The illusion of a future
pp. 120-131
in: Man Chung, Colin Feltham (eds), Psychoanalytic knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
All men are mortal, but sex is no prophylactic. All women are mortal too. Everyone dies. Nor is this a fluke; it is a matter of natural law that we will all perish. One such law is surely the second law of thermodynamics. Sometimes this law is put as a proscription of perpetual motion machines, and with them, immortal people. Another way to put it is by saying natural processes move from states realised in relatively few ways to states realised in more ways. There are many more ways that the stuff of life can be degraded into death than survive. As every tidy formation breaks up eventually, so we all die. The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to always end in death.