Spectres of Orwell, or, The Impossible Demand of the Subject

In Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, Aldous Huxley claimed that the odds were more in favour of the future resembling the brave new world than Orwell’s Oceania. History, it seems, is more than ever ratifying his claim (anti-depressants, euthanasia, the cult of youth and the body beautiful, genetic engineering, the culture industry, the hegemony of sex and pleasure, and so forth). In many areas, Orwell has proven somewhat of a false prophet, the most obvious exception perhaps being that of continuous warfare, legitimated in his novel, in much the same way as it is in the current War on Terror, by the slogan “War is Peace.” It still remains, however, that Orwell’s vision, and not Huxley’s has found a lasting place in ordinary conversation. An analogous situation would perhaps be the difference between Freud and Jung: the new age movement, nature-myths, neo-paganism and deep ecology are surely closer to Jung’s writ-ings, and yet not a single of Jung’s terms has entered ordinary conversa-tion the way Freud’s have