Koenigsberg, Richard (July 7, 2021)

Cultural objects inherit the infantile fantasies. Thus man in culture is "man dreaming while awake." Non-bodily objects inherit the fantasies. Among these cultural objects is the "body politic," which I've written about endlessly: a non-bodily object treated as if a real body.

We don't want to "awaken from the nightmare of history" because this would mean abandoning bodies politics (into which we have projected our actual bodies).

Still, there is a struggle to recover or retrieve our physical bodies and the erotic pleasure within them. Scratch the surface of the symbolic world of culture, one discovers the monumental reign of pornography: enactment of unsublimated desires; images of actual rather than symbolic bodies. The return of the repressed.

Defending against this (not so hidden) world of pornography (masturbation), is "the news." Similarly, a world of sado-maoschism erotic excitement: sublimation of perversion. 

Brown, Norman O. (1959/1985). Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic meaning of History. (page 168)

168—As Ferenczi said, the tendency to rediscover what is loved in all the things of the hostile outer world is the primitive source of symbolism. Nonbodily cultural objects (sublimations) inherit the fantasies, and thus man in culture, homo sublimans, is man dreaming while awake.

Fantasies, like everything else, exist only in the present, as hallucinations in the present, and must be attached to objects in the present.  According to psychoanalytic theory, after their detachment from the body (in Freud's blunt style, after masturbation is given up) they are projected into reality, forming that opaque medium called culture, through which we apprehend and manipulate reality.

But the ego cannot get ride of the body: it can only negate it, and by negating it, dialectically affirm it.  Hence all symbolism, even in the highest flights of sublimation, remains body symbolism.