Wo es war, soll ich werden

Wo es war, soll ich werden is a Freudian formula that the book briefly recasts as a political analogy: a Slovene Catholic intellectual’s call for rebellion and destruction is presented as a politicized version of it. The reference is pointed, not a full interpretation of Freud. Its force comes from setting a language of transformation beside a program of attacking institutions, laws, and links, while the book’s wider account of change insists that a break must be understood through the structure it unsettles.

The Political Allusion

The phrase appears in a footnote discussing a Slovene Catholic intellectual, formerly Slovenia’s Minister of Culture and ambassador to France. In a published polemic, he called for rebellion and destruction, urging attacks on windows, buildings, and institutions and invoking Osama bin Laden in relation to high-rise buildings. The book presents this rhetoric as the ridiculous climax of the line of thought under discussion, then asks whether it sounds like a newly politicized version of Freud’s formula.

That comparison is the expression’s direct function here. The note does not develop a clinical account of Freud or spell out a general doctrine of political action. Instead, it places the formula beside a call to make destruction the answer to the presence of institutions and social bonds. The contrast makes the allusion sharp: a phrase associated with transformation is made to resonate with a polemic that treats destruction as its method.

Change Through an Internal Gap

The allusion sits within a larger philosophical argument about how a limit can be more than an obstacle. In its account of Hegel’s difference from Kant, the book argues that the gap should not be overcome by reaching for an intact realm beyond it. The gap is instead treated as a condition within reality itself: what appears to be incomplete knowledge points to a reality that is itself incomplete and inconsistent. On this account, change does not require the restoration of an original wholeness or a final reconciliation that erases division. Recognizing the division as such can itself alter how the situation is understood.

This logic informs the book’s account of concrete universality. A universal is not merely a neutral container that holds particular cases; it becomes visible in the exception that has no proper place within the established order. The excluded element can therefore disclose something about the whole that the whole’s official arrangement conceals. The book connects this structure to Christ as an outcast who stands for humanity and to democracy’s part of no-part: those without an assigned place in the social edifice can embody the universal claim of the people.

Historical and Economic Parallax

The book also describes historical change through temporal parallax. A principle may take different forms in different domains, but those forms need not appear at the same historical moment. The relation among Protestantism, Kant’s philosophical revolution, and the French political revolution is treated as a problem of uneven historical development, not as a simple sequence in which one domain neatly resolves the contradictions of another.

A related argument appears in the discussion of Marx and political economy. Drawing on Kojin Karatani, the book describes Marx’s account of value as a parallax that cannot be reduced to production alone or to circulation alone. It criticizes later Marxist readings that elevate production as the sole site of truth and treat exchange and consumption as mere illusion. The commodity’s form matters: a wooden table remains an ordinary useful object, yet as a commodity it enters a social relation that cannot be explained by its material properties alone. The book’s broader method is to track the tension between levels instead of dissolving one into the other.

Scope and Significance

These arguments clarify the setting in which the formula’s political echo becomes legible, but they do not turn the brief footnote into a complete theory of the expression. Its explicit role is narrower: it supplies a comparison through which the book exposes the extremity of a rhetoric that would answer the existence of institutions and social links with destruction. The surrounding philosophy offers a different emphasis, locating transformation in the contradictions and exclusions internal to a structure rather than in a simple fantasy of escape from it.