‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’: science, perversion, psychoanalysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical examination of the contemporary imperative to ‘trust science’ from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It begins by putting contemporary scientific research in the twentieth-century historical context of the ‘military-industrial complex’ (D. Eisenhower) in which science and technology become symbiotically connected to the military. It then examines the psychic structure driving the military-industrial complex in which science (perversely) instrumentalises itself for military purposes. This structure is crystalized in two statements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal investigator of the Manhattan Project. In these two statements, Oppenheimer describes this singular invention in terms of being ‘good’ and having ‘intrinsic value to humanity’, which is then bound to an identification with ‘death’ and total destruction in his famous citation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The article then proposes that the psychic structure underpinning this claim corresponds to the Kantian notion of diabolic evil, and then goes on to further conceptualise structure under the concept of ‘bureaucratic science’. The article concludes by showing how such a self-instrumentalization of science does not correspond to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, as is usually implied, but rather to the superego defined by Lacan as the ‘imperative to enjoy’.