Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies 0367173492, 9780367173494, 0367174138, 9780367174132

Table of contents :
LIST OF FIGURESPREFACESERIES EDITOR FOREWORDACKNOWLEDGMENTS1. THEORIZING AND RESEARCHING ISLAMOPHOBIA/ISLAMOPHILIA IN THE AGE OF TRUMP2. THE MASTER'S DISCOURSE: AN ARCHEOLOGY OF (COUNTER)TERRORISM AND A GENEALOGY OF THE CONCEPTUAL MUSLIM3. THE UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE: THE PSYCHOLOGIZATION OF ISLAMOPHOBIA4. THE HYSTERIC'S DISCOURSE: EPISTEMIC RESISTANCE, OR US MUSLIMS AS ETHICAL SUBJECTS5. THE ANALYST'S DISCOURSE: ONTIC RESISTANCE, OR US MUSLIMS AS POLITICAL SUBJECTS6. TOWARDS A RADICAL MASTER: FROM DECOLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS TO LIBERATION PRAXISREFERENCES

Citation preview

DECOLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

In this provocative and necessary book, Robert K. Beshara uses psychoanalytic discursive analysis to explore the possibility of a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Islamophobia, this book enhances understandings of Critical Border Thinking and Lacanian Discourse Analysis, alongside other theoretico-methodological approaches. Using a critical decolonial psychology approach to conceptualize ­everyday Islamophobia, the author examines theoretical resources situated within the discursive turn, such as decoloniality/transmodernity, and carries out an archeology of (counter)terrorism, a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim, and a Žižekian ideology critique. Conceiving of Decolonial Psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for Critical Islamophobia Studies (CIS), the author also applies Lacanian Discourse Analysis to extracts from interviews ­conducted with US Muslims to theorize their ethico-political subjectivity and considers a politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation. Essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, and the only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the United States, this is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a critical approach to Islamophobia. Robert K. Beshara is a critical psychologist, interested in theorizing subjectivity vis-à-vis ideology through radical qualitative research (e.g., ­ discourse analysis). In addition to being a scholar-activist, he is a fine artist with a background in film, theater, and music. He holds two terminal degrees: a Ph.D. in Psychology: Consciousness and Society from the University of West Georgia and an M.F.A. in Independent Film and Digital Imaging from Governors State University, Illinois. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northern New Mexico College. For more information visit: www.robertbeshara.com

Concepts for Critical Psychology: Disciplinary Boundaries Re-thought Series editor: Ian Parker

Developments inside psychology that question the history of the discipline and the way it functions in society have led many psychologists to look outside the discipline for new ideas. This series draws on cutting edge critiques from just outside psychology in order to complement and question critical arguments emerging inside. The authors provide new perspectives on subjectivity from disciplinary debates and cultural phenomena adjacent to traditional studies of the individual. The books in the series are useful for advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and lecturers in psychology and other related disciplines such as cultural studies, geography, literary theory, philosophy, psychotherapy, social work, and sociology. Most recently published titles: Deleuze and Psychology Philosophical Provocations to Psychological Practices Maria Nichterlein and John R. Morss Rethinking Education through Critical Psychology Cooperative Schools, Social Justice and Voice Gail Davidge Developing Minds Psychology, Neoliberalism and Power Elise Klein Marxism and Psychoanalysis In or Against Psychology? David Pavón-Cuéllar

DECOLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies

Robert K. Beshara

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Robert K. Beshara The right of Robert K. Beshara to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-17349-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17413-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05661-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to the memory of my uncle, Medhat Ghali Guirguis (1951–2017).

CONTENTS

List of figures viii Prefaceix Series editor foreword x Acknowledgmentsxii 1 Theorizing and researching Islamophobia/Islamophilia in the age of Trump

1

2 The master’s discourse: An archeology of (counter) terrorism and a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim

32

3 The university discourse: The psychologization of Islamophobia

65

4 The hysteric’s discourse: Epistemic resistance, or US Muslims as ethical subjects

83

5 The analyst’s discourse: Ontic resistance, or US Muslims as political subjects

109

6 Towards a radical master: From decolonial psychoanalysis to liberation praxis

127

References139 Index155

FIGURES

1.1 Delinking the Rhetoric of (Post)colonial Violence from the Logic of (Post)modern Oppression 4 1.2 The Four Discourses 8 1.3 The Four Subject Positions 9 1.4 The Master’s Discourse as a Template for Ideology 10 1.5 The Three Statuses of the Subject 21 1.6 The Capitalist Discourse 22 2.1 Squaring the WOT Discourse 37 2.2 The Master’s Discourse 40 2.3 The Subject and the Other 47 3.1 The University Discourse 66 3.2 From Desire to Jouissance68 3.3 L Schema 73 3.4 Transmodernity 80 4.1 The Hysteric’s Discourse 84 5.1 The Analyst’s Discourse 110 5.2 Zeuxis v. Parrhasius 114 5.3 The Line and Light 115 5.4 The Gaze 115 6.1 Five Discourses, Five Subjects 128 6.2 From Mythical-Jouissance to Divine-Jouissance129

PREFACE

I turned my dissertation (Beshara, 2018c) into this book: the outcome of prolonged theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between the ‘War on Terror’ and Islamophobia. Over the years, I had the privilege of developing my research and sharing these developments with other scholars on a number of occasions. For example, I presented my research at the University of California, Berkeley three times: in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Hatem Bazian—the founder of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project and a member of my dissertation committee—organizes the Annual International Conference on the Study of Islamophobia, and I am very grateful to him, because in 2015 I presented a draft of Beshara (2018a), which is the beginning of my discursive research into the topic. In 2016, I presented the next development of my work—a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading—at the Duquesne/UWG Human Science Symposium in Carrollton, Georgia. But the most significant development in my work took place in 2017 at the Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam conference, which was co-organized by Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui on behalf of the College of Psychoanalysts and which took place at the University of Manchester, the UK. It was at that groundbreaking conference that I developed an original theoretico-methodological tool called “decolonial psychoanalysis,” (Beshara, 2018b) which I ended up developing further into my dissertation and eventually into this book.

SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD

Is psychoanalysis not part of the problem, antithetical to anything approaching ‘critical’ psychology? And, worse, is psychoanalysis not the most insidious apparatus of psychologization, ensuring that people are not only monitored and disciplined by psychology, but also required to confess within its frame, required to really believe that psychological explanations for social phenomena are paramount? And, even worse, is psychoanalysis not the most arrogant aspect of Western psychology, enforcing a model of subjectivity that all those positioned as ‘other’ to the West are trapped by, an intensely colonial theory and practice? All of these accusations against psychoanalysis must be encountered and answered in the affirmative if we are to take any steps forward to a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology, and the surprising twist to the story told in this book is that psychoanalysis of some kind can then, if we are honest about how it usually functions, end up being a tool, not only of oppression, but also of liberation. Robert K. Beshara’s psychoanalytic discursive analysis in this provocative and necessary book, essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, homes in on a new threat, a new ‘other,’ marked by the signifier ‘Islam.’ The twists and turns in the colonial heritage of the West now turn around an identitarian enemy, an enemy marked out by their identity rather than by their ‘race.’ A series of linguistic devices attach this signifier to terrorism, and a variety of psychopolitical strategies are used by those in power to then link the signifier to

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Muslims who dare to speak out about the way they are positioned within Islamophobic discourse. They are accused of cleaving to an identity that is actually constructed for them within dominant discourses of the ‘War on Terror,’ counter-terrorism, and the increasing securitization of Western nation states. Is all this merely discursive? It is anything but. Islamophobia certainly is discursive, and here the book takes forward discourse-analytic work in critical psychology, but it is also, we come to see, material. The book elaborates, with the aid of psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and power, an account of the centrality of so-called ‘extra-discursive’ phenomena, a grounding of the analysis in a deeper theoretical understanding of what is going on when we appear to be merely describing the world and the people in it. The best of critical psychology goes beyond psychology as such, showing how subjectivity is embedded in forms of materially-effective strategies of power and connecting with debates in neighboring disciplines. The decolonial psychoanalytic ‘concepts’ that are brought to bear on contemporary racism here are thus drawn from other places, from outside the discipline of psychology, and then this book takes another bold step, providing a new conceptual framework for a new disciplinary field that it names ‘Critical Islamophobia Studies.’ This book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies, thus maps out new territory, seizing ground from traditional disciplinary approaches to ‘discourse’ and ‘psychology,’ and providing a space for doing something entirely different. It shows how we must take this step if we are to move on from academic analysis to resistance. This is more than ‘Lacanian Discourse Analysis’ within critical psychology; it operates outwith the discipline, all disciplines, to speak of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real aspects of a world that reflexively includes those marked as ‘Islamic’ and those who engage in such marking of ‘others’ when they speak. Here is a challenge, a possibility of speaking against power, and against psychology as such. Ian Parker University of Manchester, the UK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to: Neill Korobov for teaching me how to do qualitative research (e.g., discourse is doing), John L. Roberts for encouraging me to find my critical voice, and Hatem Bazian for providing me and others with an incredible platform (the Islamophobia Conference) to develop our ideas as scholar-activists. And thank you Ian Parker for inspiring me with your work on so many levels! Christopher Aanstoos, Alan Pope, and Tobin Hart: the three of you taught me a lot during my Ph.D. journey from 2012 to 2018. Thank you for being a real source of inspiration! But I could not have done any of this work without my family, particularly my wife (Cony), my father (Khairy), my mother (Monika), and my sister (Lala). Thank you for your unwavering support! However, Cony deserves special thanks for redrawing some of the figures in the book. I am also grateful for my two cats (Freud and Marx) for their moral support. Friends are also impactful. Al Lingo, Chris Biase, Chris Bell, Fik Mulatu, and Ram Vivekananda, thank you for being there for me! And, most importantly, thank you to the 19 research participants, whom I interviewed online! I am grateful both for your time and for trusting me with your accounts. Finally, I would not have been in Carrollton, Georgia pursuing a doctorate if it were not for Kareen Malone—the co-founder of the Ph.D. program in Consciousness and Society. Thank you for believing in me! Last but not least, I want to deeply thank the editors: Katie Hemmings, Alex Howard, and Stephen Riordan.

1 THEORIZING AND RESEARCHING ISLAMOPHOBIA/ISLAMOPHILIA IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Critical reflexivity: The personal is political Parker (2005a) defines reflexivity as “a way of attending to the institutional ­location of historical and personal aspects of the research relationship” (p.25, emphasis in original). I am writing this book as an Egyptian-Polish-American academic living in the United States (US), but who was born and grew up in Cairo, Egypt. Being a “hybrid” (Bhabha, 1994) gives me the pretext to criticize the (post)modern “world-system” (Wallerstein, 2004) ruthlessly. My “secular criticism” is informed by this Saidian principle: even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for. (Said, 1983, p.28, emphasis added) Although I am from North Africa, paradoxically I am not naturally filiated, but rather culturally affiliated with Arabs (Said, 1983). Having lived in Egypt, a Muslim-majority country, for a quarter of a century means that most of my friends are Muslim. As a secular (Coptic-Catholic-Buddhist) ally of Muslims, the question of ‘Islamophobia’ has both moral and political significance to me. I wrote my book in 2018, in the context of Black History Month, but I started working on my book in 2015 in the context of the US presidential election of 2016, which was a charged environment, to say the least. I got

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interested in the topic of Islamophobia accidentally through my scholarly critique of the “War on Terror” (WOT) discourse, at which point I realized that I did in fact experience Islamophobia, even though I am not Muslim. My most memorable experience of Islamophobia took place sometime in 2011 during a film class at Governors State University, Illinois. A fellow student said the following out loud upon seeing my image in a short video I was acting in. She said, “you look like a terrorist!” (cf. Fanon, 2008, p.84), then she started laughing. I could not believe what I heard her say or the way she was saying it, so I froze. But that experience, as I thought about it over time, made me understand how certain people see me; an awareness that is still with me to this day, unfortunately. The first assumption in the statement mentioned above is that I look like an ‘Islamic’ terrorist. The signifier ‘Islamic’ structures the logic of that statement and functions as a “quilting point” even in its absence (Parker, 2010a, p.126). The second assumption is that terrorists ‘look’ a certain way—one can guess wherefrom that person learned to make this ‘free,’ or I should say costly, association. Finally, it is worth adding, in case it is not obvious, that there was nothing regarding the film’s content or style which is related to terrorism—except ‘my look,’ of course. Thus, is a terrorist a terrorist because of his/her look, name, or the language s/he speaks? Or is s/he a terrorist because of his/her act(s) of (post) colonial violence? Based on that experience and multiple others, I know how it feels to be a problem (Du Bois, 1903/2003, pp.3–4). I am also familiar with what it is like to be the object of “othering” (Spivak, 1985). Nevertheless, I did not understand, as a non-Muslim, why I was racialized as an object of Islamophobia. Omi and Winant (2015) define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (p.111, emphasis in original). In the foreword to The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois (1903/2003) characterizes the problem of the 20th century as “the problem of the color line” (p.xli). If that is the case, what then is the problem of the 21st century? I would argue that it is the problem of the color-blind, which goes by many names: new racism, neo-racism, cultural racism, etc. I conceptualize it as (post)modern oppression, based upon Ži žek’s (1997) notion of “‘postmodern’ racism” (p.33). But I ground Ži žek’s ideology critique in what Collins (2000) calls “systems of oppression,” a Black feminist analytic of “intersectionality” vis-à-vis the “matrix of domination” (p.18). (Post)modern oppression, or oppression without oppressed (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, p.21), in brief, is a Liberal, multiculturalist, and tolerant variation on old-fashioned scientific racism/sexism/classism, which never

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really went away (hence the parentheses). (Post)modern oppression is not only “individual,” but also “institutional” (Ture and Hamilton, 1992). It can also be characterized as “everyday” (Essed, 1991), since it is both Imaginary, or “interactional,” and Symbolic, or “structural” (p.2). But what about the Real dimension of (post)modern oppression? This is the dimension this book explores. In short, Muslims are not a race, yet conceptual Muslims are racialized, gendered, and classed, and thus, oppressed. Conceptual Muslims are oppressed, even if they are White. For example, people from West Asia and North Africa are considered Brown, even though they are technically “White” according to the US Census Bureau (n.d.): A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as ‘White’ or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian. Since I am neither a Muslim nor a scholar of Islam, yet I write about Muslims vis-à-vis Islamophobia/Islamophilia, I would like to preface by saying that I am well aware that intracommunal debates regarding “Islamic Reformation” date back to at least the 18th century (Zayd, 2006). Consequently, I am in agreement with both Hasan’s (2015) defense of traditional Islam and his rejection of the “Reformation analogy.” Here is the core of his argument: Islam isn’t Christianity. The two faiths aren’t analogous, and it is deeply ignorant, not to mention patronising, to pretend otherwise – or to try and impose a neatly linear, Eurocentric view of history on diverse Muslim-majority countries in Asia or Africa … Don’t get me wrong. Reforms are of course needed across the crisis-ridden Muslim-majority world: political, socio-economic and, yes, religious too. Muslims need to rediscover their own heritage of pluralism, tolerance and mutual respect. (Hasan, 2015, paras.7, 11, emphasis added) In what follows, I use psychoanalysis to critique “the other side of psychoanalysis” (Lacan, 1991/2007), that is, the ideology of (counter)terrorismIslamophobia/Islamophilia as a “master’s discourse.” However, I enhance my Lacanian ideology critique with a decolonial reading of psychoanalysis “from the perspective and interests of the damnés” (Mignolo, 2007, p.458).

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FIGURE 1.1 Delinking

the Rhetoric of (Post)colonial Violence from the Logic of (Post)modern Oppression.

Following Mignolo (2007), I engage in “critical border thinking” as part of an effort to “delink” the rhetoric of (post)colonial violence from the logic of (post)modern oppression (see Figure 1.1).

Decolonial psychoanalysis The theoretical backbone of this project is what I call decolonial psychoanalysis, wherein I radicalize Lacanian social theory by giving it a decolonial edge “from the borders” (Mignolo, 2007, p.8). Since I am not a Lacanian psychoanalyst, I am mostly engaging in what Bracher (1993) calls “a socially transformative psychoanalytic cultural criticism” (p.74). Hook’s (2008) “postcolonial psychoanalysis” is visibly a source of inspiration; other theorists informing my work include, but are not limited to, Jacques Lacan, Edward W. Said, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Slavoj Ži žek, and Ian Parker. I am also indebted to some feminist thinkers: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, Deepa Kumar, Angela Davis, and Sara Ahmed. Next, I will try to describe my ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. A concern with “the link between language and action” (Parker, 2017, p.6), or with praxis, “theory linked directly with practice” (p.263), informs this book. I explore these links in a transdisciplinary fashion by drawing on different fields, such as: critical psychology, decoloniality, and critical terrorism studies. Lacan (1966/2006) himself was a transdisciplinarian who drew from linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics: “Must it be stated that we have to know [connaître] other bodies of knowledge [savoirs] than that of science when it comes to dealing with the epistemological drive?” (p.737, emphasis in original). With this in mind, I conceive of decolonial psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for critical Islamophobia studies (CIS). CIS is a radical research program that builds upon the excellent work done by the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project, which

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organizes the Islamophobia Conference and publishes the Islamophobia Studies Journal. Also worth mentioning are the journal Human Architecture, which published numerous articles on Islamophobia using “the grammar of de-coloniality” (Mignolo, 2007, p.500), and the only other critical psychological research project on Islamophobia that I am aware of, that is, Marten’s (2010) Accounting for Islamophobia as a British Muslim: The centrality of the ‘extra-discursive’ in the discursive practices of Islamophobia. CIS is politically radical (i.e., Leftist) and ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically critical. According to Wallerstein (2004), Radicals believe that progressive social change is not only inevitable but highly desirable, and the faster the better. They also tend to believe that social change does not come by itself but needs to be promoted by those who would benefit by it. (pp.96–97) If CIS had a subtitle, it would be “critical links,” (Parker, 1999) because CIS is a transdisciplinary “psychosocial praxis … the solidarity-forming consciousness of lived social contradictions” (Stevens, Duncan, and Hook, 2013, p.6, emphasis in original). I situate CIS within the discursive turn, whose foundational theorists include: Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. Beginning with psychoanalysis, Freud (1900/2010), in The Interpretation of Dreams, provides us with many useful analytic tools. His “method of dream-interpretation” (p.128), for example, can be used as a method for text-interpretation. Perhaps, a text “is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (p.183, emphasis in original). In his text-interpretation of Orientalism, Said (1978), for example, distinguishes between “manifest Orientalism” and “latent Orientalism” (p.206, emphasis in original). In other words, Said repurposes Freud’s (1900/2010) distinction between “manifest content” and “latent content” (p.295, emphasis in original) for a critique of coloniality/modernity. In the interpretation of one of his dreams, Freud (1900/2010) concludes that certain “elements” or signifiers: [C]onstituted ‘nodal points’ upon which a great number of the dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream. The explanation of this fundamental fact can also be put in another way: each of

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the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been ‘overdetermined’—to have been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over. (p.301) The Freudian notion of “nodal points” would appear in Lacan (1966/2006, p.419) as points de capiton, often translated as button ties or quilting points, and would also appear in Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2014, p.99). The concept of “overdetermination” would also be picked up by a number of researchers (e.g., Hook, 2013; Lapping, 2011; Malone and Roberts, 2010). Moving on to structural linguistics, de Saussure (1916/1959) defined the “linguistic sign” as “the combination of a concept [signified] and a sound-image [signifier]” (p.231). Lacan (1966/2006) took up this formulation but emphasized the primacy of the signifier over the signified. Here is the central teaching of de Saussure (1916/1959): “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary” (p.232, emphasis in original). The arbitrariness of the sign is a crucial insight for my interpretation of ‘Islamophobia.’ Equally, Greimas’s (1968) semiotic square is a powerful tool for exploding binary discourses and for mapping multiple subject positions. We now turn from signifier to discourse, and for that, we need Foucault (1969/1972), The Archeology of Knowledge in particular. Foucault (1969/1972) is the one who brought the notion of discourse to life: [D]iscourse is constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence. And if I succeed in showing, as I shall try to do shortly, that the law of such a series is precisely what I have so far called a discursive formation, if I succeed in showing that this discursive formation really is the principle of dispersion and redistribution, not of formulations, not of sentences, not of propositions, but of statements (in the sense in which I have used this word), the term discourse can be defined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse. (pp.107–108, emphasis in original)

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The Archeology of Knowledge was published in French in 1969, the year that Lacan started his 17th seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. This seminar is a decisive text for this project, and in it, Lacan (1991/2007) is primarily responding to Foucault by articulating his theory of discourse, which is unquestionably inspired by Greimas’s (1968) semiotic square with its four elements (S1, S2, ~S1, and ~S2 ). Lacan (1991/2007) teaches that discourse is “a necessary structure that goes well beyond speech” (p.12, emphasis added) and that it is “the status of the statement [l’énoncé]” (p.13, emphasis in original). Discourse, as a structure, goes beyond speech because Lacan is not interested in intersubjective communication, which for him is Imaginary, but in the Symbolic and Real dimensions of (mis)communication: “We have the death drive here. We have it here, where something is taking place between you and what I am saying” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p.16, emphasis added). In other words, he is keen on the structure of discourse in terms of both “fundamental relations” (p.13) and “the Other’s jouissance” (p.14, emphasis in original), which is a specific kind of knowledge. Lacan (1991/2007) then introduces his theory by saying, “this fourfooted apparatus, with its four positions, can be used to define four radical discourses” (p.20). The four radical discourses are the “master’s discourse,” the “university discourse,” the “hysteric’s discourse,” and the “analyst’s discourse” (Lacan, 1991/2007). I have used Lacan’s (1991/2007) four discourses to structure my book, drawing not only on his seminar, but also the work of others (e.g., Bracher, 1993; Fink, 1995). In this chapter, I introduce the theories and methods that inform my study. I also unpack key concepts like ideology and subjectivity. I then contextualize my project vis-à-vis the US presidential election of 2016 through a fifth discourse that Lacan introduced three years after the 17th seminar in 1972, namely, the “capitalist discourse” (as cited in Vanheule, 2016). Why four, or five, discourses? Fink (1995) explains: [A] total of twenty-four different discourses are possible using these four mathemes in the four different positions, and the fact that Lacan only mentions four discourses suggests that he finds something particularly significant about the order of the elements. (p.198, emphasis in original) The four mathemes, or symbols, in Lacanian algebra are ($, S1, S2, and a); they constitute the structural elements of any discourse according to Lacan (see Figure 1.2). $ is the symbol for the “barred subject” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p.696),

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FIGURE 1.2 The

Four Discourses.

who is “barred by language … alienated within the Other” (Fink, 1995, p.41). This subject is also known by Lacan (1966/2006) as “the subject of the unconscious” (p.6) and “the subject of the signifier” (p.530). In his groundbreaking 11th seminar, given in 1964, Lacan (1973/2004) famously defines the subject in this way: “a signifier [S1] is that which represents a subject [$] for another signifier [S2]” (p.207). This laid the foundation for the master’s discourse, which brings me to the next matheme. S1 is the symbol for what Lacan (1991/2007) calls the “master signifier” (p.89): “A real master … doesn’t desire to know anything at all—he desires that things work” (p.24). S2 is the symbol for “the battery of signifiers” or knowledge as “savoir” (p.13, emphasis in original). Lacan (1991/2007) distinguishes between “two aspects of knowledge, the articulated aspect [connaissance] and this know-how [savoirfaire]” (p.21). The thrust of his argument at this point draws on Hegel’s (1807/2013) Phenomenology of Spirit. Lacan (1991/2007) says, “the slave’s own field is knowledge, S2 ,” and then he adds provocatively: “What does philosophy designate over its entire evolution? It’s this—theft, abduction, stealing slavery of its knowledge, through the maneuvers of the master” (p.21). Lacan (1991/2007) exhibits a Radical political edge here, not only as an anti-philosopher, but also as a decolonial thinker: “Philosophy in its historical function is this extraction … of the slave’s knowledge, in order to obtain its transmutation into the master’s knowledge” (p.22). In response to Foucault, Lacan (1991/2007) argues that the entire function of épistémè is to turn the slave’s “animal knowledge” [savoir-faire] into the master’s “theoretical knowledge” [connaissance] (pp.22–23), which he later characterizes as “not knowledge of everything [savoir de tout] … but all-knowing [tout-savoir]” (p.31, emphasis in original). Finally, a is the symbol for Lacan’s most intriguing concept: objet a. Lacan’s (1973/2004) shorthand definition of objet a is “cause of desire” (p.168), but elsewhere in the 11th seminar he describes it as “a privileged

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object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some selfmutilation induced by the very approach of the real” (p.83). He later adds, The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. (Lacan, 1973/2004, p.103, emphasis in original) Whereas the phallus (-φ), for Lacan (1973/2004), is the signifier of lack (p.104), the objet a symbolizes “the central lack of desire” (p.105). This is to say: just as the subject (S) is divided between ego and $, the Other (A) is also divided between a and A (Fink, 1995, p.61). According to Lacan, the objet a manifests itself primarily as a “partial object” in relation to a “partial drive” (as cited in Evans, 1996, p.48). Lacan names four partial drives (along with their partial objects), but I am only interested in two of them, namely: the scopic drive (the Gaze) and the invocatory drive (the Voice)—this will become clear later. The objet a, Lacan’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis, is a crucial concept in my work because of its relation to other key concepts, such as desire, fantasy, ideology, drive, and jouissance. Lacan came up with these mathemes as part of his effort to formalize psychoanalysis (Fink, 1995, p.144). Having discussed them, now I will address the four subject positions (see Figure 1.3) that these mathemes, as functions, can occupy in each of the four discourses; note that the order is crucial. First, there is the “truth” of the discourse (bottom left), which is situated beneath the “agent” of the discourse (top left). Then there is the “other” (top right), who is addressed by this “agent.” Finally, there is the “product” or “loss” of this exchange (bottom right), which Lacan (1991/2007), after Marx’s notion of surplus value, characterizes as “surplus jouissance” (p.19, emphasis in original)—this implies that the master’s exploitation of the slave’s labor always entails an extraction of not only value, but also jouissance. Here is a summary of how the communication moves in the four discourses: truth→agent→other→product/loss.

FIGURE 1.3 The

Four Subject Positions.

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Two more things: (1) the (mis)communication between agent and other is marked by “impossibility” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p.174) since it is unidirectional (agent→other), and since Imaginary meaning always slides under the “signifying chain” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p.418). It is also clear in Lacan (1991/2007), based on my previous discussion, that there is a power asymmetry, particularly in the master’s discourse, between agent and other, that resembles the “life and death struggle” (Hegel, 1807/2013, p.165) between “the master” and “the servant” (p.167, emphasis in original). (2) “there is no sexual relationship (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel)” (Lacan, 1973/2009, p.46, emphasis in original) between truth and product. Their (non)relationship is marked by “impotence” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p.174), which is why that (non)relationship ($ // a) manifests itself in terms of fantasy ($ ⬨ a) in the master’s discourse. Lacan’s (1966/2006) algebraic formula for fantasy reads: the barred subject’s “desire for” the objet a (p.653). The lozenge (⬨) signifies “envelopment-development-conjunction-disjunction” (p.542), or “alienation (∨) and separation (∧), greater than (>), less than (), less than (