes desire. Desire is not born after fundamental needs have been satisfied and we can indulge in other, higher fancies. It enters the scene together with need, as its constitutive split. Lacan famously defined desire as what transforms the unconditionality of demand into an absolute condition. Desire is not an optional supplement to life. It is what, under certain circumstances, makes life itself possible.
Returning to the Mujo and Haso joke, let me ask: Could it happen that, from within the nightmare, from within the “desert of the real,” a “we” emerges out of many Hasos coming up with a tree?
Could we say: “To climb a tree is necessary. To live is not necessary”?
Put like this, the formula sounds like a variation on the Roman saying Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse (To sail is necessary; to live is not necessary). The saying is attributed to Gnaeus Pompeius, who is said to have encouraged his sailors to set sail despite a violent storm in order to bring grain to Rome. The logic appears similar: One does not survive directly. One survives by fighting for something other than survival.
Yet there is also an important difference. In the case of Pompeius’s saying (which, incidentally, was much admired by Mussolini), the emphasis falls on the grandeur—or necessity—of sacrifice. It is a glorification of sacrifice. One risks one’s life for a higher cause. In Haso’s case, however, the point is not that one has to sacrifice oneself for something higher. The genuinely comic twist is that a short circuit is established between urgent need and the higher cause itself. The “higher cause” is not external to survival; it emerges from within survival as its very condition. One survives by pursuing something that is already something other than survival. Desire is the name of this short circuit.
To climb a tree is necessary because, in a strange reverse loop, life becomes possible only through climbing the tree. In this paradoxical sense, revealed by comedy, climbing the tree comes before living.
This is perhaps where a “we” can emerge: not through a common diagnosis, nor through agreement about reality, but through a practical common relation to what appears impossible yet necessary.
The tree is not simply there waiting for us. Nor does everyone reach it. Many do not survive—not because they do not desire strongly enough, but because before they can reach the tree they are struck down. Not by the lion, but by others who have different plans for the tree: for instance, turning it into a luxury oasis. The proposal of a “Gaza Riviera” merely gives a particularly brutal contemporary form to this logic.
Let us not try to wake up. Nightmares are the only reality we have. The task is not to adapt and learn to live without the tree, but to make it appear and fight for it.
