Faith in Futurity

In Marx and in Nietzsche -- though this is more pronounced in
Nietzsche -- I find a faith in the future that enables them to
imagine the possibility of a different form of life.  Thus,
without giving into the temptation to define or describe what
this different form of life will be like, they nevertheless affirm the
possibility -- as the "negative" or "inverse" of the critique
of actuality (of capitalism, of nihilism).

It is the cracks or tensions within the actual that
permit them to imagine a different possibility.  But the
possibility also remains at the level of imagination -- it does
not rise to the level of conceptualization.  The conceptual
realm is merely critical.   On the other hand, one needs
assurances that the imagined, the possible, is rational and not
mere fantasy.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud accuses communists
-- who are, after all, among the 'discontents' referred to in the
title -- of fantasy, the regression to a pre-Oedipal stage.  There's a
lot of mileage to be gotten out of reading Anti-Oedipus as a
prolegomenon or preparation for a post-oedipal subjectivity --
if that's possible.

I think that it is; unfortunately, the deterioration of traditional
(authoritarian) family structures and the deterioration of the ego
seems to be a "post-oedipal" subjectivity, and if that's right, then
the post-oedipal subject is all the more vulnerable to direct
manipulation by market forces and the logic of exchange.

If one wanted to read Dialectic of Enlightenment and
Anti-Oedipus in conjunction (as I do), one might need to see
these two very different responses to Freud (and Marx, and Nietzsche)
as engaged in a conversation about the decline of oedipal subjectivity.

This decline points the way to both a reversion or regression
to pre-oedipal subjectivity ("the last man") and to a genuinely
post-oedipal subjectivity ("the Uebermensch").