ABSTRACT
One of the wagers that Teresa Brennan places before the readers of History After Lacan (1993a) involves specifying the moment when the Western ego becomes a fixed and inviolable form. When it does, she argues, the modern age—what she elsewhere calls the age of paranoia—begins. It is our age, marked by the singularly aggressive and expansive character of the ego, and it owes many of its woes to the historical moment of its formation. Extensive analysis can show that masculine dominance, characterized by fear of the other as a threatening force, a drive to colonize, and a need to establish economies of expansion and exploitation, came with the era of the ego. We could say that the same parabola of development can explain the condition of rampant global degradation. Elsewhere Brennan argues that the unprecedented violence that we witness being enacted against the planet, geocide , in fact has its foundation in the fantasy of egocentered control. Massive ecological destruction does not, like a low dose of sulfuric acid, merely “come with the rain.” 1 The foundational fantasy of mastery over the world “increases as the material means to control the environment increase. In other words, in that active agency is the ability to do things according to one's own direction, to impose direction” its psychical omnipotence increases in proportion to its actual social, technological control. (Brennan 1993b: 109–110).
