NEW DELHI, July 26 -- The title of this essay is a statement from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's book Anti-Oedipus which is certainly critical of Freud's assertion of the universality of Oedipus' fate. Eric Fromm fleeing from the Nazis wrote in his essay Prophets and Priests that "there is indeed no greater distinction among human beings than that between those who love life and those who love death." Today in India we have so many priests and prophets who seem to love death than love.
The 20th century was an epoch of Enlightenment -- the supremacy of rationality -- but it also turned out to be an era of the passions of world wars, Nazi death camps, Communist mass murders of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like. The first two decades of...