“In that limited appropriation which Adorno makes of Freudian conceptuality [...], neurosis is simply this boring imprisonment of the self in itself, crippled by its terror of the new and unexpected, carrying its sameness with it wherever it goes, so that it has the protection of feeling, whatever it might stretch out its hand to touch, that it never meets anything but what it knows already. To put it that way, however, is to begin to wonder — not merely ‘psychologically’ — what it would take to have the strength to stand the new, to be ‘open’ to it; but even more: what the new might be, what it might be like, how one would go about conceptualizing and imagining what you can by definition not yet imagine or foresee; what has no equivalent in your current experience.
“At that point, there slowly emerges the counter-image or -mirage of the neurotic self locked utterly into its own ‘identity’ — namely, the unrepresentable vision of the ceaseless flow of the absolutely new, the unrepetitive, the great stream which never comes twice and which Deleuze calls the ‘flux’ of perpetual change, in which neither subject nor object can yet be imagined, but only the terror and exhaustion of radical difference without markers or signposts, without moments of rest or even those spatial folds into which, like the bull into its querencia, we withdraw to lick our wounds and to know a few instants’ peace. To shed our defenses and give ourselves over absolutely to this terrifying rush of the non-identical is of course one of the great ethical fantasy-images of the postmodern and the very delineation of the ’schizophrenic hero’: why postmodern social space — the most standardized of all ‘administered societies,’ from which the Other and otherness has been the most successfully exorcized — should be thus fantasized as the primal flux of schizophrenic difference is another and a puzzling question, which can only be answered sociologically…”
- Fredric Jameson
