ABSTRACT
Now here is the point of the consultancy. The community does not recognize Bradley’s death as a sacrifice, that is, as necessary to the way of life we currently embrace as a civilization. As this death and similar ones are reported day after day in the paper, leaders, pundits, spokespersons, sermonize against the disaster, even putting public money behind the call to eliminate such events. These leaders lack an idiom that would help them and us grasp what is happening (ATH), and so they hire empirical consultants whose commitment to the principle of sufficient reason prevent them from taking into account the unconscious. Slavoj Zˇizˇek referred to such circumstances as ‘the sublime object of ideology,’ noting this need to treat as exceptions and anomalies those matters that were in fact essential qualities of the way of life.25 The intractability of the ‘problem’ would make more sense to empiricist consultants if they could grasp the link between abuse and the foundational value of ‘family’ (to give one name to it). We lack what Fredric Jameson called a ‘cognitive map’ that would graph the passage connecting individual experience with collective historical structure. In short, we need a cartography of ATH, tracing the paths joining blindness and calamity.
