preface

pr e fac e in 1929, trying to understand the nature of what he termed the discontent, malaise, or anxiety of his times, Sigmund Freud suggested that a tragedy was at the center of human existence: The civilization that was supposed to protect human beings from the ills of rape, war, and crime demanded that we renounce an essential part of our instincts and thus condemned us to neurosis and a nagging sense of guilt.Civilization and Its Discontents was perhaps the first attempt to understand a highly elusive experience of collective "malaise." Freud offered an ahistorical, psychic account that tried to keep intact his love for culture in general and German culture in par tic u lar without averting his eyes from the vis i ble cracks in the light of that world.When aggressiveness could no longer be reined in, war and devastation ensued.But when aggressiveness was kept in check, it produced a kind of self-control that killed the vitality of human beings.In hindsight, as we are struggling with our own malaise, we can only be struck that Freud was oblivious to more mundane and more obvious explanations: the economic collapse of a Germany increasingly unable to face American loans in 1929, the political instability of the Weimar Republic, and the vio lence spread by Nazi militias in the streets.One did not need some grand narrative of the strug gle between civilization and a death instinct to understand that the moral and political foundations of Germany were crumbling.This book is an attempt to understand our current malaise by discarding such a grand psychological narrative and by taking far more seriously what did not interest Freud: politics, economy, and ideology.Rampant inequality, loss of trust in demo cratic institutions, the technologization of daily life, and the precariousness of jobs and marriages cannot be foreign to the current state of affairs.Yet this book, like Freud's, also pays sustained attention to the psychic dimension of the con temporary malaise.For, however free-floating and elusive, a "malaise" is a lived, subjective, and intersubjective experience.In this