Germany: A Science Fiction

[Dave Monroe]

In I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, Laurence A. Rickels investigated the
renowned science fiction author’s collected work by way of its
relationship to schizophrenia (as concept and condition). In his new
book, Germany: A Science Fiction, he focuses on psychopathy as the
undeclared diagnosis implied in flunking the empathy test. The switch
from psychosis to psychopathy as an organizing limit opens up the
prospect of a genealogy of the Cold War era, which Rickels begins with
a reading of Dick’s The Simulacraand follows out with readings of
Simulacron 3, Fahrenheit 451, The Day of the Triffids, This Island
Earth, Gravity’s Rainbow, and many other genealogical stations.

Nazi Germany hosted the first season of realization of science fantasy
with the rocket at the top of this arc. After WWII, the genre had to
delete the recent past and begin again within the new Cold War
opposition. Certainly the ancestral prehistory was still intact (as
seen in the works of, for instance, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells). But
at the bulk rate of its generic line of production, SF would
henceforth become native to the Cold War habitat.

This study addresses the syndications of the missing era in the SF
mainstream, the phantasmagoria of its returns, and the extent of the
integration of all the above since some point in the 1980s. Rickels
works through the preliminaries of repair that must be met in a world
devastated by psychopathic violence before mourning can be even a
need. While I Think I Am was the endopsychic allegory of Dick’s
corpus, Germany takes the corpus as a point of context for the
endopsychic genealogy of the post-WWII containment and integration of
psychopathy.

http://www.anti-oedipuspress.com/2013/12/germany_10.html
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l