Post-modernism means, among other things, the loss of faith in metanarratives

and the consequent relativization of values (Lyotard 1984); the waning of historicity,
a collective generalized forgetting about the past and a sense of living in
a permanent present; intensifications and elaborations of individuality and
identity and amplified emphasis on subjectivity and the self so that ‘feelings’
eclipse ‘meanings’ (Jameson 1991). Neoliberalism, among other things, entails
the deregulation of economic relations in general and the flexibilization of
work in particular, and thus the end of stable, life-long vocational careers and
the ‘corrosion of character’, even for the professional classes, and insecurity –
indeed, the precarity of working life more generally (Sennett 1998; Bourdieu
1999; Harvey 2007); privatization, and the complete penetration of the
commodity form into all social relations; and an inverse trans-valuation of all
values into market value. In Dufour’s (2008) formulation, taken all together, the
conditions of post-modernism and neoliberalism entail a pervasive process of generous.

Herein lies the root of the social pathologies inherent in this great transformation
of the moral foundations and the symbolic orders of contemporary
civilization that Durkheim analysed in Suicide, foremost among them being
egoisme and anomie (tendencies that are now reaching conditions of Sadean
isolism in Dufour’s account): egoism arising from the detachment of the individual
from networks of social relations and institutions, and anomie from the
dissolution of the conscience collective, the big Other as a source of singular
authority. Durkheim’s key concept, anomie, is derived from Greek, anomia,
meaning ‘no law’; more specifically the etymology is from the proto-Indo-
European nomn, from whence ‘nom’, ‘noun’, ‘name’. Anomie means that there
are no Name(s) of the Father, no phallic signifiers, no points de capition that fix
the flow of signification in the social fabric and give order to the symbolic
order. Where there are no big Other(s), there can be no metanarratives and
there can be no memories – for memorable and meaningful experiences
become memorable and meaningful only insofar as they are authorized or
prohibited by the Father – hence they matter. Otherwise, they merely flit by, as my possibility.

For some, the young perhaps, living life without a higher purpose, ‘may
begin to assume the character of a sport’; but as the game accelerates so that
the rules are changing all the time, the goalposts suddenly shifting to a
different, distant, always unsecure horizon, ‘anxiety’ becomes a characteristic
individual pathology, for no matter how fit and flexible, how well-trained
they may make themselves – assuming that they are, in fact, able to ‘make
themselves’, given that the symbolic resources of the big Other are denied
to them – playing the game successfully becomes increasingly difficult and
for most, in the end, impossible. For more, somewhat older (and in what
passes these days for a mid-stage career) people may have been willing to
submit themselves to the structuring and ordering effects of the ‘iron cage’
of rationalized acquisitiveness, even if lack of higher cultural values and ideals
have meant to become no more than ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists
without heart’ (ibid.).