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destructive. While we can agree with Nietzsche that nihilism is a motor of modern history, it is a mistake to see it in purely negative terms. One of the greatest myths about contemporary violence is still connected to rather old psycho-analytical insights concerning fatalism and the egotistical downfall of the deluded man. Freud’s notion of the death drive in many ways is integral to the de-legitimation of the violence we do not like on account of its negation of human existence ( Freud, 1991 ). Of course, it is necessary to understand the psychic life of violence, and to
sovereignty. But it is more likely that the world system will go through a prolonged period of turbulence and wars provoked by sudden changes and increasingly unstable alliances, precisely because it is reproducing the history of the formation of the European state system on a planetary scale. Notes 1 Translated from Portugese by Juliano Fiori. 2 In the psychological and psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as in the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, mythology occupies a
I once heard someone say – in a retrospective on I.A. Richards (the author of Practical Criticism ) and his concerns with textual interpretation – that Hamlet could be about an infinite number of matters but it could not be about the 1984 British Miners’ Strike. 1 There was, then, a limit to how much mapping or analogizing one could do. This was not a problem of temporality (we are all happy to accept that Freud is now one of the major influences on Hamlet ) but was related instead to the question about what a text or a film could, interpretively speaking