Routledge Handbook Of Pyschoanalytic Political Theory 1138696315, 9781138696310, 1315524759, 9781315524757

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of Diagrams......Page 10
List of Contributors......Page 11
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Introduction......Page 20
Part I Figures......Page 36
1 Sigmund Freud......Page 38
2 Melanie Klein......Page 50
3 Jacques Lacan......Page 63
4 Wilhelm Reich......Page 76
5 Carl Jung......Page 86
Part II Traditions......Page 100
6 Marcuse and the Freudian Left......Page 102
7 Lacanian Left......Page 114
8 Psychoanalytic Feminism......Page 126
9 Critical Management Studies......Page 141
Part III Concepts......Page 156
10 Superego and the Law......Page 158
11 (Liberal) Narcissism......Page 170
12 Affect and Emotion......Page 181
13 Trauma......Page 193
14 Fantasy......Page 206
15 Identification (With the Aggressor)......Page 218
16 Mourning and Melancholia......Page 227
17 Language and Discourse......Page 240
18 Collective Subjects......Page 252
Part IV Themes......Page 268
19 Sexuality......Page 270
20 Hate......Page 280
21 Racism......Page 291
22 Nationalism......Page 304
23 Capitalism......Page 315
24 Choice and Consumerism......Page 326
25 Religion and Islamic Radicalization......Page 335
26 Populism......Page 349
27 Arts......Page 360
Part V Challenges and Controversies......Page 372
28 Psychoanalytic Geopolitics......Page 374
29 Psy Ethics......Page 388
30 Neoliberalism......Page 399
31 Migration and Diversity......Page 411
32 Biopolitics......Page 424
33 The Climate Crisis......Page 436
34 Post-politics......Page 448
35 Posthuman Identities......Page 462
Index......Page 476

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICAL THEORY

The emerging field of psychoanalytic political theory has now reached a stage in its development and rapid evolution that deserves to be registered, systematically defined, and critically evaluated. This handbook provides the first reference volume which showcases the current state of psychoanalytic political theory, maps the genealogy of its development, identifies its conceptual and methodological resources, and highlights its analytical innovations and its critical promise. The handbook consists of 35 chapters, offering original, comprehensive, and critical reviews of this field of study. The chapters are divided into five thematic sections: • The figures section discusses the work of major psychoanalytic theorists who have considerably influenced the development of psychoanalytic political theory. • The traditions section genealogically recounts and critically reassesses the many attempts throughout the 20th century of experimenting with the articulation between psychoanalysis and political theory in a consistent way. • The concepts section asks what are the concepts that psychoanalysis offers for appropriation by political theory. • The themes section presents concrete examples of how psychoanalytic political theory can be productively applied in the analysis of racism, gender, nationalism, consumerism, and so on. • The challenges/controversies section captures how psychoanalytic political theory can lead the way toward theoretical and analytical innovation in many disciplinary fields that deal with cutting-edge issues. The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory will serve as a scholarly reference volume for all students and researchers studying political theory, psychoanalysis, and the history of ideas. Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science in Athens and Essex. He worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham before taking up a position at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2006. His research focuses primarily on contemporary political theory (with emphasis on psychoanalytic and post-structuralist approaches) and on the analysis of ideology and discourse in late modern societies (with emphasis on populism, environmentalism, post-democracy, and the role of artistic practices).

“The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory introduces the reader into a new but rapidly growing field in the social sciences. It provides key texts by well known scholars on the ways in which psychoanalytic theory and practice have an impact on the political order. The editor Yannis Stavrakakis provides an illuminating and extensive introduction which explains the general organisation and the basic themes and controversies. There is no doubt that the book will be a vital tool for those who want to explore and develop further the variety of theoretical/ conceptual frameworks that the volume provides. It will also be useful to researchers who want to study empirically the influence of psychoanalytic approaches to themes and controversies in the areas of feminism, nationalism, consumerism, populism etc.” —Nicos Mouzelis, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics, UK “Far from simply serviceable and convenient, this Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory is handy in the robust, Chaucerian sense. Intellectually challenging and urgent, it explains the crucial, updated psychoanalytical concepts now impacting political theory, while providing a clear account of the various ways in which psychoanalysis and political theory related to each other previously. While the interventions of Freud and Lacan are, rightly, privileged, other formidable psychoanalytic figures also receive fresh attention. This is a volume that will be treasured.” —Joan Copjec, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, USA

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICAL THEORY

Edited by Yannis Stavrakakis

EDITORIAL BOARD: STEPHEN FROSH, LYNNE LAYTON, AND DANY NOBUS

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Yannis Stavrakakis to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-69631-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-52477-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Diagrams ix List of Contributors x Acknowledgmentsxvii Introduction1 Yannis Stavrakakis PART I

Figures17   1 Sigmund Freud Stephen Frosh

19

  2 Melanie Klein R. D. Hinshelwood

31

  3 Jacques Lacan Dominiek Hoens

44

  4 Wilhelm Reich Christopher Turner

57

  5 Carl Jung Peter T. Dunlap

67

v

Contents PART II

Traditions81   6 Marcuse and the Freudian Left Douglas Kellner

83

  7 Lacanian Left Sean Homer

95

  8 Psychoanalytic Feminism Lisa Baraitser

107

  9 Critical Management Studies Alessia Contu

122

PART III

Concepts137 10 Superego and the Law Todd McGowan

139

11 (Liberal) Narcissism Robert Samuels

151

12 Affect and Emotion Candida Yates

162

13 Trauma Marshall Alcorn

174

14 Fantasy Matthew Sharpe and Kirk Turner

187

15 Identification (With the Aggressor) Jay Frankel

199

16 Mourning and Melancholia Claudia Lapping

208

17 Language and Discourse Ed Pluth

221

18 Collective Subjects Campbell Jones

233 vi

Contents PART IV

Themes249 19 Sexuality Eran Dorfman

251

20 Hate C. Fred Alford

261

21 Racism Derek Hook

272

22 Nationalism Amanda Machin

285

23 Capitalism Samo Tomšič

296

24 Choice and Consumerism Renata Salecl

307

25 Religion and Islamic Radicalization Andrea Mura

316

26 Populism Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perelló

330

27 Arts Cecilia Sjöholm

341

PART V

Challenges and Controversies

353

28 Psychoanalytic Geopolitics Dany Nobus

355

29 Psy Ethics Ian Parker

369

30 Neoliberalism Valerie Walkerdine

380

31 Migration and Diversity Nikolay Mintchev and Henrietta L. Moore

392

vii

Contents

32 Biopolitics A. Kiarina Kordela

405

33 The Climate Crisis Sally Weintrobe

417

34 Post-politics Olivier Jutel

429

35 Posthuman Identities Anthony Elliott

443

Index457

viii

DIAGRAMS

  3.1 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4

Lacan’s Four Discourses Lacan’s Algorithm for the Linguistic Sign Saussure’s Diagram for the Linguistic Sign Formula for Metonymy Formula for Metaphor

ix

53 224 224 225 226

CONTRIBUTORS

Marshall Alcorn is a professor of English and chair of the English Department at The George Washington University. He graduated from the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in 2006 and now teaches in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. He is the cofounder (with Mark Bracher) of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. His current research focuses on trauma, neuroscience, and aesthetics. He is the author of Narcissism and the Literary Libido, Changing the Subject in English Class (which won the Ross Winterowd Prize in 2002) and Resistance to Learning and is the coeditor of Lacanian Theory of Discourse. C. Fred Alford is a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of over 15 books on moral psychology, including Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (2013) and Trauma, Culture, and PTSD (2016). He coedits the Psychoanalysis and Society Book Series and served as executive director of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society for over ten years. He runs the blog www.traumatheory.com. Lisa Baraitser is a professor of psychosocial theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) and Enduring Time. She has published widely on psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory and the maternal and the relation between temporality and care. Paula Biglieri received her PhD from the National University of Mexico (2005). She has served as researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina since 2007. She is currently director of the Cátedra Libre Ernesto Laclau at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. Her publications include two books coauthored with Gloria Perelló: En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del kirchnerismo (In the Name of the People.The Emergence of Kirchnerism), 2008, and Los usos del psicoanálisis en la teoría de la hegemonía de Ernesto Laclau (The uses of Psychoanalysis in Ernesto Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony), 2012. Alessia Contu is the chair of the Management Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, College of Management. Alessia is a psychologist by training. Her work draws on x

Contributors

different strands of political theory, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics to question and understand contemporary organizational, managerial, and working practices. Much of her research has focused on organizational politics and specifically organizational resistance and control in MNCs, SMEs, and NGOs. Alessia is currently studying and advancing progressive organizational alternatives in academia and beyond. Her latest empirical work is on workers’ recuperated firms and workers’ buyouts: their meaning in the current socioeconomic juncture and the conditions for their flourishing. Eran Dorfman (PhD, University of Paris XII, 2005) is an associate professor in the Department of Literature,Tel Aviv University, and a former directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. He specializes in continental philosophy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis and is the author of Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition; Learning to See the World Anew: Merleau-Ponty Facing the Lacanian Mirror (2007, in French) and the coeditor of Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms. Peter T. Dunlap is a psychologist working in private and political practice. He is engaged in research at the interface between Carl Jung’s thinking about the human species’ psychocultural development and the role of the psychological attitude in that development. He combines his interest in Jung with training in a system-centered approach to group development, leads a weekly Hope and Leadership group for activists and community leaders, and offers workshops and seminars on psychological leadership. He is the author of Awakening our Faith in the Future, which focuses on founding a distinctive Jungian political psychology. Anthony Elliott is the executive director of the Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia, where he is a research professor of sociology and chancellery dean of external engagement. He is super-global professor of sociology (visiting) at Keio University, Japan, and visiting professor of sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author and editor of some 40 books, which have been translated or are forthcoming in 17 languages. His recent books include Identity (four volumes), Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, The New Individualism (with Charles Lemert), Mobile Lives (with John Urry), On Society (with Bryan S. Turner), Reinvention,  Identity Troubles, and The Culture of AI. Jay Frankel, PhD, is an adjunct clinical associate professor and clinical consultant in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; faculty in the Trauma Studies Program, at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, New York; and associate editor of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the coauthor of Relational Child Psychotherapy; coeditor of Ferenczi’s Influence on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Traditions (2018); and author of many journal articles, book chapters, and numerous conference presentations on topics, including the work of Sándor Ferenczi, trauma, identification with the aggressor, authoritarianism, the analytic relationship, play, child psychotherapy, relational psychoanalysis, and others. Stephen Frosh is a professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was a consultant clinical psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, throughout the 1990s. He is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis, including Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions, Feelings (2011), A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory, Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic, Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis, For and Against Psychoanalysis (2006), After Words, and The Politics of Psychoanalysis. He is a xi

Contributors

fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a founding member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, and an honorary member of the Institute of Group Analysis. R. D. Hinshelwood is a professor emeritus at the University of Essex. He is a fellow of The British Psychoanalytical Society and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He authored A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989, 1991) and recently (with Tomascz Fortuna) Melanie Klein: The Basics (2017). Dominiek Hoens, PhD, teaches philosophy and psychology of art at Erasmus University College (RITCS, Brussels) and Artevelde University College (Ghent). His publications include articles and book chapters on Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Marguerite Duras, on logical time, love, and catastrophe. He is coeditor (with Sigi Jöttkandt) of S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique (www.lineofbeauty.org). Sean Homer is a professor of film and literature at the American University in Bulgaria, where he teaches courses in film criticism, Balkan cinema, modernism, postmodern literature, and psychoanalytic studies. He is author of Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Jacques Lacan (2004) and Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics (2016). He is coeditor (with Douglas Kellner) of Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader. He is currently completing on the book History and Cultural Trauma in Balkan Cinema. Derek Hook is an associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and an extraordinary professor of psychology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics (in social psychology) and Birkbeck College (in psychosocial studies), he is the author of Six Moments in Lacan, (Post)Apartheid Conditions and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial. He was one of the founding editors of the journal Subjectivity, a lead researcher on the Apartheid Archive project and between 2006–2013 a psychoanalytic trainee at the Freudian Centre for Analysis and Research in London. Campbell Jones is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Auckland and a researcher at the left think tank Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA). His work develops and refines the critique of political economy by drawing on the resources of contemporary critical theory. His work in psychoanalytic political theory has developed largely in relation to the thought of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, always in relation to questions of political economy. This involves articles, chapters, and books that draw on psychoanalytic political theory to transform understandings of entrepreneurship, organization, the imperative to recycle, the market, wealth taxes, biofinancialization, work, economic planning, and the hatred of thought in cognitive capitalism and in the university. He is currently writing a book on The Work of Others. Olivier Jutel is a lecturer at The University of Otago in the Media, Film, and Communication Department in New Zealand. A former journalist and media worker, his research has been concerned with the role of social and affective media in the rise of American right-wing populism. His published work has looked at Fox News, the alt-right, the Tea Party, cyber-libertarianism, and Barack Obama. Jutel’s political essays can be read in literary journals Overland and Springerin. Douglas Kellner is George Kneller chair in the Philosophy of Education Department at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. Kellner’s latest xii

Contributors

published books include Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush/Cheney Era (2010); Media Spectacle and Insurrection 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere (2013); American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism (2016); and The American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J.Trump (2017). His website is www.gseis. ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html, which contains several of his books and many articles. A. Kiarina Kordela is a professor of German and director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, US, and honorary adjunct professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She works on philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, social and political theory, and biopolitics. She is the author of Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-FreudLacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (2018); Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology; and Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan, and she is the coeditor of Spinoza’s Authority: Volume 1: Resistance and Power in Ethics; Spinoza’s Authority, Volume 2: Resistance and Power in Political Treatises; and Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages. Claudia Lapping is a reader in psychosocial studies and education at UCL Institute of Education. Her research explores the use of psychoanalysis in empirical research methodology and unconscious processes in the production of institutionalized knowledge and practices. She is the author of Psychoanalysis in Social Research (2011) and of recent papers in Journal of Education Policy (with Jason Glynos, 2017), Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2016), Qualitative Inquiry (2016), and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2013). She coedited (with Tamara Bibby)  Knowing and Not Knowing:Thinking Psychosocially about Learning and Resistance to Learning (2016). Amanda Machin is an acting professor of international political studies at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. Her research focuses on the politics of citizenship, nationalism, environment, and embodiment, and she is particularly intrigued by the implications of collective identifications for models and institutions of democracy. Her books include Against Political Compromise: Sustaining Democratic Debate (2017, coauthored with Alexander Ruser); Nations and Democracy: New Theoretical Perspectives (2015); and Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (2013). Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Capitalism and Desire:The Psychic Cost of Free Markets; Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy; Enjoying What We Don’t Have:The Political Project of Psychoanalysis; and other works. Nikolay Mintchev is a research associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. He specializes in the themes of ethnic identity and subjectivity in psychoanalysis and the social sciences. He is coeditor (with R.D. Hinshelwood) of The Feeling of Certainty: Psychosocial Perspectives on Identity and Difference (2017). Henrietta L. Moore is the founder and director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, and chair of culture, philosophy, and design. She has written extensively on psychoanalysis, social transformation, and politics. Andrea Mura teaches comparative political theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely in the fields of political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and comparative political thought, with attention to areas of contemporary applied relevance, such as citizenship, xiii

Contributors

borders, and the role of religion and global capitalism in contemporary world politics. He is the author of The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism: A Study in Islamic Political Thought (2016). Dany Nobus is a professor of psychoanalytic psychology at Brunel University London and the chair of the Freud Museum London. He is the author, most recently, of The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’, and he has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis. Ian Parker is a psychoanalyst in Manchester, UK, where he is codirector of the Discourse Unit. His books include Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography (2019). Gloria Perelló is a psychoanalyst. She has been codirector of the Cátedra Libre Ernesto Laclau at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires since 2014 and lectures at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires. Her publications include two books coauthored with Paula Biglieri: En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del kirchnerismo (In the Name of the People.The Emergence of Kirchnerism), 2008, and Los usos del psicoanálisis en la teoría de la hegemonía de Ernesto Laclau (The uses of Psychoanalysis in Ernesto Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony), 2012. Ed Pluth is a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at California State University, Chico. He is the author of Signifiers and Acts and Alain Badiou and coeditor, with Jan De Vos, of Neuroscience and Critique (2016). Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She is professor of psychology and psychoanalysis of law at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, and senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is also recurring visiting professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York. Her last book, Tyranny of Choice, has been translated into 15 languages and was featured at TED Global. Her previous books include The Spoils of Freedom (1994); (Per)versions of Love and Hate (2000); and On Anxiety (2004). Robert Samuels received his PhD from the University of Paris VIII. He is the author of 11 books, including Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently working on the book Freud for the 21st Century. Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University. He is the coauthor of Žižek and Politics (with Geoffrey Boucher) and Understanding Psychoanalysis (with Joanne Faulkner), together with articles on critical theory, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, the history of ideas, rightwing political thought and practice, and philosophy as a way of life. Cecilia Sjöholm is a professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her research is focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture. Her latest book, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to See Things (Columbia University Press, 2015), looks at how Hannah Arendt’s reflections on art and aesthetics invite us to rethink her political concepts. Her other books include Translatability (2012), edited with Sara Arrhenius and Magnus Bergh; Kristeva and the Political (2005) and The Antigone Complex; Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (2004). Her most recent, ongoing project aims to refigure the history of aesthetics through the writings of Descartes. xiv

Contributors

Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science in Athens, Greece, and discourse analysis at Essex, UK, where he also completed his PhD under the supervision of Ernesto Laclau. He worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham before taking up a professorship at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2006. His research focuses primarily on contemporary political theory (with emphasis on psychoanalytic approaches) and on the analysis of ideology and discourse in late modern societies (populism, environmentalism, post-democracy, and artistic practices). In 2014–2015 he was Leverhulme visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is contributing editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and served as vice-president of the Hellenic Political Science Association. He is the author of Lacan and the Political (1999) and The Lacanian Left (2007). In addition, he has published articles on psychoanalysis and political theory in major international journals in many languages. Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has worked at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Ljubljana) and is currently research fellow at Humboldt University (Berlin). His research areas comprise psychoanalytic theory, structuralism, epistemology, and political philosophy. Recent publications include The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, Jacques Lacan Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (coedited with Andreja Zevnik, 2016) and Psychoanalysis:Topological Perspectives (coedited with Michael Friedman, 2016). Christopher Turner is keeper of the Design, Architecture and Digital collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has a PhD in humanities and cultural studies from the University of London and is the author of Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, a book about Wilhelm Reich and his legacy. He is an editor of Cabinet magazine and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. Kirk Turner is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. His current research concerns Lacan’s concept of fantasy: its evolution across his seminars and writings broadly and how it specifically affects the subject/world interface mediated by language. He has published articles in the International Journal of Žižek Studies, Parrhesia, and Foucault Studies on shifts in Lacan’s thinking; sense and meaning in the psychoanalytic and analytic philosophical traditions; and changing academic subjectivities. Valerie Walkerdine is a distinguished research professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University,Wales, UK. She has written and researched on subjectivity, class, liberalism, and neoliberalism for some years and has used psychoanalytic insights to inform her work on this and many other aspects of social and cultural theory and critique. She is currently working on deindustrialization, especially in relation to Brexit and in relation to understanding current divisions in the UK and elsewhere. She is also working on a volume that traces a number of girls, both middle and working class and born in the mid 1970s, and their families to understand the long and intimate history of class and neoliberalism in Britain. Tentatively entitled Neoliberalism’s Daughters, it forms the fourth volume in a series of works, published from the 1980s to the present. Sally Weintrobe is a practicing psychoanalyst. Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, she chaired its scientific program and was honorary senior lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies at University College London. She edited and contributed to Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2012), shortlisted for the xv

Contributors

International Gradiva Award for contributions to psychoanalysis. She is currently working on a new book that explores the psychology behind neoliberal ideology, in particular how its culture actively works to block transition to a low-carbon and fairer economy. A founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, her talks and blogs can be found at www.sallyweintrobe.com. Candida Yates is a professor of culture and communication in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. Her research background is in psychosocial and cultural studies and its applications to politics, culture, and media, and she is codirector of the AHRC Media and Inner World research network. Her publications include The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity (2015); Media and the Inner World (2014); Television and Psychoanalysis (2013); New Psychosocial Perspectives on Emotion (2010); Culture and the Unconscious (2007); Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema (2007); and numerous journal articles and special editions. She is joint-editor of the Karnac/Routledge books series Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture and an editor of the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and Psychosocial Studies.

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks are due to my editor at Routledge, Natalja Mortensen, for entrusting me with the task of compiling this handbook and for her invaluable help during the various stages of its preparation. Concluding this project would be impossible without the assistance of the editorial board of the handbook, namely Lynne Layton, Stephen Frosh, and Dany Nobus. I remain grateful for their comments and support. I am also greatly indebted to my friend Theodosis Papanikolaou for his help with the diagrams included in the volume. Last but not least, I would like to thank all contributors for their devotion, originality, and erudition. Any remaining mistakes, conscious and unconscious, should be attributed solely to the editor of this volume.

xvii

INTRODUCTION Yannis Stavrakakis

The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory arguably marks the first time that psychoanalytic political theory is acknowledged as a distinct orientation within political studies and theory in general in such a prominent way. As a result, it also registers the emergence and the gradual establishment of a whole hybrid terrain of theorization in between psychoanalysis, political theory, and philosophy. No doubt, this is the culmination of a long process that started with Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis itself, a little more than a century ago, and comprises an immense variety of theoretico-political projects and initiatives. What is the family resemblance, the common thread, if you will, connecting all these distinct projects and initiatives? They aim to enrich and reorient (political) theory by employing psychoanalytic concepts, theoretical strategies, and analytical methods in mapping, accounting, and interpreting sociopolitical phenomena. What makes an established academic publisher consider such a project worth commissioning and supporting? Indeed, why should psychoanalysis figure as something relevant for social and political analysis at all? Isn’t psychoanalysis something already discredited in its own ‘natural’ psy ecosystem? Besides, isn’t it something confined to the study of individuals? If this is the case, then how can it claim to possess insights able to illuminate phenomena beyond the psychoanalyst’s consulting room?

Psychoanalysis and Politics: Tensions and Confluence Clearly, the trajectory of psychoanalysis and its vicissitudes could not but result in a series of paradoxes; the latter are, indicative, however, of its irreducible dynamism and its immense potential in reshaping many disciplines, including political studies. It has been declared dead so many times (already from Freud’s age), maybe as many as its major steps in slowly conquering clinical practice, the humanities, and the public imagination at large: Psychoanalysis, a product of the culture of late nineteenth century Europe, has been one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century thought, its impact comparable only to that of Darwinism and Marxism. Much that was new in psychoanalysis has become accepted wisdom in our culture and has been absorbed even by people who have not read Freud’s works: several decades of technical writing, popular literature 1

Yannis Stavrakakis

and therapy have made the concepts of repression, sexual desire and the unconscious familiar, often implicit in ordinary “common-sense” understandings of ourselves and each other. (Frosh 1999: 1) This is clearly visible in how the image of Freud itself has become a cultural icon, figuring in a variety of stamps issued by many countries worldwide and even in an Austrian banknote. Such influence is also felt within political studies, as a relevant text indicates vis-à-vis one current of psychoanalytic theorizing and its contemporary theoretico-political impact. In a critical review essay published as early as 2004 in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations—one of the journals of the UK Political Studies Association—characteristically entitled ‘The Politics of Lack’, one reads that ‘an approach to politics drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis is becoming increasingly popular of late among theorists . . . Indeed, this approach to theorising politics is today second in influence only to analytical liberalism’ (Robinson 2004: 259). Yet, as we know from political inquiry itself, there is no emerging (political and/or cultural) hegemony without the proliferation of counter-hegemonic claims, without, that is, hegemonic struggle (Gramsci); there is no exercise of power and establishment of authority without the emergence of resistance(s) (Foucault).Together with the clinical and cultural celebration of psychoanalysis went Freud’s character assassination(s) and the degrading of psychoanalysis: Most well-educated people know that Sigmund Freud was a charlatan who abetted child molesters, snorted cocaine, started a messianic cult, denigrated women, bullied patients, and lusted for his sister-in-law. According to the relentless scourging words of Frederick Crews (The Memory Wars and Unauthorized Freud), Richard Webster (Why Freud Was Wrong), and Jeffrey Masson (The Assault on Truth and Against Analysis), Freud would be the twentieth century’s supreme con artist if only he had not been dumb enough to believe in his own pseudoscience. Historian Frank Sulloway, who compiles twenty-six myths Freud allegedly concocted, asserts that the history of psychoanalysis is one of “myth formation and propaganda production,” a record he is happy to set straight. Debunking Freudian psychoanalysis has been all the rage for ages. (Jacobsen 2009: 1) Notice, however, the following: even when psychoanalysis falls from grace within a particular field, its radical message instantly seems to migrate to another (or others), exhibiting a remarkable plasticity, much like unconscious formations themselves, one of its prime subject matters. As we read in a relevant article from 2007, for example, ‘A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis—or what purports to be psychoanalysis— is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process” ’ (Cohen 2007: 46). Arguably, there is no compelling reason why one should authorize contemporary academic or mainstream clinical ‘psychology’ to be the judge of psychoanalysis, apart from etymology (or confusion). And yet what is most challenging is that, at the same time, within the same culture, even in the same academic terrain, the one that dissociates psychology from psychoanalysis—prioritizing less time-consuming, more quantifiable, and less ‘expensive’ therapies—Freud emerges as the scientist par excellence with the highest h-index score in the world (280) with 491.861 citations (cited by the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, accessed 23 May 2018).

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Introduction

Arguably, such paradoxes reflect both the inherently ambivalent structure of the psychoanalytic enterprise itself and its ambiguous impact on a Western culture jolted by its most unsettling ideas but simultaneously unable to resist them and eager to ‘incorporate’ and eventually ‘neutralize’ them, before eventually partially rejecting them. Some brief comments on the second aspect (doubt) can help us highlight what the first is really about (potential). First of all, what is the (alienating and/or frustrating) context against which psychoanalysis finds itself today and against which it has to be evaluated? What if it is more or less what Jonathan Lear has cogently described as the ‘complacent picture of human motivation’ (Lear 2005: 3)? He also provides a list of its main features, located at the intersection of the subjective, the social, and the political: •

‘That we can find out all we need to know about human behavior and motivation by conducting polls’. • ‘That all human disagreements are in principle resolvable through rational conversation and mutual understanding’. • ‘That we have reached “the end of history” ’. • ‘That all serious psychological problems will soon be treatable either by drugs or neurosurgery’. • That ‘the only form of psychotherapy that is needed is rational conversation’ and, at any rate, not psychoanalysis, the Freudian invention, which is dead (Lear 2005: 2). At one level, some of the above may be partly true, of course; but their absolutization does create a certain cumulative outlook of complacency—not to mention intellectual stagnation and sociopolitical resignation to a psychosocial TINA (there is no alternative) dogma of sorts; isn’t there something crucial missing, something repressed or disavowed, in such an account? ‘By contrast, psychoanalysis seeks to provide an interpretation of people, show them as acting in certain motivated ways and achieving certain gratifications—without thereby rationalizing the acts’ (Lear 2005: 6). What is at stake here is a different type of practical reasoning and workingthrough process. In Lear’s words, psychoanalytic interpretation • •

‘[N]ames an experience, emotion, behavior as it is emerging in the here-and-now’. ‘In the naming[, it] serves to augment a practical skill by which the analysand can monitor their life-experience and intervene in satisfying ways’.

In addition, ‘the interpretation will typically’ •

‘Bring to light aspects of that experience that have hitherto remained unconscious’ (Lear 2005: 51).

Providing the discursive medium through which (symptomatic) experience becomes reorganized and encounters (psychoanalytic) intervention and interpretation, psychoanalysis thus comprises a set of distinct registers in which its potential has been felt and, fortunately, still is. Thus, in the systematic account of an informed lay observer like Louis Althusser, Freud introduces ‘1. [a] practice (the analytic cure). 2. A technique (the method of the cure) that gives rise to an abstract exposition with the appearance of a theory. 3. A theory which has a relation with the practice and the technique’ (Althusser 1971: 183).1 Although the three are inextricably related, each one retains its autonomy and can also be linked to other similar enterprises.2 Thus, a field

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of comparisons, equivalences, and obstacles (to be registered or re-negotiated) is produced in which things can go both ways—for example, it becomes meaningful then to sharply distinguish psychoanalysis from psychotherapy or, moving in the opposite direction, to initiate a distinct psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Similarly, as far as psychoanalytic theory is concerned, its conceptual development, its gradual codification and transmission, allows both the differentiation from other theoretical orientations (e.g., rational choice models of human behavior, which often underpin mainstream political analysis), cross-fertilization with other adjacent terrains—like that of (critical) political theory and philosophy—and eventually the emergence of a distinct psychoanalytic political theory. This is not unique to politics. As Elisabeth Roudinesco has recently pointed out, today there is a Freud that can be linked with practically anything, be it positive or negative: Every moment of Freud’s life has been discussed and every line of his work interpreted in multiple ways, to such an extent that one can draw up a Georges Perec—style list: Freud and Judaism, Freud and religion, Freud and women, Freud the clinician, Freud the family man, Freud with his cigars, Freud and neurons, Freud and dogs, Freud and Freemasons, and so on. Turning to the many practitioners of radical anti-Freudianism (or Freud- bashing), still more Freuds can be found: Freud the rapacious, Freud the organizer of a clinical gulag, the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud. Views of Freud appear in every form of expression and narrative: caricatures, comic books, art books, portraits, drawings, photographs, classical novels, pornographic novels, detective stories, fictionalized narratives in films, documentary films, television series. (Roudinesco 2016: 2) Within this context, there is, apparently, a philosophical Freud (Marcuse 1974 [1955]; Ricoeur 1970; Derrida 1987; Lear 2005; Schuster 2016), a sociological Freud (Elias 2000 [1939]; Bocock 2002), a Freud for historians (Gay 1985), and a hugely challenging political Freud (Frosh 1999; Said 2004; Zaretsky 2015; Roazen 2016).Yet by no means is this something that should be taken for granted in advance. Indeed, one can enlist a variety of challenges that a psychoanalytic political theory is bound to encounter and in turn has to address in terms of putting forward such a confluence in a rigorous and rewarding way. Besides, there are also many different and even contrasting significations of what a psychoanalytic politics would mean. One can, for instance, address this issue in terms of the distinct directionalities involved in such an encounter.3 What is the triggering experience, and what is the terrain or the phenomenon that has to be illuminated? How will this happen? Will priority be given to political or psychoanalytic reasoning? At least two possibilities emerge at this point: there are two distinct strands to the “politics of psychoanalysis”. . . . The first of these concerns the politics inherent in psychoanalytic theories, the implications of psychoanalytic ideas and assumptions for notions of selfhood and society, and for programmes of personal and social change. . . . The second strand of the “politics of psychoanalysis” concerns the application of psychoanalysis to wider political questions. (Frosh 1999: 12–13) Such questions include class (Layton et al. 2006) and religion (Žižek 2009).

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Psychoanalysis: Progressive or Reactionary? What is at stake here can also be conceptualized as clashing theoretico-political priorities. What often emerges when psychoanalysis and politics are put together is not only different sensibilities and methodological patterns but also ‘two seemingly antithetical moments: a critical moment when political thinkers and social movements looked to psychoanalysis to clarify the irrational sources of domination and an affirmative moment when Freudianism became submerged in a larger history and appeared to become obsolete’ (Zaretsky 2015: 12). This has been the case already from the beginning: From its inception, psychoanalysis was divided between two impulses: one pushed toward absorption into mainstream institutions integral to twentieth-century capitalism, especially the research university, the “social control” professions such as social work, therapy, and testing, and the new mass culture; the other pulled toward sectarianism, that is, the wish to guard a Freud-centered, proto-Calvinist, ultimately Hebraic or Mosaic core. Both impulses had dangers. Absorption would destroy the unique character of psychoanalysis; sectarianism would preserve its identity, but at the cost of keeping it marginal and schismatic. Until the 1930s, psychoanalysis maintained a precarious balance. Beginning in the thirties, however, when psychoanalysis was destroyed in continental Europe and its refugees fled to England and the United States, the balance tipped. Psychoanalysis became, in Weber’s term, a “this worldly program of ethical rationalization,” one with strong links to such normalizing agencies as the social service professions, medicine, and the welfare state. (Zaretsky 2015: 29) Fortunately, this has not been the end of the story, although it has indeed discredited certain strands of psychoanalytic inquiry, at least as far as their political relevance is concerned, especially those that ended up functioning as ‘a form of social control’ (Zaretsky 2015: 31). Notice, for example, at the conceptual level, the analogous relationship between the unconscious and the political.4 One of the founding figures of the so-called Lacanian Left, Fredric Jameson, the American cultural theorist, who was one of the first to use Lacan’s work in the United States in politically salient ways (highlighting the importance of the Lacanian teaching in making sense of political issues already from the 1970s), has published a whole book with this title and obviously the syntagma ‘political unconscious’ made some sense to him. Broadly speaking, the unconscious is a dynamic term, a hypothesis based on a series of troubling phenomena that otherwise remain obscure and inexplicable. We know from Freud what these unconscious formations are: dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms, and so on. It is precisely through the salience, rather the insistence, of such formations that we can hypothesize the crucial operation of the unconscious in human life (Freud 1957 [1915]: 166). Now, what all these have in common is what also highlights their political character: they disrupt, more or less, our ‘normal’, conscious mental functioning, and they dislocate social interaction and naturalized political processes. Interestingly enough, the political is also properly defined as something that disrupts:5 as something linked to antagonism and social dislocations, to what registers the limits of a particular sociopolitical terrain and puts forward the task of an alternative arrangement of meanings and forces. It seems to me that the psychoanalytic clinic is also premised on a similar orientation: to use the traces of these formations of the unconscious in making possible a symbolic and affective reorganization of our psychosocial world.

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It is difficult, of course, to assign the unconscious exclusively to either a progressive or even revolutionary or to a counter-revolutionary, reactionary side. As Lynne Layton has cogently put it, psychoanalysis involves ‘a culturally embedded discourse and practice that cannot be characterised as either uniformly democratic or anti-democratic’ (Layton 2013). Unconscious processes provide the conditions of both the possibility and the impossibility of social change, are implicated in both the drive for democratic expansion and in that producing long-term crystallizations of hierarchical power relations. And this is crucial. At any rate, we should be careful not to end up assigning to analysts or psychoanalytic political theorists the task of drawing the practical implications of the functioning of the unconscious for political action, thus being elevated into a privileged avant-garde able to effect and guarantee social change. Obviously, this would be totally inconsistent with psychoanalytic discourse and its ethos. Let us remember here how Lacan concludes his early text on the mirror stage: ‘psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the “Thou art that”, in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins’ (Lacan 1977 [1966]: 8).This is, besides, what justifies the psychoanalytic doubts about the possibility of effecting a miraculous change in society as a result of a direct application and implementation of preconceived ideals and theoretical insights through a singular radical act. It is beyond this fantasy that real politics begins. Here, of course, analysts, theorists, social movements, and progressive citizens all have to contribute their equal share. Hence, in terms of directionality, this handbook will prioritize approaches that use psychoanalytic concepts and logics in accounting for political phenomena. It will also place emphasis on critical, psychoanalytically inspired orientations able to reflexively analyze our contemporary predicament(s) and chart new orientations for the future, especially for alternative political rearticulations of the psychosocial sphere. As a result, this collection does not focus on the analytic clinic, nor does it merely concern the ‘individual’; it engages primarily with processes and mechanisms constructing a ‘subject’ overdetermined by the social bond and opening the road to a genuine sociopolitical and psychosocial inquiry: Psychoanalysis is neither a social theory nor a programme for revolutionary activity. Instead, it is a major tool for understanding subjectivity. It reveals the workings of society within each individual, it offers a means for directly confronting each person’s emotions and investments in identity positions, and it supplies a set of criticisms of the distortions and despair that are suffered under conditions of domination. All this makes the politics of psychoanalysis real and important, however ambiguous and partial they may be. (Frosh 1999: 317) So much so was already acknowledged in Norbert Elias’s seminal study of the dynamics of civilization, entailing such a sociopolitical overdetermination of subjectivity: This, as has been mentioned, is clearly the state of affairs which Freud tried to express by concepts such as the “superego” and the “unconscious” or, as if is not unfruitfully called in everyday speech, the “subconscious”. But however it is expressed, the social code of conduct so imprints itself in one form or another on human beings that it becomes a constituent element of their individual selves. (Elias 2000 [1939]: 160)6

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Elias thus posits a ‘continuous correspondence between the social structure and the structure of the personality, of the individual self ’ (Elias 2000 [1939]: 160). This subject can emerge as such only within the terrains of culture and civilization—that is to say, against a truly political background and through political dynamics. Already from its inception, in Freud’s work, psychoanalysis was envisaged as a clinical practice and a theoretical endeavor focusing on the social bond and its effects on the construction and development of subjectivities (sexual, cultural, political). Placed beyond any naïve individualism, psychoanalytic ideas started influencing the theorization of social and political phenomena—hence Freud’s interest in clarifying the constitution of group and mass formations in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud 1955 [1921]). This is, after all, what stands at the kernel of psychoanalytic inquiry; this is what differentiates psychoanalysis from other psy orientations; last but not least, this is what permits the emergence of a distinct body of psychoanalytic political theory. Many, of course, will still be surprised by the confluence this handbook represents and stages between psychoanalysis and politics; yet, as we have seen, psychoanalysis has been political from the beginning. For a start, it has been political in the epistemological sense, since science, theory, and systematic reflection are always constituted politically. If we use the terms introduced by Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn 1996 [1962]), for example, we could say that psychoanalysis has triggered a scientific revolution; it has brought into existence a whole new paradigm about the constitution and functioning of human experience. If we employ Althusserian jargon (1971, 1999), we could also say that it has effected an epistemological break, by setting its own object of study: the unconscious. As Althusser points out, this revolutionary status also accounts for the ‘persecution’ of radical psychoanalytic thinking—the persecution Freud faced and the latter excommunications of Lacan—and can serve as a point of identification between the psychoanalytic tradition and the radical political tradition.

A Political Freud? This is not to say that Freud himself was ‘a man of politics, to say the least’ (Dolar 2008: 15). In the words of Dany Nobus, ‘[f]or all his outspokenness about the “discontents in civilization”, he had very little to say about politics, and what he did say tends to be profoundly ambiguous’ (Nobus n.d.). Throughout his life, he did not get involved in political life in any significant manner: ‘Apart from [his] staggering ending [as an exiled victim of Nazi anti-Semitism], his relationship to politics was anecdotal’ (Dolar 2008: 15). At any rate, although he often flirts with a rather egalitarian or even social-democratic spirit (Danil 2018; also see the monograph by Danto 2005), Freud never became truly sympathetic to progressive fantasies of social and political refoundation: ‘It is clear that, whatever his own liberal sympathies, Freud did not hold out much hope for any radical change in social affairs. . . . Yet . . . what in some ways is most reactionary in psychoanalysis also holds the seeds of a truly critical practice’ (Frosh 1999: 60). Admittedly, any explicit political goals have remained quite modest for Freud, something reflecting the therapeutic formula of psychoanalysis: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (Freud 1991 [1895]: 305). This therapeutic strategy finds an analogy in what Melanie Klein describes as the—subjective, clinical, and developmental but also ethical and thoroughly political— challenge of passing from what she calls a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ to a ‘depressive’ position. In the former, subjective reality is articulated around the polarized zero-sum opposition, the radical

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split between a ‘bad object’ and a ‘good object’—that is, a ‘good breast’, which is present and is thus assessed positively, and a ‘bad breast’, which is absent and frustrates the satisfaction of the newborn baby; in the latter, it is eventually realized that the object is one and that our relationship to it is always a complex and ambivalent matter (Klein 1975). In turn, Klein’s intuition may encounter its sociopolitical equivalent in what Chantal Mouffe puts forward as the sublimation of the ever-present raw political antagonism into democratic agonism—the continuous challenge of every reflexive democratic political culture. And here, alas, rationalistic fantasies cannot be of any help: ‘a rationalist approach is bound to remain blind to “the political” in its dimension of antagonism and . . . such an omission has very serious consequences for democratic politics’ (Mouffe 2000: 11). Only if the force of the negative—the unconscious, the affective—is properly acknowledged and its implications worked through can analytical and philosophical registers of political studies be reoriented in a truly rigorous and more comprehensive direction. Many significant political theorists explicitly acknowledge the importance of psychoanalysis in this enterprise: If I see rhetoric as ontologically primary in explaining the operations inhering in and the forms taken by the hegemonic construction of society, I see psychoanalysis as the only valid road to explain the drives behind such construction—I see it, indeed, as the only fruitful approach to the understanding of human reality. (Laclau 2004: 326) In effect, politics and the moment of the political can be discerned almost in every sentence of the Freudian corpus, precisely because the psychosocial constitution of subjectivity elevate it into a ubiquitous dimension of our experience: The individual, the ego, and the subject are inconceivable without a theory of a social tie. On this account, politics would be universally and ubiquitously present in Freud’s work, to the point that there would hardly be room for anything else. Not a page of Freud’s wouldn’t imply political consequences. But this account is only possible at the price of a certain equivocation between the social and the political, a certain seamless equation of the two, and one can easily feel that this is not sufficient, that there is a seam to be made. (Dolar 2008: 17) Dolar singles out at least three aspects of this antinomy: ‘the problem of establishing a psychoanalytic institution; the problem of relying on reason or on Eros, libido, as a solution to the social discontents, Unbehagen; and the problem of group psychology and its construction’ (Dolar 2008: 17). Indeed, what is the common thread marking all these three terrains? We can see that all three lines of inquiry intersect at a certain point, although they arrive there by very different ways.The point has been variously named as conflictuality, antagonism, rift, a crack in the social tissue, an excess, the point of ambivalence, untying of social bonds, negativity. This point runs through all of Freud’s works; one can detect it at work in different contexts and under different concepts. One can see it in the conflictual nature of psychoanalytic institutions; one can see it as designated by the death drive or by what Freud calls the primary mass. (Dolar 2008: 28)

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Last but not least, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic political theory, both based on a thoroughly reflexive ethos, are obliged here to assert their particularity and difference from politics tout court. In Dolar’s words, One could put it this way: if psychoanalysis refrains from making a step, from deciding the ambivalence, filling the crack, proposing a new tie for the untied, if there is a missing step where a step would have to be made, then politics makes a step too much. It decides the ambiguity; it proposes a new tie; it engages what Badiou calls fidelity to the event, a subjective stance, a process of truth without a guarantee, a transformation. It turns the negative condition into a positive project, a movement, a party, a militancy. (Dolar 2008: 28) In this sense, then, the productive encounter between psychoanalysis and political theory staged in this volume and informing today a whole academic orientation does not entail any Aufhebung, the harmonious merger between a psychoanalytic orientation and politics itself: ‘psychoanalysis and politics belong together but can never quite meet or converge’ (Dolar 2008: 29). Yet, as the chapters of this handbook will hopefully indicate, this may be the crucial precondition for their dynamic and thoroughly challenging encounter.

Post-Freudians and the Political: The Freudian Left, the Lacanian Left, and Beyond But psychoanalysis is political in many other—more literal—ways as well. On the one hand, it is de facto political internally: it institutes its own community (or communities), the psychoanalytic community, with its membership quarrels, its in-groups and out-groups, its leaders and its bêtes noires, its frontiers and their continuous displacement, its conservatives and its revolutionaries, its civil (and uncivil) wars and its truces, and so on. On the other hand, it is also political externally, as a theoretical, analytical, and strategic resource that soon migrated onto the terrains of political reflection, becoming a potent tool for social and political analysis, progressive strategy, and social change. This is an orientation visible already in Freud and obviously becomes more pronounced with the emergence and establishment of the so-called Freudian Left: Reich, Marcuse, Roheim, and so on.7 Despite the ups and downs, this tradition never lost its dynamism and appeal. Of course, over time, the rather simplistic slogans of sexual liberation gave their place to more nuanced accounts of social and political phenomena, and with the passage from the Freudian to the Lacanian Left8 (Laclau, Žižek, Badiou, etc.), the vocabulary has changed together with the strategic objectives in a political terrain that has seen the global capitalist establishment co-opt enjoyment in its various expressions (sexual, consumerist, etc.). It is against the ambivalent Freudian background that one must understand the early attempts of psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich to account for fascism in psychoanalytic terms (Reich 1970). Likewise, it was to psychoanalysis that the Frankfurt School turned to account for the unexpected lure of Nazi ideology and the ‘failure’ of the Enlightenment project it signaled: What are the forces of personality and what are the processes by which they are organized? For theory as to the structure of personality we have leaned most heavily upon Freud, while for a more or less systematic formulation of the more directly observable and measurable aspects of personality we have been guided primarily by academic psychology. (Adorno et al. 1950: 5)

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This two-way movement between psychoanalysis and political philosophy was subsequently debated under the rubric of the Freudian Left. Indeed, important critical philosophers like ‘Marcuse epitomized the ideas that it was impossible to understand politics without insight into the irrational forces that shaped history and that Freudian thought was incomparably the deepest path we had to such insight’ (Zaretsky 2015: 1). Hence, it is far from an exaggeration to argue that Freudian thought was integral to many if not all of the great progressive currents of the twentieth century, including the cultural rebellions of the 1920s, African American radicalism, surrealism, Popular Front antifascism, the New Left, radical feminism, and queer theory . . . political Freud had an affinity with the left and, at times, with heterodox Marxism. (Zaretsky 2015: 2) In the 1960s, it was once more to psychoanalysis, to the ‘Freudian practice of psychoanalysis’ as recast this time by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Nobus 2000), that Louis Althusser turned to grasp the role of ideology in producing docile social subjects and in limiting the scope of resistance (Althusser 1999). The so-called Lacanian Left, an expanding group of critical theorists and philosophers appreciative of the teaching of Lacan and determined to explore its numerous sociopolitical implications, has since shaped the orientation of contemporary political theory with a dynamism similar to that of the Freudian Left, but with somewhat different preoccupations and priorities (Stavrakakis 2007). Obviously, this partly follows from the different styles of argumentation and exposition present in Freud and Lacan: The question of Lacan’s literary style is in fact fundamental and makes up part of his identity in a crucial way. Freud’s prose, written in a beautiful classical language, is at once dense and clear, seeking an order of exposition that follows the real movement of his thought. Now, Lacan’s stylistics in many ways seem closer to the meanders of the unconscious: it seizes in a statement what precisely escapes every conscious reflexive order. (Badiou in Badiou and Roudinesco 2014: 40) This is a point already captured by Althusser in the 1960s: ‘since he has to teach the theory of the unconscious to doctors, analysts or analysands, in the rhetoric of his speech Lacan provides them with a dumbshow equivalent of the language of the unconscious’ (Althusser 1971: 188). Obviously, the Lacanian Left does not monopolize the whole terrain of contemporary psychosocial theorization, nor does it exhaust the field of the emerging psychoanalytic political theory; other, equally challenging initiatives and arguments have been put forward by authors and researchers working within other psychoanalytic traditions (Kleinian theory, object relations, etc.). This handbook attempts to represent and map as faithfully as possible this multiplicity of approaches and theoretico-conceptual orientations, although the academic salience and broader appeal and the existence of a significant volume of consistent political ‘applications’ inspired and generated by particular currents (e.g., by Lacanian political theory) has also been taken into account to determine a certain balance between them. At the forefront of this new trend in political theory, Slavoj Žižek, for example, has put forward what he often describes as an explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist tradition to question the very presuppositions of the circuit of capital. This comes from the outline of the Wo es war series edited by Žižek for Verso publishers (also, for the ‘founding moment’ of 10

Introduction

his impressive intellectual trajectory, see Žižek 1989). For his part, Alain Badiou has reappropriated Lacan in his radical ethics of the event. Pointing out that ‘Lacanian theory contributes decisive tools to the formulation of a theory of hegemony’, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have included Lacanian psychoanalysis in the list of contemporary theoretical currents necessary ‘for understanding the widening of social struggles characteristic of the present stage of democratic politics, and for formulating a new vision for the Left in terms of radical and plural democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: xi). Indeed, over the past 20 years, psychoanalysis has emerged as one of the most important resources in the ongoing reorientation of contemporary political theory and critical analysis. As we have seen, this is now acknowledged even in mainstream political science fora.The emerging field of psychoanalytic political theory has clearly now reached a stage in its development and rapid evolution that deserves to be registered, systematically defined, and critically evaluated. Indeed, the aim of this handbook is to provide the first reference book that showcases the current state of psychoanalytic political theory, maps the genealogy of its development, identifies its conceptual and methodological resources, and highlights its analytical innovations and its critical promise. Last but not least, the handbook will aim at setting the research agenda for the near future, capturing emerging challenges, and providing students, young academics, and established scholars working in a variety of disciplines with ideas and encouragement for future research activity. This has been made possible by the establishment of similar, earlier initiatives like the foundation of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, with its challenging annual conferences and its vibrant journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, arguably the most important publishing hub on these issues worldwide. But it also signals a dynamism, which is impossible to confine within established institutional boundaries and does not stop surprising us, in terms of new meetings, encounters, and publications.

Organization and Structure of the Handbook This handbook comprises the following five broad thematic sections, each one comprising a number of individual chapters: • Figures. • Traditions. • Concepts. • Themes. • Challenges/Controversies. Let us explain briefly what each section entails. The first section (Figures) will present the political aspects in the work of major psychoanalytic theorists, indicating the presence of a desire to theorize the political within the psychoanalytic milieu itself. Individual chapters are devoted to figures like Freud, Lacan, Klein, Reich, and Jung. Of course, many more could be included (e.g., Erich Fromm and others), but that could risk transforming the handbook into an exhaustive encyclopedia with a very different scope and length. At the same time, the handbook works in an intertextual way, and thus, the important contribution of some additional figures is discussed in subsequent chapters, focusing on traditions or particular concepts (such as Marcuse in the chapter dealing with his work within the broader context of the Freudian Left9 or Ferenczi, whose intervention is placed at the center of the chapter on identification with the aggressor). The list is far from exhaustive, but it serves to set the broad historical background for what is to follow, highlighting the major contributions of Freud himself as well as of some of the most 11

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preeminent post-Freudians, certainly those who have been also associated with contemporary developments in political inquiry. The next section (Traditions) will genealogically recount and critically reassess the many attempts throughout the 20th century to experiment with the articulation between psychoanalysis and political theory, this time from the side of social and political theorists: the so-called Freudian Left (Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, etc.) and the so-called Lacanian Left (Althusser, Jameson, Laclau, Žižek, Badiou, etc.). These encounters have gradually shaped the different traditions or currents in the field of psychoanalytic political theory and beyond, often facilitating the creation of hybrid disciplinary terrains like critical management studies and establishing a lasting dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism, leading into the emergence of a distinct psychoanalytic feminism, which deserves to be discussed at length. The third section (Concepts) focuses on the conceptual apparatus emerging at the intersection of psychoanalysis and political theory. What are the concepts that psychoanalysis offers for appropriation by political theory? How can they be ‘transferred’ from the one field to the other? What is the input anticipated and already registered within psychoanalytic political theory? In this section, we try to deal with the mutual suspicions among social and political theorists, on one hand, and psychoanalysts, on the other, on the confluence between the two orientations. The gap between psychoanalysis as both a praxis and a theory that reflects a praxis, which marks its discursive formulation, and standard academic discourse is also debated. Individual chapters are devoted to categories like identification, narcissism, affect and emotion, fantasy, trauma, and so on. Once more, the list is not exhaustive and reflects the current state and orientations of psychoanalytic political theory. In some cases, where a concept acquires, in psychoanalytic literature, many different inflections, the emphasis has been placed on one that is both original and explicitly political (thus, with regard to ‘identification’, for example, this is debated in the relevant chapter in one of its particular forms, namely ‘identification with the aggressor’). However, other dimensions of this dynamic concept are discussed in other chapters, such as the ones on nationalism or mourning and melancholia (since these are usually defined together, the chapter deals with both concepts in their mutual co-constitution, something applying to some other concepts as well: superego and the law, affect and emotions, etc.). The same applies to the ‘subject’, which is discussed through the rubric of collective subjectivity. The relevant chapter covers the basics of subjectivity in Freud and Lacan and its hugely important, from a political perspective, collective aspect. Likewise, other dimensions of this important concept are discussed in many other chapters. The reader should also keep in mind that what is missing is particular chapters devoted to certain central concepts (e.g., the unconscious, repression, jouissance); but this has solely to do with the fact that some of these foundational concepts are unavoidably discussed in many other chapters due to their centrality and axial importance (the first two aforementioned central psychoanalytic categories are already presented and discussed in detail in the opening chapter on Freud; as for jouissance, it inevitably crops up in many chapters drawing on a Lacanian orientation). This section also takes into account and registers the opposite dynamic. If we can indeed pass from the side of psychoanalytic concepts to that of political ones, are there, in addition, any standard political concepts that have been rigorously rethought, re-signified, and revitalized from a psychoanalytic perspective? Categories associated with the core problematic of political theory, the conceptualization of power relations (law, aggression, discourse, organization, hegemony, etc.), obviously belong to this rubric. How can psychoanalysis illuminate the various dimensions of power relations? This section—and the next—will also engage with the whole conceptual apparatus related to issues around collective and political identity (group, mass, race, people, nation, etc.). Starting from the traditional approach of Freud to the constitution of the group, 12

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we will follow the relevant work up until recent attempts to think about popular identities and populism from a psychoanalytic point of view. The fourth section (Themes) introduces many pressing sociopolitical issues that are illuminated through the psychoanalytic conceptual apparatus; in this sense, this section presents concrete examples of how psychoanalytic political theory can be productively applied in the analysis of racism, sexuality and gender, nationalism, capitalism, consumerism, art, and so on. At the same time, this orientation has been at the forefront of articulating innovative theoretico-political responses to events and trends that have shaken established norms and paradigms; some of them (immigration and refugee crisis, the rise of populism, economic crisis, etc.) seem to merit special attention within the context of such a handbook as this. Besides charting the genealogy and the main signposts in its development, presenting its major conceptual contributions and highlighting their analytical implications and potential, the Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory must also attempt to map the major theoretical and analytical challenges and controversies that the field is already facing or is bound to face in the near future. The scope of its last section (Challenges/Controversies) will stretch back to capture how psychoanalytic political theory has assumed the challenges of the linguistic and the affective turn leading the way in theoretical innovation in both these fields and will then extend into the challenges of new materialist, biopolitical theories and neoliberal, environmental, post-political, and posthuman realities. Enjoy!

Notes 1. On the technical and more clinical aspects of psychoanalysis, see Etchegoyen 1991; Fink 1997 and 2007; as well as Hinshelwood 2003. 2. To these one should probably add one more that seems to animate all of them, the ethical—not moral or moralistic—orientation of psychoanalysis: Just as there is a strict correlation between psychoanalytic theory and technique and investigation, so the relation between ethics and technique also arises in a singular manner in psychoanalysis. It can even be said that ethics are a part of the technique, or, in another way, that what gives sense and coherence to the technical norms of psychoanalysis are its ethical roots. Ethics are integrated into the scientific theory of psychoanalysis not as a simple moral aspiration but as a necessity of its praxis. (Etchegoyen 1991: 11) On the ethics of psychoanalysis and its political implications from a Lacanian perspective, see Stavrakakis 1999, ch. 5, ‘Ambiguous Democracy and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis’. Also see, in this respect, Zupancic 2000. 3 . Affinities with what, in his late work, Louis Althusser has put forward as a ‘materialism of the encounter’ are not entirely coincidental (Althusser 2006). 4. The following (introductory) dictionaries can offer a first take on the conceptual constellation put forward by psychoanalysis and on the continuities and differences between major psychoanalytic traditions: Laplanche and Pontalis 1988 [1973], Hinshelwood 1989, and Evans 1996. 5. Politics is traditionally conceived as constituting a separate system or subsystem of a social totality: the political system—and it is expected to stay within the spatial frontiers of this system. Thus, we usually expect to find politics in the arenas prescribed for it in the hegemonic discourse of liberal democracies; parliament, parties, trade unions, and so on, and we expect it to be performed by the accordingly sanctioned agents (Beck 1997: 98). To also register the moment of the political is to be alert to the ever-present possibility that a previously non-political social relationship or social arrangement may be dynamically politicized, becoming the locus of a novel political antagonism. In the last century, issues like the environment, gender, and racial hierarchies have emerged as the terrains of such contestation by previously excluded and marginalized political subjects. The choreography between politics and the political has preoccupied political philosophy from the ambivalent legacy of Carl Schmitt (2007) to the challenging theorizations of Claude Lefort (1986), Chantal Mouffe (1993), Jacques Rancière (1999),

13

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6. 7 . 8. 9.

and Ernesto Laclau (1990). For a detailed analysis of the distinction between politics and the political, the relevance of psychoanalysis in conceptualizing this opposition in a rigorous way, and its importance for psychoanalytic political theory, see Stavrakakis 1999, esp. ch. 3, ‘Politics vs. the Political’. Elias explicitly registers Freud’s influence in the most categorical manner throughout his work: ‘In this connection it scarcely needs to be said, but is perhaps worth emphasizing explicitly, how much this study owes to the discoveries of Freud and the psychoanalytical school’ (Elias 2000 [1939]: 527). See, in this respect, Robinson 1967, who seems to have coined this phrase. This is the symmetrical, analogous concept introduced in Stavrakakis 2007. Focusing primarily on Marcuse becomes easier since a whole chapter is devoted to Reich in the first section of the handbook.

References Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. and Nevitt Sanford, R. (1982 [1950]) The Authoritarian Personality, abridged edn., New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Freud and Lacan’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books. Althusser, L. (1999) Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, New York: Columbia University Press. Althusser, L. (2006) Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, London: Verso. Badiou, A. and Roudinesco, E. (2014) Jacques Lacan, Past & Present, a Dialogue, New York: Columbia University Press. Beck, U. (1997) The Reinvention of Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Bocock, R. (2002) Sigmund Freud, revised ed., Key Sociologists Series, London: Routledge. Cohen, P. (2007) ‘Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department’, The New York Times, 25 November, 46. Danil, L.R. (2018) ‘Freud the Socialist, Freud the Revolutionary’, Verso blog, www.versobooks.com/ blogs/3964-freud-the-socialist-freud-the-revolutionary (accessed 17 December 2018). Danto, E.A. (2005) Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1987) The Post-card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dolar, M. (2008) ‘Freud and the Political’, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, 4(15), 15–29. Elias, N. (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process, revised ed., Oxford: Blackwell. Etchegoyen, R.H. (1991) The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, London: Karnac Books. Evans, D. (1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Fink, B. (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis:Theory and Technique, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fink, B. (2007) Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practicioners, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Freud, S. (1950 [1927]) An Autobiographical Study, fifth impression, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Freud, S. (1955 [1921]) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, Oxford: Macmillan, 65–144. Freud, S. (1957 [1915]) ‘The Unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, ii–viii, 159–215. Freud, S. (1991 [1895]) ‘Studies on Hysteria’, vol. 2, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Frosh, S. (1999) The Politics of Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed., Houndmills: Macmillan. Gay, P. (1985) Freud for Historians, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1989) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, London: Free Association Books. Hinshelwood, R.D. (2003) Clinical Klein: From Theory to Practice, New York: Basic Books. Jacobsen, K. (2009) Freud’s Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science, and Resistance, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Klein, M. (1975) Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Kuhn, T. (1996 [1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Introduction Lacan, J. (1977 [1966]) Écrits: A Selection, London: Tavistock/Routledge. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London:Verso. Laclau, E. (2004) ‘Glimpsing the Future’, in Critchley, Simon and Marchart, Oliver (eds.) The Laclau Critical Reader, Abingdon: Routledge, 279–327. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001) ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed., London: Verso. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1988 [1973]) The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books. Layton, L. (2013) ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics: Historicising Subjectivity’, Mens Sana Monogr., www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653236/ (accessed 13 December 2018). Layton, L., Hollander, N. and Gutwill, S. (2006) Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting, New York: Routledge. Lear, J. (2005) Freud, Routledge Philosophers series, Abingdon: Routledge. Lefort, C. (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society, Thompson, J. (ed. with intro.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcuse, H. (1974 [1955]) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mouffe, C. (1993) The Return of the Political, London:Verso. Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London:Verso. Nobus, D. (2000) Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Nobus, D. (n.d.) ‘Answers by Dany Nobus’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, www.journal-psychoanalysis. eu/answers-by-dany-nobus/ (accessed 13 December 2018). Rancière, J. (1999) Dis-agreement, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reich, W. (1970 [1933]) The Mass Psychology of Fascism, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud: An Essay on Interpretation, New Haven:Yale University Press. Roazen, P. (2002) The Trauma of Freud, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Roazen, P. (2016) Encountering Freud:The Histories and Politics of Psychoanalysis, New Brunswick:Transaction Publishers. Robinson, A. (2004) ‘The Politics of Lack’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6(2), 259–269. Robinson, P. (1967) The Freudian Left, New York: Harper and Row. Roudinesco, E. (2016) Freud in His Time and Ours, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E. (2004) Freud and the Non-European, London:Verso. Schmitt, C. (2007 [1932]) The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schuster, A. (2016) The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stavrakakis,Y. (1999) Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge. Stavrakakis,Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left, Albany: SUNY Press. Zaretsky, E. (2015) Political Freud, New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2009) The Fragile Absolute: Or,Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, London: Verso. Zupančič, A. (2000) Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, London:Verso.

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PART I

Figures

1 SIGMUND FREUD Stephen Frosh

The development of psychoanalysis in its early days—and arguably always—was dominated by Freud’s thought. Freud was the originator of psychoanalytic knowledge, its dispenser and its dominant figure, shadowing all that has come since. Every nuance of his speaking and writing has been pored over for its implications for psychosocial understanding, and his attitudes and prejudices, as well as his insights, have become an indispensable (or inescapable) background for understanding many aspects of the sociopolitical landscape. This chapter examines the political ‘philosophy’ that can be found in Freud’s work and addresses the question of what tools this work makes available for political theory.

Conservative, Liberal, Radical Freud was not primarily a political thinker, but his theories, actions, and affiliations nevertheless allow for a great variety of political readings, ranging from traditional and patriarchal to those best understood as radical, or at least ‘critical’. His personal beliefs were certainly conservative: he was suspicious of Bolshevism and feminism (Roudinesco 2016; Makari 2008) and resistant to incorporating Marxist—or really any—political ideas into psychoanalysis. This resistance was explicit in the 1930s, when he supported the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich from the German Psychoanalytic Society on the grounds that, as Anna Freud put it in the name of her father, ‘psychoanalysis has no part in politics’ (Steiner 2000: 128). On the other hand, Freud’s awareness of the unequal conditions of social life was acute, driven in part by his personal experience of antiSemitism but also by simple observation of the conditions of suffering that lay outside what on the face of it was his narrowly bourgeois circle of contacts. Once the First World War had dashed any hopes that he and others like him might have had that, as he put it in The Future of an Illusion, ‘infantilism is destined to be surmounted’ (Freud 1927: 48)—or more to the point, that destructiveness might be a secondary phenomenon and that the enlightenment project might eventually succeed—Freud became increasingly aware of privation and the necessity for psychoanalysis to contribute to a social reformist project. His speech to the Budapest Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1918 ended on a note that was stirring, effective, and true: Compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world, and perhaps need not be, the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible. . . . On 19

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the other hand, it is possible to foresee that at some time or other the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. When this happens, institutions or out-patient clinics will be started, to which analytically-trained physicians will be appointed, so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work. Such treatments will be free. (Freud 1919a: 166–167) It is noteworthy how clearly Freud lays out the relationship between material privation (‘the poor man’) and neurotic suffering and how contingent this is: there is a ‘vast amount of neurotic misery . . . in the world’ that ‘perhaps need not be’. That is, misery is unnecessary; or rather—because Freud did not believe that people were capable of prolonged happiness—the quantity of misery was not determined by the propensities of the human psyche. ‘Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience’, he wrote (Freud 1930: 76–77). And early on, in Studies on Hysteria, he had set up an interlocutor who asked him, ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ To which Freud famously replied, ‘You will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (Freud 1893: 305). Still, as can be seen from the 1918 speech, Freud did think something could be done: struggling people ‘may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance and of efficient work’. What is meant by these proposed outcomes? ‘Work’ is clear: in Freud’s usage, it literally means work, something productive but also the capacity to sublimate, to contribute in a positive way to society. Sublimation is the other side of repression: in both cases, the unconscious wish is in some way transformed, but in repression it emerges as a symptom, in sublimation as a creative act. But resistance? This is usually seen as what has to be overcome in psychoanalysis. Resistance is the opposition experienced in the analytic situation to progress, to the subject understanding herself or himself fully in the light of unconscious life. Freud himself, as his thinking developed, was led to differentiate between a number of different types, or at least sources, of resistance, including resistances of the ego and of the id and those due to ‘secondary gain’. But the most interesting for political purposes is perhaps that arising from the operation of the superego, the ‘part’ of the mind in which guilt is held and which is constantly appealing for punishment. This is a source of one frustrating reality of psychoanalysis: patients can come seeking help but then reject it when it is offered, because they do not feel they deserve it. For Jacqueline Rose (2007), the title of whose book The Last Resistance plays neatly on the tension between psychoanalytic and political resistance, this type of resistance is the most important one for political analysis, the most ‘deadly, because it arises out of the pleasure the mind takes in thwarting itself. . . . Freud is talking about the superego—the exacting, ruthless and punishing instance of the mind through which the law exerts its pressure on the psyche’ (31). That is, this kind of resistance is the one which is most embedded in the subject, the one which arises not only out of a fear of change but also out of the sheer pleasure of resistance itself, the enjoyment that comes out of the investment of psychic energy in destroying the opportunities for progress. This is clearly not the kind of resistance that Freud is referring to; he seems to mean something 20

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like ‘resistance to the circumstances of life, to socially induced suffering’—hence, a political form of resistance that is in tension with the psychoanalytic idea of resistance as an interference with the capacity to live life to the fullest. The slippage between these two types of resistance is of considerable political importance. However ubiquitous psychoanalytic resistance might be, and however much humans might be programmed for unhappiness rather than lasting pleasure, for Freud, it seems that well-being requires resistance to the injustices perpetrated by a society that creates unnecessary suffering. Freud’s 1918 speech fell on fertile ground, in that many of the analysts who heard it were social democrats, sick of the suffering of war and of the corrupt politics that had brought it about. It was seminal in provoking the analysts into action, with the result that ‘free’ psychoanalytic clinics were formed in Berlin,Vienna, Budapest, and London, aiming to offer high-quality psychoanalytic treatment to all who needed it. Moreover, as Elizabeth Danto (2005) documents, Freud was deeply committed in the1920s to the liberal or social-democratic cause, however much he was also concerned that psychoanalysis itself should retain its neutrality as a ‘science’. Danto (2005: 13) presents the context of Freud’s speech: Until the end of his life Freud supported free psychoanalytic clinics, stood up for the flexible fee, and defended the practice of lay analysis, all substantive deviations for a tradition of physician’s privilege and their patients’ dependence. His consistent loathing of the United States as ‘the land of the dollar barbarians’ echoed his contempt for a medical attitude he believed to be more American than European, more conservative than social democratic. The history, traced by Danto, of psychoanalytic free clinics in the 1920s and 1930s—the Polyclinic in Berlin, the Ambulatorium in Vienna, and the Clinic of Psychoanalysis in London are prime instances—is a practical example of how psychoanalysis tried to maintain a socialegalitarian perspective, at least in Europe, despite all the pressures on it. Freud treated many patients for free during the 1920s (charging exorbitant prices to his American patients to crosssubsidize this), and other analysts, out of purely ideological motives, committed themselves to financial contributions and voluntary work to sustain the clinics. The idea of political neutrality could never be absolute anyway, given how the restrictions of any society affect the well-being of its citizens. For example, Freud’s (1908) paper ‘ “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, with its argument that neurosis is in large part caused by the hypocritical relations governing sexuality, can be understood as an intervention in the social and political mores of his time. In this relatively early paper, written well before he gave any systematic account of society, Freud made it clear that there might be a general problem with any form of socially induced renunciation: It is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a pitch that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well. (Freud 1908: 180) Notably, Freud refers with irony to ‘civilized’ sexual morality—that is, the problem is not due to exceptional sexual restrictions but is built into the structure of ‘civilization’. As Freud considers the actions of society (‘civilization’) in its various ‘stages of development’ toward 21

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regulating sexuality and restricting it to monogamous marriage, he retains a highly critical stance, seeing this regulation as the source of neurosis in social life and also as damaging of society itself: But even if the damage done by civilized sexual morality is admitted, it may be argued . . . that the cultural gain derived from such an extensive restriction of sexuality probably more than balances these sufferings, which, after all, only affect a minority in any severe form. I must confess that I am unable to balance gain against loss correctly on this point, but I could advance a great many more considerations on the side of the loss. Going back to the subject of abstinence. . . . I must insist that it brings in its train other noxae besides those involved in the neuroses and that the importance of the neuroses has for the most part not been fully appreciated. (195) The spread of neurosis under the conditions of Freud’s society is attributed to the impossible demands made by the hypocritical sexual morality of that time; and although Freud is cautious about making political suggestions as a consequence, he is pretty clear about the implications of his analysis. The restrictiveness of ‘civilized’ morality rebounds on society as a whole, corrupting it and creating misery for its subjects. In this moment, we might also see a space opening up for a gendered set of political implications. Freud’s early clinical work in psychoanalysis was focused especially on female hysteria, and although there are plenty of examples of his adherence to a conventionally patriarchal and paternalistic set of attitudes around feminine ‘irrationality’, there is also a striking repositioning of the centrality of the ‘doctor’ as the one who hears the plea in hysteria as a sexual plea arising from inhibition and repression that themselves have strongly social sources.With everything else that goes on in his texts, including a colonizing impulse that makes irrationality and femininity (often run together) subject to psychoanalysis’ expert understanding, Freud’s ‘act of listening represents an effort to include the irrational discourse of femininity in the realm of science’ (Moi 1989: 197).That is, he gives the voice of feminine sexuality a space in which it can be heard and recognized as saying something of importance—notably, here, that women have desires and that these are repressed under ‘civilized’ social conditions.

Repression, Aggression The tension around the issue of resistance is characteristic of how many Freudian notions have ambiguous implications for political thought. Perhaps most important, because the concept concerned is most central to psychoanalysis in that it establishes the necessity of the unconscious, is the concept of repression. Without repression, there is no unconscious. Famously, Freud’s (1923: 15) formula for their relationship runs, ‘The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us’, highlighting the dynamism of his system, in which unconscious material is refused entry to consciousness by an active process of censorship. As already noted, there is an important relationship between repression and sublimation. In both cases, following the standard Freudian model, an unconscious entity—a wish or idea—is kept from consciousness by defensive forces. This is a tiring process for the ‘I’, the ego where the defenses are located, demanding constant scrutiny and activity, interminable guarding of the city of the mind against breaches of its walls. In sublimation, the situation is resolved by the conversion of the repudiated unconscious idea into something acceptable in the light of day: an artistic creation, a piece of writing, or a set of activities that may be fueled by sexual or aggressive forces but that are nevertheless constructive 22

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and socially congruent. In repression, however, the continuing defense is one that is caught up in a series of substitutive processes that remain hidden and troubling. An idea is repressed, but the affect attached to it is relocated into another idea, and as the particularities of this shift so does the pressure for direct expression of the originally repressed idea become greater and greater, until neurotic compromises ensue. The question here is whether repression of this psychological kind is linked to political repression, or at least is a model for thinking about it. For some of the classic Freudo-Marxists of the mid 20th century, it certainly could be considered that way, either naturalistically, as in Norman Brown’s (1959: 3) formulation that ‘In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual and the essence of the individual is repression of himself ’, or in Herbert Marcuse’s (1955/1966: 11) Marxist version (and that of several other members of the so-called Freudian Left influenced by him—Robinson 1990): ‘According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression’. Marcuse went on to develop a sophisticated set of individual-social parallels focused on the idea of ‘surplus’ repression as that which conditions of domination adds to what is the necessary, base-level repression required for any society to function. But even in the simpler version given by Freud, although it is clear that repression is a psychological phenomenon referring to what goes on ‘within’ the individual, it is also apparent that this has social resonances and even causes. This issue comes to the fore in Freud’s relatively late ‘sociological’ text, Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1930), which can be seen as his most explicit engagement with social and sociological issues. This proposes a foundational opposition between the demands of the pleasure principle, identified as the ‘purpose of life’, and the ‘world’ with which it is ‘at loggerheads’ (75).This is first because pleasure is an instantaneous event derived from the reduction of tension and cannot be sustained, whereas suffering (‘unpleasure’) continues for all the rest of the time. Additionally, people are faced with the threat that comes from nature, from their own bodily frailties, and most importantly from other people. It is as a consequence of this last factor that civilization emerges as a way to regulate interpersonal interactions so that the social order ceases to be characterized solely by domination through brute strength. Such regulation is necessary, but it also produces dissatisfaction; and the many shows of ‘hostility’ toward society that are evident throughout history and in contemporary times are testaments to the continuing trace of the pre-civilized impulse to indulge in unregulated wish fulfillment. ‘The liberty of the individual’, writes Freud (1930: 94–95), is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it.The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. What makes itself felt in a human community as a desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and so may prove favourable to a further development of civilization; it may remain compatible with civilization. But it may also spring from the remains of their original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis in them of hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. Note that even in this passage, which stresses how the essence of society and the essence of individual desire are opposed to one another, Freud allows important space for the situation in which there is ‘some existing injustice’; that is to say, the ‘desire for freedom’ and the ‘revolt’ of people might be a way to advance civilization in the sense of improving it. On the other hand, 23

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society is a process of control and limitation of the individual in the interests of the group, and there is no way around this even in the most liberal or permissive social situation. Revolting against this necessary aspect of society is not a sign of personal or social health; it is rather an atavistic expression of the ‘untamed’, pre-social period of humanity, and so nowadays destructive. This perspective had a lasting impact on some influential psychoanalytic radicals—for example, as reflected in Brown’s (1959: 9) formula that ‘man is the animal that represses himself and which creates culture or society in order to repress himself ’; history, in the sense of the development of human collectivity, is neurosis, but much of this neurosis is necessary if humanity itself is to survive.

Destructive Drives The pessimistic implications of Freud’s adoption of the individual-collective opposition are obvious and on the face of it also undermine the possibility of a radical psychoanalytic politics. In this view, society will always be restrictive, suppressive of individual desire; ‘internally’, this will lead to an economy of repression, in which what is most profoundly wished for is also most deeply unavailable. In a way, the story of another central psychoanalytic notion, the Oedipus complex, ostensibly the most ‘social’ of Freudian ideas because it marks the process by which desire is regulated by the external ‘law’, simply aggravates this situation. Civilization is built on the renunciation of incestuous desire but also on the internalization of the social aggression that makes that renunciation necessary. This internalization materializes in the form of the superego, which is the inward registration of paternal violence; the superego judges and commands, and it acts aggressively to do so. The superego thus describes a mode of psychic activity that does violence to the subject and is often projected to then do violence to others as well. The superego is tightly connected to the social order, as Freud (1930) notes in his famous formulation, in which he describes it as ‘like a garrison in a conquered city’ (124), a formulation that implies an intimate connection between ‘the city’ and the mind, with the garrison being a code for how something from ‘outside’ colonizes inner space. More ‘structurally’, the oedipal father stands in for the law. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973: 286) write, concerning the anthropological critique of the universality of the Oedipus complex, In practice, when confronted with the cultures in question, psycho-analysts have merely tried to ascertain which social roles—or even which institutions—incarnate the proscriptive agency, and which social modes specifically express the triangular structure constituted by the child, the child’s natural object and the bearer of the law. This ‘structuralizing’ of the Oedipus complex is a crucial move for political thought. Whereas most of the clinical attention paid to the Oedipus complex emphasizes the personal relations that engender it—the reality of each child’s encounter with the limits of its power and the generational and gender differences that inform these limits—its political resonance lies more in its postulation that these relations are themselves held within a structure of law that allows and prohibits, that encourages transgression and punishes it. It also attends to the way these social forces become ‘internalized’; that is, they are experienced by their subjects as irrevocable, even ‘natural’, and they create the subject as a self-scrutinizing, self-regulating citizen. Punitiveness and violence are taken in from a social order that trades in violence and that enforces its prohibitions with a distinct threat. This process is essential for sustaining that social order for two related reasons. First, it provokes subjects to regulate themselves, thus freeing society from the requirement to become so authoritarian that the only way for people to survive would be to 24

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rebel. Second, it means that individuals are constituted as social subjects; they have the ‘effects’ of society ‘inside’ them in the form of the superego. Violence continued to exercise Freud well into the 1930s. In 1933, with the storm clouds of Nazism looming, Albert Einstein persuaded him to collaborate in an exchange of letters under the aegis of the League of Nations, to explain why wars occur, and to reflect on the possibilities for peace. Published under the title Why War? this exchange opened with Einstein acknowledging that his training as a physicist gave him little understanding of the answer to the title’s question and deferring to Freud as the expert in psychology who might be able to throw light on the ‘psychological obstacles’ to peace, ‘whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom’ (199). Noting the perseveration of militarism and the lack of success in what might appear to be the simplest way to deal with the threat of war—the setting up by international agreement of a ‘legislative and judicial body’—Einstein (200) could only conclude that there were at work ‘strong psychological factors . . . which paralyze these efforts’. What might these be? Clearly, ideology was operating, refracted through the media, education, and Church (201), but why should the masses be so easy to sway, particularly when the effect could be their personal destruction? Here, Einstein’s letter takes a specifically Freudian turn: it invokes the death drive. Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times, this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve. (Einstein and Freud 1933: 201) Freud seems to have been taken aback by Einstein’s psychological tack. [You] have said almost all there is to say on the subject. But though you have taken the wind out of my sails I shall be glad to follow in your wake and content myself with confirming all you have said by amplifying it to the best of my knowledge—or conjecture. (Einstein and Freud 1933: 203) Freud then goes on to offer a rather convoluted account of the death drive. This includes the complex idea that the death drive, which is primarily an inner compulsion to return to rest, a kind of nirvana-urge, becomes a drive toward destructiveness when it is turned outwards, and that this happens in order to protect the ‘organism’ (i.e., the individual) from its own internal dissolution: ‘The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one’. Given its biological basis, ‘there is no use trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations’, notes Freud (211); rather, one has to work on ‘encouraging the growth of emotional ties between men’ as the only way to oppose war. This apparently simple exchange over the inherence of destructiveness to the human psyche is not as straightforward as it might seem. The death drive has hardly been treated as commonsensical by analysts themselves, many of whom—including Freud’s daughter Anna—have tried to dispense with it. It is also too easy to explain away the theory of the death drive as if it were invented by Freud solely out of his despair at the Great War, though this was to a considerable extent true, as the examples of war neurosis and traumatic dreams mentioned in Beyond 25

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the Pleasure Principle (the book in which the death drive is formally introduced) make clear (Freud 1920). Instead, the concept of the death drive is a powerful, non-obvious, indeed nonconsensual idea with two major elements to it. One is the ‘nirvana’ principle that Freud (1920: 56) refers to, characterized by the pull of the subject toward inactivity and complete rest—the characterization of the death drive that Freud first emphasized. The other is the death drive as a more active principle of destructiveness. It appears in this guise particularly in Freud’s later writings, for example at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents: The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result? (Freud 1930: 144) Even without the last sentence, which as the editors to the Standard Edition note ‘was added in 1931—when the menace of Hitler was already beginning to be apparent’, it is clear in this passage that the death drive is being personalized as a ‘Heavenly Power’ with the capacity to wipe out everything. It takes the form of the ‘human instinct of aggression and self-destruction’ and is as terrifying for the human subject as it is portentous for the world as a whole. The death drive could be viewed as simply another element in Freud’s increasingly bitter, ironic aging process and as part of a pessimistic sociopolitical theory that could see little good come of anything human. To some extent this is true, although we should also note that the miserable end of Civilization and Its Discontents is lightened somewhat by the idea that Eros—the life drive—might be a source of resistance (in this instance of the political rather than the psychoanalytic variety). Also, Freud’s last great ‘anthropological’ text, Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939), offers quite remarkably fertile terrain for political adoption that belies its rather embarrassing reputation.The argument for the value of Moses and Monotheism is complex and has been taken up in a number of works by important thinkers, two of the most notable of which are the slim texts by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1991) and Edward Said (2003). Moses and Monotheism, which was written from 1933 onward and finally published in its entirety in 1939, after Freud had moved to London, explores the origin of Judaism as a monotheistic religion through an examination of the personhood and mythology of the biblical figure of Moses. It draws heavily on the mythopoeic structure laid down by Freud over 20 years previously, in the heat of his breakup with Carl Jung, in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1913). In that earlier text, Freud had conjured up a primeval world with an original ‘primal father’ who possesses all the women in his troop or ‘horde’ and is murdered and then eaten by his sons. Because the sons feel not only hate for their father but also love, the murder haunts them and encourages them, out of guilt and remorse, to set the father up as a ‘totem’ and to incorporate his terror in them. As with the development of the individual’s superego, what had been an external authority is incorporated internally as a sense of guilt, more powerful and unassailable for all that. In addition, to prevent a repetition of the primal situation, the brothers, under the shadow of the totem, impose certain rules on themselves to regulate their relations and restrain their passions. Freud uses this both as a ‘just-so’ 26

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story to account for the origins of civilization and as a model for his notions of acquired inheritance: in every generation, the same ambivalence toward the primal father, the same sense of guilt and murderous envy, is present in every human subject. These intergenerational links are insufficiently explained by overt modes of social transmission; rather, there is an inherited disposition to repeat the traumatic original event, triggered into action by some experience in the actual life of the individual concerned. The important point is that every generation opens up a communicational channel through which the original traumatic killing of the father is passed down.

Primitivity, Archaic Remains, and Returns There are many problems with Totem and Taboo: ‘scientific’ (the lack of much evidence for Freud’s historical and genetic claims) and more importantly, from the point of view of Freudian ‘politics’, ideological. Totem and Taboo, subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, is a transparently colonial text, replete with assumptions that are built around a savage/civilized binary which is deeply rooted in racist assumptions about non-Western people and their cultures. For example, at the beginning of Totem and Taboo, Freud makes a direct statement about the ‘primitivity’ of certain peoples—meaning, given the context of his time and the sources on which he draws, black Africans and Australasian Indigenous people: There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a wellpreserved picture of an early stage of our own development. (Freud 1913: 1) Freud also was explicit about how savages share attributes with children, in terms of how they think and how they are thought about by ‘we adults’. In Freud’s thought, savage societies hold to various types of irrational thinking (concreteness, mystical attitudes to death, etc.), processes reviewed throughout Totem and Taboo and explicitly linked with children in more civilized societies. As has now been explored in many places (Brickman 2003; Frosh 2013), this classic racist and colonialist set of assumptions about the primitive other leaves traces in the theoretical and practical edifices of psychoanalysis and has not been easy to escape. In Freud’s usage, as ever, the situation is complicated by a move that turns things on its head. The issue of primitivism is not restricted to the primitive subject: as became more and more apparent from the outset of World War I onward, everyone is primitive at heart. The unconscious operates in every human subject, and the social expression of this is that we can have no confidence in any society—however apparently civilized—to keep its destructive elements at bay. Psychoanalysis reveals this and is consequently a radical opponent of the primitive/civilized distinction. Indeed, the point of the primal horde myth is that it suggests how in every generation, the same primitive battles are fought, with the consequence that the alternative idea embraced by Freud, that ‘infantilism is destined to be surmounted’ (Freud 1927: 48), becomes an untenable claim. By the time of Moses and Monotheism, the archaic heritage hypothesis had hardened and been made more specific. Here the primal father is Moses, the murder of whom by the Hebrews is given more psychic force because it is a recapitulation of the original murder of the father of the primal horde. Freud argued that the Moses of the Exodus who liberated the band of slaves was an Egyptian monotheist; the impossible demands he then placed on his new people led to them murdering him. However, the guilt attached to this percolated down through the generations. 27

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When a second Moses arose, the two stories were then amalgamated to give the biblical myth. What is important in this wild account, deeply held by Freud but already known by him to be extravagantly speculative, is that the killing of Moses is the traumatic moment that fixes Jewish identity in place. Every Jew, no matter how assimilated or distanced from the specifics of the tradition, has inherited the psychic memory of the event, and it is this that pulls Jews together and away from others, eliciting envious anti-Semitism in those around them. More generally, what Freud is working on here is a set of questions about the atavistic elements both of trauma (the killing of the father) and of identity (the continuing hold of the past over the present). While this might once again seem unpromising terrain for a political reading of Freud, it has offered a great deal to those wishing to mine it for progressive implications, in particular in relation to Said’s (2003) argument that the election of Moses to Egyptian status is a way for Freud to reveal the ‘brokenness’ at the heart of all identities. In this regard, he praises Freud’s profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—for him, this was the Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity. (53) Which is to say, Freud’s attempt to lay out a theory of transgenerational transmission, dealing with the questions of trauma and identity, leads on to a surprisingly open politics. This openness is born from recognition of trauma and destruction—which is what the death drive deals with, after all—accompanied by a set of questions about what can ever be new, in a culture or in psychoanalysis.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the ambiguous relationship of Freud’s thinking to political ideas. On the one hand, he presents a normalizing and pessimistic vision of the prospects for an emancipatory politics. The death drive, the built-in contradiction between individual desire and social possibility, and the emphasis on the debilitating hypocrisies of a civilization that is opposed only by savagery do not seem promising routes for progressive political thought. On the other hand, political philosophy is potentially radicalized by Freud’s characterization of the excessive restrictiveness and violence of society, his clear feeling for social suffering and belief in the possibility of psychoanalytic enlightenment to oppose this, and his radical formulation of the openness of social being produced by the polyvalent nature of the unconscious. Even the late, speculative notion of what might now be called transgenerational transmission of trauma and identity has some important possibilities for progressive psychosocial practice. To clarify this point, we need to recall that psychoanalysis is in large part a theory and practice of repetition. The ‘compulsion to repeat’ features heavily in Freud’s later work, from The Uncanny onward (Freud 1919b) but especially centrally in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It describes a tendency toward ‘return’ in all things and so is linked to the idea of the death drive as an inescapable, preprogrammed, biological entity. But it also describes a process in which what appears to be lost is potentially recoverable—sometimes against our will but sometimes in the service of new possibilities. Here, recent reworkings of Freud’s notion of ‘melancholia’ might be relevant. Freud (1917) describes melancholia as a process of failed mourning, in which loss remains unrecognized and therefore ungrievable. Traditionally, this is seen as a pathological 28

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state, in which the subject is made incapable of moving on by an unconscious fixation on the lost object. Mourning, by contrast, is a process through which past losses are incorporated into the psyche, allowing growth to occur—a model that also has useful analogies with potentially recuperative political responses to suffering, violence, and loss. As Judith Butler (1997) has influentially pointed out, however, there are also some radical prospects implicit in the idea of melancholia. The possibility is that the ‘lost objects’ that are not mourned are also in an important way not disposed of but instead can lurk and perhaps return as a critical challenge to the existing psychopolitical order. Unlike mourning, in which the lost object is ‘lost again’ by being assimilated into the psyche, the melancholic object stays as it was, returning to confront the formation that the ego has taken on. As Butler and some others have read it, this means both that there is a melancholic component to all identity formations (she is specifically concerned with those of gender, but racialized formations are the focus of postcolonial work along the same lines—e.g., Eng and Han 2000) and that there is a way that the act of political recovery can begin with the recognition and reassertion of what has previously been lost through subjugation, denial, and political and psychological ‘repression’.That is, Freud’s model once again has roots in a conservative tendency (everything returns, there is nothing new under the sun, etc.) and subverts this tendency through the multiple readings it makes possible. Specifically, the Freudian model that emphasizes how lost objects are ‘taken in’ to the psyche to become part of the ego offers a vivid way of understanding how political and social structures are lived as real by their subjects (they inhabit the mind ‘like a garrison’) and through that of how they might be revived as a source of resistance and political change.

References Brickman, C. (2003) Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, N. (1959) Life Against Death, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Danto, E. (2005) Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, New York: Columbia University Press. Einstein, A. and Freud, S. (1933) ‘Why War?’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932–1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 195–216. Eng, D. and Han, S. (2000) ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10, 667–700. Freud, S. (1893) ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria from Studies on Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria, 253–305. Freud, S. (1908) ‘ “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume IX (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 177–204. Freud, S. (1913) ‘Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913 [1912–13])’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIII (1913–1914):Totem and Taboo and Other Works, vii–162. Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237–258. Freud, S. (1919a) ‘Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 157–168. Freud, S. (1919b) The ‘Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–256. Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1–64. Freud, S. (1923) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XIX (1923–1925):The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 1–66.

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Stephen Frosh Freud, S. (1927) ‘The Future of an Illusion’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, 1–56. Freud, S. (1930) ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, 57–146. Freud, S. (1939) ‘Moses and Monotheism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1–138. Frosh, S. (2013) ‘Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33, 141–154. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press. Makari, G. (2008) Revolution in Mind, London: Duckworth. Marcuse, H. (1955/1966) Eros and Civilisation, Boston: Beacon Press. Moi, T. (1989) ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge’, in Brennan, T. (ed.) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Robinson, P. (1990) The Freudian Left, New York: Cornell University Press. Rose, J. (2007) The Last Resistance, London:Verso. Roudinesco, E. (2016) Freud in His Time and Ours, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European, London:Verso. Steiner, R. (2000) ‘It is a New Kind of Diaspora’: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac. Yerushalmi,Y. (1991) Freud’s Moses, New Haven:Yale University Press.

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2 MELANIE KLEIN R. D. Hinshelwood

Melanie Klein’s object-relations approach addresses the mind in terms of its relations with other minds. So, it might come easily to capture political processes in terms of the interactions between minds. This assumes that traversing between one discipline and another—from psychoanalysis to political theory—is unproblematic, as if psychoanalytic ideas may be used about a group or society as if there were no difference from the individual psyche. In fact, there is a good deal of difference (Hinshelwood 1996). A psychoanalytic approach needs to be cognizant of the fact that a lot in political life is consciously debated and determined. Psychoanalysis has to discipline itself to limit its applications to those occasions when conscious explanations and actions have proved insufficient and ineffective. In fact, Roger Money-Kyrle, one of Klein’s followers argues that The principle discovery of analysis is that all conscious desires, feelings, and beliefs are to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by unconscious processes . . .Therefore, the primary aim of [the] application of [psycho]-analysis to politics is to discover the nature and extent of whatever unconscious processes may influence our political desires, feelings, and beliefs. (Money-Kyrle 1951: 23) Another limitation is that many attempts to unify psychoanalysis and sociopolitical discourses, including the Freudian Left (Robinson 1969), tend to be utopian. Psychoanalytic approaches, notably the Kleinian, benefit from the specter of the depressive position—that is to say, nothing is ever perfect. Such a psychoanalysis of ambivalence offers a steadier look at the mixed state our world is in. The single most persuasive factor for paying attention to a ‘Kleinian’ political theory is that certain Kleinian psychoanalysts have already developed a view of the human unconscious in the social and group setting, which arises out of and is compatible with an understanding of the individual as well. Yet Kleinian concepts relevant to a psychoanalytic social psychology are unfortunately the most remote and unconsciously hidden (some further grasp of these unconscious forces may be gained from Hinshelwood and Fortuna 2017). This chapter will first of all attempt some description of the basic ideas of Kleinian psychoanalysis, acknowledging that they are not so easily grasped. And then it provides an account of 31

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how these psychoanalytic ideas can inform public and political life. Respect will be given to the separate spheres of knowledge, individual and social, and how they can be seen to influence each other. Three general areas of interaction will be considered: the internal ‘society’, social defense systems involving feedback loops, and alienation.

The Positions: Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Klein accepted the fundamental concepts of Freud: psychic reality, the unconscious (and its anxiety-defense structure), and symbolization (Segal 2007). Klein built on these when observing children playing out their anxieties and defensive evasions of those anxieties. She considered that children’s play showed her their conceptual models, and these formed the basic building blocks of her own theory. By the 1930s, some 15 years after becoming a psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein established her original viewpoint. The core of her ideas was that before, and underlying, the phenomena of Freud’s Oedipus complex, there was another layer to the unconscious mind where considerable anxiety is generated about managing one’s self, identity, and emotions. In particular, the negative, aggressive, and destructive feelings create anxiety and concern from early in life. At first, the young infant has to cope with alternating states of blissful satisfaction and enraged frustration, depending on the carer’s ability to understand what the baby needs. These highly polarized experiences comprise the paranoid-schizoid position. The intense hatred and fear and indeed the intense state of bliss arise quite out of key with the truer reality before the infant has mastered the comprehension of its perceptions. Those unrealistic states are attributed to objects (or ‘others’) that are believed to cause them—good objects and bad objects, neither realistically perceived at this early stage. Technically, this is called ‘splitting of the object’, these distorted black-or-white perceptions at this early stage of development may persist or recur later in life as emotions take control of perception. Gradually, sensory perception develops sufficiently to begin to show the infant that the origins of both the blissful and the persecutory states must be the same person—the mother who feeds and the mother who keeps the infant waiting for a feed, for instance. Klein thought that this mixture of feelings was a crisis, occurring around four to six months of life. She called this mixed state the depressive position. It is a confrontation with a mixture of feelings, one’s ambivalence toward the person one needs: a resentment at the need but also appreciation and gratitude. So from early on, the infant is beset by the risk of harming (in the moments of frustration) the person one needs and loves. These two states of mind—paranoid-schizoid and depressive—are called positions, because they alternate and are not in a rigid sequence. They occur in differing states of tension over the whole course of life, though their extremes come to be ameliorated in the course of time. The result is a lifelong urge to keep in play a reassurance that one’s loved ones are repaired and in good care; that is the key anxiety in the depressive position. Then reversion occurs at times of stress to polarized views in the paranoid-schizoid position, when others and the world become either utopian or demonic. A second key aspect of Klein’s innovations is the concept of the ‘internal objects’. Klein started her work by observing children and developing a therapeutic method for the psychoanalysis of children. She called her method the ‘play technique’, in which she facilitated children’s playing out dramas with toys. The more unconscious aspects of the dramas she inferred were the basic activities of mind. She called them unconscious phantasies and postulated that the nature of mind is a stock of such phantasies, elaborated progressively throughout life. She thought that the world around and outside us is seen in terms of these dramas. When Klein 32

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moved to adult psychoanalyses, she tended to form the same sort of pictures or dramas, involving the thoughts and other mental entities, which are experiences like toys in their own minds (see Hinshelwood 2006). In fact, early experiences depend on bodily states, for instance hunger or satiation; then the location of the objects that are causing these states is felt to be within the person. Klein therefore understood that her patients were telling her about the sense of a world of animate beings inside the self. These formulations of experiences as dramas between objects arise in the earliest period of life and remain at the ‘deepest’ layers of the unconscious mind throughout the rest of life. They are known as ‘internal objects’ and are felt to be real, to be animate inside, and to constitute the mind and the body of a person. There is, as it were, an internal ‘society’. Dramas, or unconscious phantasies, transport these internal objects in and out of the self, through processes or mechanisms known as projection (evacuating) and introjection (internalizing). The two principal anxieties characteristic of the two positions are shaped as two general phantasies; one, the persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position, is the drama of threats to the self, and the other, the guilty and concerned anxiety of the depressive position, is the drama of damage to the loved and needed other person (the ‘good object’). Each of these two characteristic anxieties calls forth defensive mechanisms, all of which remain hidden and unconscious. Forms of bravado (a ‘manic’ stance), with an impenetrable denial, first of dependency and then of responsibility and guilt (while finding others to blame and shame, etc.), are a common response to depressive anxiety. The persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position is evaded with methods called ‘schizoid mechanisms’, which involve the splitting into polarities to try to maintain the blissful one. In addition, a self-directed splitting divides the self, removing certain ego functions, specifically those producing perceptions that cause anxiety. One typical function split off is the awareness of emotionality to avoid experiencing painful feelings, leaving a rather stiff and unemotional personality. Melanie Klein gave an example: The session I have in mind started with the patient’s telling me he felt anxiety and did not know why. He then made comparisons with people more successful and fortunate than himself. These remarks also had a reference to me.Very strong feelings of frustration, envy and grievance came to the fore. . . . [When I interpreted] that these feelings were directed against the analyst and he wanted to destroy me, his mood changed abruptly. The tone of his voice became flat, he spoke in an expressionless way, and he said that he felt detached from the whole situation. He added that my interpretation seemed correct, but that it did not matter? In fact, he no longer had any wishes, and nothing was worth bothering about. (Klein 1946: 19) A whole aspect of his personality went missing.This is an example of what she called ‘the weakening and impoverishment of the ego’ (104), resulting from splitting. This process of evacuating a part of the personality is called projective identification. The person then sees exactly that function in someone else.This is especially easy to follow when two people have a row and each blames the other: there is a ping-pong match in which guilt is forcibly imposed on the other through some accusation and condemnation, which meet counteraccusation. There is an important challenge here. Someone who splits off a part of herself or himself is weakened, impoverished as Klein said. Decision-making will suffer if the person lacks some faculties. The idea that people may exchange ego functions challenges the contemporary view of the individual. Consciously, we conceive (and perceive) the individual as discrete and standing 33

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alone and her or his functions are not assumed to be variable, fluid, and potentially reorganized. ‘Going to pieces’ in this way is a form of illness, mental illness. As Klein proposed, however, this redistribution of parts of the self is an everyday occurrence (Hinshelwood 1997a). Adopting at times the paranoid-schizoid position is not entirely a handicap. It does mean reconstructing reality in one’s mind, but then with the cooperation of others, we do in fact construct large aspects of our reality—especially our social world. Without entering a paranoidschizoid emotional state, it probably would be impossible to fight in a war, where hatred of the other has to be complete; the other side is constructed as all bad, requiring complete destruction, while we ourselves are blameless and must survive. At much less intensity, games and sports and even academic rivalries mobilize this tendency toward splitting between the good self and bad other. Clearly, such intense emotional polarities can be spotted in the political process.

Some Psychodynamics: Internal Totalitarianism, Social Defense Systems, and Alienation I will proceed to give an account of three significant ways these concepts have been tried out as explanations of political values and actions. Political theory often creates a tension within psychoanalytic theorizing. The tension is that a Kleinian perspective tends to assign agency and responsibility to internal states of mind, while political commitment assigns agency predominantly to external factors: ‘The issue is: what, if any, is the relationship between these two powerful perspectives?’ (Rustin 1991: 90). The psychoanalytic pull is toward debate about other’s internal worlds; as Money-Kyrle concluded, it is easy enough to use psychoanalysis polemically, to uncover flaws only in one’s political opponents. But if we find ourselves doing this, without first applying it pretty rigorously to our own opinions, we should suspect a ‘mote and beam’ principle operating in us, and a ‘scapegoat’ motive. (Money-Kyrle 1978 [1964]: 374–375) Rustin agreed: ‘Such externalisations . . . or preconceptions are not infallible guides to realistic understanding and action’ (Rustin 1991: 10). Here, I shall take it that the tension shall not be so much between internalist and externalist conceptions but instead the question of how both perspectives interact. The internal world is a quasi-society (Menzies 1981), in which people felt as inside us are in relation to each other and the self. Such relations have various characteristics, just as relations in the external world. Comparisons are made all the time with actual social others, especially close loved ones, such as a child’s mother, father, and siblings, who are structured both by internal phantasy characters and the external objective perception. So, the focus of psychoanalytic political theory must be the two sets of dynamics and how they influence each other: how the unconscious and the social entwine and resonate. The first investigation to expose is the unconscious dynamics of internal totalitarianism. This indicates an internal drama of a totalitarian kind, which is a configuration in the inner world organized so that an intimidating, omnipotent, and unrealistic part of the self takes a domineering stance in relation to other, more-reality-oriented internal objects and parts of the self. This has come to be known as the internal ‘mafia gang’, after Rosenfeld (1971). Under stress, a patient of Rosenfeld’s adopted a superior attitude, dismissing his analyst as unimportant, so that his actual dependency and appreciation was pushed aside and thus split off as if no longer existing. 34

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This internal dominance may be played out externally. Michael Sebek, living in the Czech Republic, observed how in ex-Soviet societies after 1990, many people still carried with them a kind of internal, controlling authoritarian whom they frequently perceived (or rather misperceived) still present in their sociopolitical world. Sebek wrote, convincingly, that [T]he totalitarian social environment and the totalitarian psychic space are two aspects of the same phenomena. The totalitarian political system is more or less a consciously elaborated social result and product of projected individual and collective beliefs that a strong power, submission, obedience, devotion and self-sacrifice, strong organization and unity, preference of group interests over individual ones, sameness on one side and exclusivity and high position of a leading authority on the other side, are important collective values. (Sebek 1996: 289–290) There is, as it were, internal and external ‘political’ systems. The idea of a domineering internal object is not new, and it can be related to Freud’s theory of a superego derived from the parents (Freud 1923). The superego is not just a replica of the parents but also a structure inside the person that exerts a punitive dominance: ‘Experience shows, however, that the severity of the superego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with’ (Freud 1930: 130). The superego is built out of the punitive phantasies of the person added to the actual characteristics of the real parents. Few children, in fact, have encountered a parent who really does castrations. That internal structure has been alluded to as ‘an ego-destructive super-ego’ (O’Shaughnessy 1999: 862). Whatever the result of the Oedipus complex and the solution achieved by relinquishing and internalizing the parent, there is an added factor that distorts the social values that the superego represents (see also Stephen 2000 [1946]). This was the subject of one of Freud’s few acknowledgments of Klein (Freud 1930: 139n). The internal world is not an accurate replica of the external. And the external in turn gets perceived as in part distorted by the internal world. The psychoanalytic understanding of racism (Davids 2011) has emphasized how a powerfully threatening internal object comes to dominate experiences. This can be projected onto a group of people in the actual external world. Any evidence underlying prejudice against a racial group ‘relies on an internal frame of reference for the force of its conviction, much as delusion proper does’ (Davids 2017: 71). Davids cites Figlio, who sees that internal state of dominating certainty as contrasting with ‘a conversation among interlocutors who aim to agree and to ground their agreement in evidence’ (Figlio 2017: 24). Internal certainty does not rely on external evidence. Freud (1921) described how something similar to this internal structure, which he called the ego ideal, could be shared between people. The subject of a hypnotist adopts the hypnotist’s commands as his or her own, as if introjecting something from the hypnotist. Freud also thought it similar to falling in love when the loved one becomes a dominating object in the mind to which the lover becomes subservient. The point is that an internal figure of this kind may be shared and exchanged with others and in fact among members of the group, which will unite a group (Hinshelwood 2007, 2017a). That circulating ideal then becomes a ‘group ideal’ and can be aligned with political values. The second investigation to consider is the way members of a group or organization who share anxieties and conflicts, especially in work situations, will share social rituals and practices which mitigate their experience of anxiety and conflict. The relationship with the group allows the sharing of anxiety through projection and the introjection of the common practices. As 35

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Elliott Jaques put it, ‘Individuals may put their internal conflicts into persons in the external world, unconsciously follow the course of the conflict by means of projective identification and re-internalize the course and outcome of the externally perceived conflict’ (Jaques 1955: 496–497). The individual gains support, and actually relief, in coping with her or his unconscious conflict through narratives played out in a group. She or he may simply watch two others in conflict in the group. A football match may carry that meaning; political debate serves a similar vicarious purpose. Group dynamics supervenes on the psychodynamics of the individual members through the unconscious schizoid mechanisms. One example given was a funeral. The grievers may not all even know each other, but they process the joint mourning collectively (see Jaques 1955).The effective politician is one who stirs anxieties and collective responses in a wide social group. One such historical moment was following World War II: No doubt the discharge of atomic bombs does not differ in principle from snowballing. There has been no change in fighting methods since Cain threw the first stone with intent to kill. Nevertheless, the actual destructiveness of the atomic bomb plays straight into the hands of the Unconscious. The most cursory study of dream-life and the phantasies of the insane shows that the ideas of world-destruction are latent in the unconscious mind. And . . . [the atomic bomb] is well-adapted to the more bloodthirsty phantasies with which man is secretly pre-occupied. (Glover 1946: 274) Alix Strachey (1957) and Franco Fornari (1974) wrote too in a similar vein during this period. Events that formed such close connections with deep layers of the unconscious result in collective responses. Another moment of common anxiety was after the events of 11 September 2001. Again, a wealth of literature developed on terrorism (e.g., Covington 2002; Varvin and Volkan 2003).These events touch on the ubiquitous fear for one’s survival, with an accompanying ubiquitous retaliatory annihilation of an imagined evil other. The idea of a collective anxiety and responding defenses is important in an organization where the work itself carries a stress that is common to all the workers (Fraher 2004). Their common stress leads to commonly created defenses. Isabel Menzies explained this in a healthcare system where the depressive guilt of care is a permanent stress for staff. She stated that nurses suffer in their hospital work: In this inner world [a person’s ‘objects’] exist in a form and condition largely determined by his phantasies. Because of the operation of aggressive forces, the inner world contains many damaged, injured and dead objects. The atmosphere is charged with death and destruction . . . The degree of [real] stress is heavily conditioned by the fantasy, which is in turn conditioned, as in nurses, by the early phantasy situations. (Menzies 1988 [1959]: 47–48) In response to the unconscious phantasies, primitive mechanisms, including splitting and all forms of projection, are used (see Hinshelwood 1986, 1987).The collective stress coordinates these collective unconscious defenses. Research cases such as these exemplify how professional skills may be practiced so as to support the personal defenses of individuals against the stress of the work. Political life may be prone to a comparable phenomenon when national anxieties (perhaps coordinated to play on basic underlying anxieties, by political campaigns and the media) develop with the answering response of defenses against the social anxiety, which come from 36

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the unconscious levels in individuals. With a gift for eloquence, Churchill could adeptly rouse a nation to war, as he did in the 1940s, when the threat to survival was palpable, especially when bombs dropped on homes. His strategy identified the enemy as the evil killers—projecting destructiveness into ‘them’—a policy of killing them with bombs could be collectivized through the shared introjection by the members. The third area chosen here to investigate is to understand the phenomenon of alienation. Kleinian recognition of splitting mechanisms provides an explanatory concept showing how individuals become alienated from themselves in certain sociopolitical circumstances. Similarities in the description of self-alienated experiences appear from two rather different disciplines (Hinshelwood 1983). Consider Marx, in 1844, where he dealt with the unfairness of a separation of a worker from the product of his or her labor: [T]he object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object . . . this realisation of labour appears as loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (Marx 1975 [1844]: 324) If the work product is disconnected from the producer, then he or she is disconnected to some degree from what is felt—by him or her, and by others—to be him or her. He or she becomes a lesser person as these aspects are removed: ‘The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces’ (323). She or he becomes poorer in a psychological sense. The product is an object that ‘stands opposed’ to her or him.Yet it retains an identity with the worker; it is labor embodied. This is a psychological understanding (not something that we would normally go to Karl Marx for). However, it makes us think of Klein’s view of splitting and impoverishment of the ego (Hinshelwood 1983). For example, ‘[i[n such phantasies products of the body and parts of the self are felt to be split off, projected into the mother, and to be continuing their existence there’ (Klein 1955: 142). A splitting of the ego, or self, and projective identification weaken and impoverish the self. Alienation in a social organization and projective identification in the individual seem to mirror each other. Frank Braverman (1974) developed this labor process from Das Kapital (Marx 1976 [1867]). For instance, a worker is paid a certain amount for a specific product—for example, nails. Then that factory has costs that include the worker’s daily wage, plus the maintenance and servicing costs of the factory and the enterprise itself. Then if the factory is successful, the worker makes enough nails to cover his or her wage and the proportion of the costs. The enterprise intends that he or she will make more nails than merely enough to cover these costs. Then the extra nails that the worker has made bring a profit that will belong to the enterprise. The worker sells her or his time, not her or his products, so her or his material products (his ‘embodied labor’) are taken from her or him. The point of all this is that a psychological process and the effects of the mode of production converge in a common pattern. The sources of the two processes—social and psychological— are quite different. But they converge. So a successful political regulation of industrial work has emerged from the compatibility of this convergence with the psychological. We can then presume that the system of political regulation is successful because the two processes—individual and social—converge. This is a model of psychosocial emergence. This exemplified how feedback loops emerge. Psychological mechanisms are defenses aimed at managing anxiety by avoiding it, and like all defense mechanisms, as Freud showed, they are 37

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usually imperfect and cause further effects, known as symptoms. And this is the case, no less, with the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification. They are aimed at avoiding fears about annihilation and at promoting personal survival. However, splitting enhances the feeling of going to pieces, and projective identification ‘impoverishes the ego’. The conscious anxiety may be avoided, but it is unconsciously enhanced. And then the defense mechanisms are driven even harder—that is, splitting and projective identification are sustained. A vicious circle is set up: alienation in social relations fits into and enhances the survival anxiety in the individual, and then splitting and projective identification exacerbate the anxiety and thus allow the social process of alienation. That interaction stabilizes as a self-perpetuating system. Another vicious circle also occurs (see Hinshelwood 2017b). Projective identification denies separation and leads to the person merging with the object projected into. Thus, the individual identifies and merges with the factory and its owner, promoting solidarity in the worker with the owners into whom the worker has projected her or his products.Then when the product is actually removed in a concrete way, separated and sold on from the factory, it must enhance the painful feelings of separation, which in turn drives projective identification to enhance the solidarity. In general, at the unconscious level, an anxiety leads to a collective (social) defense. But the defense, while evading anxiety, implicitly ensures its continuance.The upshot is an interaction between two distinct types of forces: those of the individual’s unconscious and those of the truly social forces of society (Hinshelwood 1996). This conceptual psychosocial model provided by Kleinian concepts sees a dynamic system not hermetically sealed but in interaction as feedback loops that cycle around and around to create self-organizing systems (see Nicolis and Prigogine 1977). In other words, the success or failure of public policy emerges from this factor—the possible convergence of suitable unconscious interaction between social programs and unconscious individual dynamics.

Political Values: Ethics, Leaders, and Indifference If psychology were an ordinary science, then the psychological (and psychoanalytic) study of politics would be value neutral. That is, their conclusions would be nonjudgmental, merely an objective study. However, psychology (and psychoanalysis) is not that kind of science, being as it is the study of a moral being. The argument that moral judgments of public policies can be assessed satisfactorily by psychological study was advanced by Money-Kyrle (1951), and he argued in particular that certain psychoanalytic ideas, especially of the Kleinian variety, could be a valid basis for making judgments about which political choices count as ethical ones. Let us start with ethical aims. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to collectivize their thinking and behavior, not always consciously. As we have seen, that collusion will often concern the amelioration of personal anxieties of the group members. Such collusion may have different ethical resonances—good or bad.What is good and what bad may be judged according to what perceptions, however distorted, bring comfort rather than judging the reality of self and others. Under stress, the projection of badness into others leads to unrealistic states of mind, and in turn, those may be supported by group processes. Kleinian theory points toward two ethical values arising from paranoid-schizoid and depressive position functioning: (i) the promotion of integrity of the person, however ambivalent, and (ii) the concern for others. The first of these, personal integrity, is clearly lost when the ego loses parts of itself in the process of splitting. And the associated social process of alienation can also harm integrity, as we have seen. Political action and policy can then be assessed according to whether they enhance or undermine the integrity of people in society (see Hinshelwood 1997a). A society that simply 38

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requires obedience to law and authority will tend to attract the projection of decision-making upwards, leaving individuals passive and impoverished, without the need for or interest in making responsible decisions. As Obholzer commented, ‘It is a momentous turning point when one recognizes that to get authority from outside is not possible and that change will either happen on the basis of one’s own authority, as sanctioned internally, or not at all’ (Obholzer 1994: 205). Coercive political regimes tend to enhance splitting over a population of passive and demoralized people (e.g., see Dale’s (2005) Popular Protest in East Germany). This deliberate kind of assault on integrity is indicated in Vinar (1989), who describes torture as designed to achieve the demolition of a person (see also Reyes 1989). However, more subtle processes occur in society, and the advertising industry in some respects offers the opportunity to split off various thinking and deciding activities; for instance, an early pioneer of marketing wrote, The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. (Bernays 1928: 37) Questions therefore arise over the extent to which social and political actions and policies might promote this kind of impoverishment of the individual person. As the depressive position functioning takes over from the paranoid-schizoid, recognition of the reality of self and other improves. The reality principle is of overriding importance in psychoanalysis (Freud 1911) and includes recognizing the pressures of ambivalent feelings in the reality of the internal world, as well as a balanced and more accurate picture of those around us. It can be said, because of this, that the move, where possible from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, is an ethical move.The latter state of mind addresses the truer nature of reality and, with the reality of bad feelings, arouses concern for the ‘other’. Hannah Segal’s paper on nuclear war (1987; see also Segal 1997) exemplifies this, and it is supported by Bell’s (1996) argument for political action to support ‘ethical institutions’. The escalation in the 1980s, of the nuclear Cold War that ultimately broke the resolve of the Soviet Union, was a military policy based on the ideological purity of democracy (as opposed to the (im)purity of Soviet socialism). It was a war to the death and the survival of ‘us’ and the elimination of ‘them’.This paranoid-schizoid outlook seemed at the time of Segal’s paper to be hardening and to go against the more mature forms of political engagement in international relations, of negotiation and acknowledging the other’s point of view: This kind of functioning has been described in the individual as a regression from the depressive position, characterized by a capacity to recognize one’s own aggression, and to experience guilt and mourning, and a capacity both to function in reality and to make reparation. The regression is to the paranoid/schizoid position, characterized by the operation of denial, splitting and projection. (Segal 1987: 5) This clearly states a political judgment based on psychoanalytic ideas: the depressive position of care, concern, and reparation as a more mature and ethical stance. Psychoanalysts should not remain silent but instead speak this ethical truth. Political protests based on conscious issues were strong at that time. However, adding a psychoanalytic stance to the unconscious guilt would need to be coupled with a degree of teaching Kleinian concepts within any political forum of discussion. 39

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Bell (1996), a close colleague of Segal’s, also addressed this depressive position ethics. He took the issue of fundamental changes in the 1990s to the welfare consensus in the United Kingdom. The introduction of market-style economic principles into the National Health Service (NHS) involved a radical change in thinking about care and welfare. It was not just in conscious thinking. He wrote,‘the analogy of these cultural processes and social ideologies [compares to] certain forms of perverse unconscious thinking characteristic of severe narcissistic disorders’ (Bell 1996: 53). The NHS, for instance, is explicitly driven by a motive of concern and care for each other by the community. But Bell characterized the new ideology as omnipotently rejecting dependency and care. In other words, the new ideology concentrates on survival (a paranoid-schizoid attitude of mind), especially financial survival, typical of a competitive market philosophy, and distracts from the depressive attitude of care for patients. Ethically, we need a political campaign for the caring principles of the National Health Service (depressive position) against paranoidschizoid functioning focused on the survival of the service. Politics can be carried on by campaigning for policies and organizations, which carry a depressive position function of care. On this issue, in fact, a more oppositional political stance may be required. It is a more mature form of the paranoid-schizoid position, as already described, but where the idealization of one’s own group is not so absolute.We might say fighting for something rather than against something. These papers by Segal and Bell are polemical ones and are thus political acts in themselves. By this, I mean that their approach is via normal political action and campaigning—for the NHS in this instance. It is fought for, not just for the benefits to the community but also because it can be ethically argued that care for its own sake is of greater ethical value than competition for its own sake. A caring institution such as the NHS is likely to be more satisfactory in psychological terms because its caring brings it closer to the depressive position. Such a political campaign involves pitting oneself against opposition in a manner similar to the paranoid-schizoid position. In fact, such opposition and conflict show that the paranoidschizoid position recurs from time to time and progressively takes a more realistic form (e.g., see Britton 1998). The hallmark of a more mature paranoid-schizoid functioning is a ‘fighting for’ something held to be good, as opposed to fighting against something, or specifically someone, held to be bad. If we go back to the early quote by Money-Kyrle, about ‘[uncovering] flaws only in one’s political opponents’ without addressing one’s own ‘flaws’, we can see that this developmental process involves increasing the understanding of one’s own powers of projection of the bad only. Such a progressive amelioration of the paranoid goes along in the course of development with the amelioration of the punitive guilt of the depressive position. Ethical conduct, as it develops in the course of the depressive position, is connected with the function of leaders to represent and instill social norms and ethical values. Certain experiments conducted in the course of officer selection during World War II were in effect political ones. These experiments followed certain principles worked out by Wilfred Bion, in conjunction with John Rickman, before Bion became a psychoanalyst (Bion and Rickman 1943; Bion 1946). They concocted a psychological assessment program. The idea was to form groups of applicants with a task and to observe who came out as the leader.Those who emerged were then deemed capable of being officers to lead a unit of soldiers. The men were in a critical situation that tested ‘a man’s capacity for maintaining personal relationships in a situation of strain that tempted him to disregard the interests of his fellows for the sake of his own’ (Bion 2014 [1946]: 36). Although not expressed in these terms, the test was whether the consideration and care for others (depressive position) could survive the stress of determined self-interest (paranoidschizoid position). They sought to extract the quality of leadership, which then was viewed as balancing the individual’s self-interest against her or his membership in a group of colleagues. The exercise was a training in ethical involvement. 40

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A similar approach was taken to the rehabilitation of soldiers who had broken down with ‘war neurosis’, working on the principle of sustaining a morale for camaraderie in the unit against the fear of each individual for his own survival (Bion and Rickman 1943). Most challenging of all is the extraordinary capacity for people to be led unethically into inhuman forms of indifference: the Holocaust, various forms of genocide, and systematic torture. Indifference to humanity in a minor form is complicit in the forms of alienation considered earlier in commercial and industrial organizations. The human being is capable of reducing others to become quite depersonalized objects, toward whom there is only indifference. The causing of suffering for which there is zero empathy is a ubiquitous trait.These processes of political actions and associated values are especially prominent in the depersonalization of opposing groups and supported often enthusiastically by otherwise normally human people.The export of human subjects to Auschwitz in cattle trucks expresses the message that they were not people (Arendt 1958). Their experience was a matter of indifference to those administering the extermination. And indeed, the use of a rat poison, Zyklon-B, gives the same message about the value of the people and their suffering. Slavery as the depersonalization of people has had a long and successful history as a political system since humans began settlements. It is that reverberation between external and internal impoverishment that combines to make slavery an enduring sociopolitical system. And so, the propensity for the ‘inmates’ of Auschwitz as they came from the cattle trucks to the gas chambers, to lose the semblance of people, is an internal process among the captors collaborating with a sociopolitical command that guided them.We might equally consider the position of the guards at Auschwitz and indeed the inmates recruited by the guards to take authority in the huts. How is it that other human beings can be seen as lacking the essential humanity that the rest of us have? This is the kind psychological impoverishment Klein investigated, and we can refer back to the example of Klein’s man who lost his capacity to feel anything important. A whole aspect of his personality went missing—that is, his capacity for feeling and giving meaning to things. He had split his mind and became impoverished, rendering himself indifferent. His aggression and the responsibility and guilt for it disappeared, with the loss therefore of his concern. He became disabled, just as the Schutzstaffel (SS) at Auschwitz must have been.

Conclusion I have argued that Kleinian discoveries about deeply unconscious processes by which we relate to others have explanatory value when considering obscure aspects of political life. The argument here is that political judgments need in many cases to take account of unconscious judgments and collusions and the unconscious phantasies or dramas on which these judgments may be based. An understanding of these processes not just implies explanation but affords a possibility of morally justifying some political choices against others. Ethical categories of attitudes toward others have been described, on which a political position can be founded. At a more academic level, one more promising line of thinking may be the use of psychoanalysis as a grounding for a ‘natural ethics’ (Hinshelwood 1997b). Waddington (1942) turned to psychoanalysis and Freud—and indeed Melanie Klein—for ideas and debate on the origins in nature of human values. One other issue remains unsettled: whether psychoanalytic ideas lead to any particular forms of political action. Like other forms of psychoanalysis, Kleinians are strikingly limited. As all psychoanalytic ‘action’ is in the form of developing verbal insight into unconscious life inside individuals, any political effectiveness will depend on the willingness of those needing insight to collaborate and agree with the need. In other words, mostly we do not have a license to interpret our views of unconscious experiences, which need exposure. Exposure of the unconscious, uninvited by the 41

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public at large, is unlikely to be listened to. Nevertheless, speaking the truth has a long and reputable history in politics. It is speaking the unconscious truth that psychoanalysts attempt. It may however be not too implausible, since the two configurations of responses that have political relevance, the fear for survival and the care for others, are simply close to common sense for most people. So general discussion could possibly be engaged in, in the attribution of unrealistic levels of ‘badness’ to other individuals, groups, and categories (paranoid-schizoid position), as opposed to the attitude of realistic care and concern for others (depressive position). Kleinian theories could perhaps enable a straightforward discussion about politics and could promote more integrated individuals in a society. However, we need to be constantly aware that unhelpful polarization into opposites is always a possibility in social institutions.

References Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bell, D. (1996) ‘Primitive Mind of State’, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 10, 45–58. Bernays, E. (1928) Propaganda, New York: Liveright. Bion, W.R. (1946) ‘Leaderless Group Project’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 10, 77–81. Republished 1996 Therapeutic Communities, 17, 87–91. Bion, W.R. (2014) ‘The Leaderless Group Project [1946]’, in The Complete Works of W.R. Bion, Volume IV. London: Karnac, 35–40. Bion, W.R. and Rickman, J. (1961[1943]) ‘Intra-Group Tensions in Therapy’, in Bion, W.R. (ed.) (1961) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, London: Routledge, 11–26. Braverman, F. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital:The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press. Britton, R. (1998) Belief and Imagination, London: Routledge. Covington, C. (ed.) (2002) Terrorism and War: Unconscious Dynamics of Political Violence, London: Karnac. Dale, S. (2005) Popular Protest in East Germany, London: Routledge. Davids, F. (2011) Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference, London: Palgrave. Davids, F. (2017) ‘Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset’, in Mintchev, N. and Hinshelwood, R.D. (eds.) The Feeling of Certainty,Towards a Psychosocial Approach, London: Palgrave, 69–91. Figlio, K. (2017) ‘The Mentality of Conviction: Feeing Certain and the Search for Truth’, in Mintchev, N. and Hinshelwood, R.D. (eds.) The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial Approach, London: Palgrave, 11–30. Fornari, F. (1974) The Psychoanalysis of War, New York: Doubleday. Fraher, A.L. (2004) A History of Group Study and Psychodynamic Organizations, London: Free Association Books. Freud, S. (1911) ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XII, London: Hogarth, 213–226. Freud, S. (1921) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XVIII, London: Hogarth, 65–144. Freud, S. (1923) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XIX, London: Hogarth, 1–66. Freud, S. (1930) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XXI, London: Hogarth, 57–146. Glover, E. (1946) War, Sadism and Pacifism, London: George Allen and Unwin. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1983) ‘Projective Identification and Marx’s Concept of Man’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 16, 221–226. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1986) ‘Psychological Defence and Nuclear War’, in Medicine and War 2, 29–38. Republished in Covington, C., Williams, P., Arundale, J. and Knox, J. (eds.) (2002) London: Karnac Books. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1987) ‘The Psychotherapist’s Role in a Large Mental Institution’, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 2, 207–215. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1996) ‘Convergences with Psycho-Analysis’, in Parker, I. and Spiers, R. (eds.) Psychology and Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 93–104. Hinshelwood, R.D. (1997a) ‘Primitive Mental Processes: Psycho-analysis and the Ethics of Integration’, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry, 4, 121–143.

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Melanie Klein Hinshelwood, R.D. (1997b) Therapy or Coercion: Is Psychoanalysis Brainwashing? London: Karnac Books. Hinshelwood, R.D. (2006) ‘Early Repression Mechanism: Social, Conceptual and Personal Factors in the Historical Development of Certain Psychoanalytic Ideas Arising from Reflection upon Melanie Klein’s Unpublished (1934) Notes Prior to her Paper on the Depressive Position’, Psychoanalysis and History, 8, 5–42. Hinshelwood, R.D. (2007) ‘Intolerance and the Intolerable: The Case of Racism’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 12, 1–20. Hinshelwood, R.D. (2017a) ‘Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation of the Personalityn’, in Mintchev, N. and Hinshelwood, R.D. (eds.) The Feeling of Certainty, Psychosocial Perspectives on Identity and Difference, London: Palgrave. Hinshelwood, R.D. (2017b) ‘Reflection or Action: And Never the Twain Shall Meet’, Psychotherapy and Politics International, 16, 67–74. Hinshelwood, R.D. and Fortuna, T. (2017) Melanie Klein:The Basics, London: Routledge. Jaques, E. (1955) ‘Social Systems as a Defence Against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety’, in Klein, M., Heimann, P. and Money-Kyrle, R (eds.) New Directions in PsychoAnalysis, London: Tavistock, 478–498. Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110 (and reprinted (1975) in The Writings of Melanie Klein,Volume 3, London: Hogarth, 1–24). Klein, M. (1955) ‘On Identification’, in Klein, M. (1958) On the Development of Mental Functioning: The Writings of Melanie Klein,Vol. 3, London: Hogarth. And in The Writings of Melanie Klein Vol. 3, 141–175. Marx, K. (1975 [1844]) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, London: Penguin, 279–400. Marx, K. (1976 [1867]) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 279–400. Menzies Lyth, I. (1959) ‘The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety: A Report on a Study of the Nursing Service of a General Hospital’, in Human Relations 13, 95–121. Republished 1988 in Menzies Containing Anxiety in Institutions, London: Free Association Books; and in Trist and Murray (eds.) (1990) The Social Engagement of Social Science, London: Free Association Books. Menzies Lyth, I. (1981) ‘Bion’s Contribution to Thinking About Groups’, in Grotstein, J. (ed.) Do I Dare Disturb the Universe, Beverley Hills: Caesura Press, 661–666. Money-Kyrle, R.E. (1951) Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Contribution to the Psychology of Politics and Morals, London: Duckworth. Money-Kyrle, R. (1978 [1964]) ‘Politics From the Point of View of Psychoanalysis’, in The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle, Perth: Clunie Press, 366–375. Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. (1977) Self-organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations, London: Wiley. Obholzer, A. (1994) ‘Authority, Power and Leadership: Contributions from Group Relations Training’, in Obholzer, A. and Roberts,V. (eds.) The Unconscious at Work, London: Routledge. O’Shaughnessy, E. (1999) ‘Relating to the Superego’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 80, 861–870. Reyes, A. (1989) ‘The Destruction of the Soul: A Treatable Disease’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, 6, 185–202. Robinson, P.A. (1969) The Freudian Left, New York: Harper & Row. Rosaenfeld, H. (1971) ‘A Clinical Approach to the Psycho-Analytical Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism’, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 52, 169–178. Rustin, M. (1991) ‘Psychoanalysis, Racism and Anti-racism’, in The Good Society and the Inner World, London:Verso. Sebek, M. (1996) ‘The Fate of the Totalitarian Object’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5, 289–294. Segal, H. (1987) ‘Silence is the Real Crime’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 14, 3–12. Segal, H. (1997) Psychoanalysis, Literature and War, London: Routledge. Segal, H. (2007) ‘Symbolic Equation and Symbols’, in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, London: Routledge, 111–113. Stephen, K. (2000 [1946]) ‘Relations Between the Superego and the Ego’, Psychoanalysis and History, 2, 11–28. Strachey, A. (1957) The Unconscious Motives of War, London: Allen & Unwin. Varvin, S. and Volkan,V. (eds.) (2003) Violence or Dialogue: Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, London: Karnac Books. Vinar, M. (1989) ‘Pedro or the Demolition. A Psychoanalytic Look at Torture’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, 5, 353–362. Waddington, C.H. (1942) Science and Ethics, George Allen & Unwin.

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3 JACQUES LACAN Dominiek Hoens

If a political scientist were to look in a rather naïve way for a theory of the human being in Lacan’s works—for example, to obtain a precise idea of what that being that lives in common with others is—he or she may end up with both less and more than expected. Less because as Lacan once put it in unambiguous terms, ‘If there are people who do not know what man [l’homme] is, indeed they are psychoanalysts’ (Lacan 1967–1968: lesson of 6 March 1968; see also Lacan 2007: 63). There is a simple reason for this absence of knowledge about the human being in Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely it does not treat ‘man’, the human being, the individual, not even the psyche (as one may expect from a discipline named ‘psychoanalysis’), but rather the subject. Although in colloquial language, the latter notion is often used interchangeably with the former ones, the Lacanian subject has to be distinguished from them. A large part of Lacan’s contribution to the psychoanalytic field consists precisely in making this distinction and in explaining why and how the subject is neither a universal human being nor a particular individual.This also suggests why one may get more out of Lacan regarding politics than expected, because this subject, as we shall see, is conceived as intrinsically social and political. Succinctly put, the subject’s social and political life is not a layer on top of a supposedly apolitical way of being; on the contrary, from a Lacanian point of view, only when taking into account a sociopolitical context does it make sense to refer to a subject.

Not Without Others If the crucial point about Lacanian theory is to approach it as a theory of the subject, to be distinguished from the human being, then it is all the more surprising to observe that this ‘subject’ does not appear in the early stages of Lacan’s work; instead, it is enquiries about the ‘human being’ that take the central place. Indeed, before introducing the notion of the subject, most of Lacan’s first contributions to psychoanalysis raise the question of what it means to be a human being or, more precisely, how one ends up taking oneself for a human being. This question is particularly prominent in two of his early texts, The Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion (Lacan 2001: 85–99) and Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty (Lacan 2006: 161–175). The reader may wonder why one should pay attention to two texts that do not belong to what is generally considered as the more mature period of Lacan’s thought1 and that were originally published in the non-psychoanalytical and non-academic art journal Cahiers 44

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d’Art. Yet there are two reasons to do this here. First, the texts are marked by and expressly refer to the political, (post-)World War II context during which they were written, and second, they not only reveal at what point Lacan situates the subject but also anticipate and orient later developments of his thought. Although Number Thirteen got published one year after Logical Time, in 1946, we will start our overview with this text, because it is considered by Lacan as anterior (Lacan 2001: 86). The problem that Number Thirteen discusses in detail concerns, generally put, the identification of a false coin among a variable number of coins, with a balance one can use only a limited number of times. More concretely, if given 13 coins, how can one find the false one, using a balance three times? This coin-weighing problem is well-known among mathematicians, and although it is most interesting in itself, we will engage with only a fragment of its solution.2 The first step consists in weighing four coins against four others. There are two possible outcomes: equilibrium or not. If there is an equilibrium, one knows the false coin belongs to the five remaining pieces. How to find this odd piece in two remaining weighs only? The following weigh is done with three remaining pieces and one good coin, that is, one that belongs to the eight tested before—which turned out to be of equal weight and therefore OK. Lacan names this method ‘3 + 1’, because to three suspect coins one good coin is added, which helps to eventually discover the false weight among the suspect. For our purposes, the question of how this is done is not relevant, but Lacan’s comments on this procedure need to be spelled out. The inserted coin, Lacan argues, does not function as ‘specified or specifying norm’ according to which the other suspect coins are either in conformity or not (Lacan 2001: 98). Inserting the coin is merely part of the general operation of weighing coins against each other, the inserted coin included, which is considered ‘good’ only because it has been weighed against others before. The coins, therefore, do not belong to the same species, which would imply that their identity relies on an externally chosen quality—for example, ‘weighs 21 grams’—but belong to a collection based on being uniform. The coins, therefore, do not form a class—to which one belongs on the condition of having a certain quality—but become part of a collection through the weighing of every piece against the others. The interrelated processes of becoming a one among equal others and of the formation of a collection by testing the items one by one results, according to Lacan, in a synthesis of the particular and the universal (2001: 99). Lacan’s interest in this dialectic between a group and its individual members was piqued during a five-week stay in England in September 1945 (Roudinesco 1997: 172).3 In a text recounting his experiences and observations, English Psychiatry and the War, Lacan discusses the work of, among others, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman and praises the way one managed to treat large groups of patients during the Second World War (Lacan 2001: 101–120). Lacan’s main conclusion is that a group does not need to depend on a leader or an external ideal to show coherent organization. Freud had discussed this issue before in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1981 [1921]), in which he argued that horizontal, mutual identifications and emotional ties depend on an anterior, vertical identification with a leader or a more abstract ideal. Lacan reverses this order—‘horizontal’ collection/collectivity before ‘vertical’ class—and emphasizes the logical forms, like ‘3 + 1’, that define the relations between the individual and the group. Considering the horizontal relations as primordial may serve well as a way to avoid an authoritarian conception of group psychology, but this is not without problems of its own. As already mentioned, the individual finds its identity solely through its relationship with others, yet this also implies that this identity is far from particular, let alone singular, since all the members of the collection are uniform. However, this does not seem to bother Lacan much, because his focus is not on the outcome of the process but on the logical process that leads to it. 45

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The emphasis on logic and its intertwinement with individuality is made more poignant in another contemporaneous text, Logical Time (2006: 161–175). Here, logical reasoning is required to determine the color of a disk put on one’s back by a prison warden. What one sees are two fellow inmates who have white disks on their backs and what one knows is that (1) there are three white disks and two black disks at play and that (2) one will only be released if one presents a logical reasoning leading to the identification of the color of the disk on one’s back.4 Strictly speaking, nothing can be concluded from what one knows to be the situation. One can consider it to be more probable to have been adorned a black disk—after eliminating the two white disks that one can actually see, there remain two black disks (out of two) and only one white one (out of three)—but that is having to resort to probability, not to the required conclusive, logical reasoning. There is only one situation in which the solution could be seen at once, namely if the two other prisoners were to wear black disks, then the third prisoner would not doubt for a second about the color of his own disk—but this is not the case. That is why the prisoners are standing still.Yet at a certain moment, all three move toward the exit, convinced that they know the answer to the question.5 To understand how this is possible, let us follow one prisoner, A, and observe how the situation changes when he or she adds a hypothesis, H1, to it: ‘what if I would be wearing a black disk?’ Within H1 he or she may attribute a second and similar hypothesis to B (= H2). If H1 and H2 are the case, however, then C, hypothetically facing two black disks, would know the solution at once and be leaving immediately. Yet, because C does not move, H2 must be false. If H2 is false, then B knows the contrary to be true: he or she is not wearing a black disk but rather a white one. Yet, because B does not move either, A can conclude only that his or her initial hypothesis, H1, is false and that a white disk has been pinned on his or her back. The originality of Lacan’s presentation of this riddle resides in his distinction of three socalled logical times. The first one is the instant of the glance, which is actually the non-time required to conclude that ‘being opposite two blacks, one knows that one is a white’ (Lacan 2006: 167). The important word here is ‘one’—that is, the third person singular or an undifferentiated anyone. The second time is the time for comprehending, which starts as soon as one has formulated H1 and should conclude that ‘were I a black, the two whites that I see would waste no time realizing that they are whites’ (Lacan 2006: 168). Here the subjects involved are undefined except by their reciprocity: I am what I think you think that I am, et cetera. This time can either lead to error—I conclude myself to be black (which is not the case)—or open up a third time, the moment of concluding, which introduces a third kind of subjectivity implied in a logical formula of the form ‘I hasten to declare myself a white, so that these whites, whom I consider in this way, do not precede me in recognizing themselves for what they are’ (Lacan 2006: 168). The third formula has the remarkable quality of inserting the subjective dimension of haste into the domain of logics, usually considered as the most desubjectivized kind of reasoning human beings are capable of. Haste, here, is not motivated by the circumstances of the situation—the prisoner may lose the game—but by realizing that the time for comprehending can reach its conclusion, and therefore its telos, only if one concludes before it is too late to do so.The conclusion is preceded and supported by sound reasons, but the prisoner realizes that if he or she does not hasten the conclusion, he or she will never be able to conclude anything at all, because the entire reasoning is based on the others’ standing still (which proves that H1 and H2 are false).The subject of this assertion is qualified as ‘the personal subject’, which is neither the impersonal one of what one knows or sees nor the I or ego dependent on what others reflect about his or her identity. This subject is not so much a substantial person but rather indicates the lack of support marking any identity to be acquired. This lack of being or indeterminacy resonates heavily with the existentialist theme of an existence preceding essence (Sartre), which Lacan seems to be very 46

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much aware of, as he uses exactly the same terms: existence and essence. Yet in both Number Thirteen and Logical Time, Lacan emphasizes that psychoanalysis deals with the primordial ‘logical essence’ of the subject, rather than its ‘existence’ (Lacan 2001: 86 and 2006: 170). Parallel to these logical excursions, Lacan developed his theory of the mirror stage (2006: 75–81) during which the prematurely born human being acquires an identity through the identification with an image reflected by a mirror (or a peer functioning as such). This identity provides it with an ego and a sense of coherent oneness—which the young child cannot derive from its incoherent bodily sensations—but this identity is far from stable. It is, to start with, tragically alienating in that one finds oneself in an image outside oneself—hence, the narcissistic mixture of love for this personal life-giving image and hatred for it, as it also signals the death of the ego, possibly reduced to a mere lifeless image. The gist of Logical Time, however, concerns an element arising from and supplementing this imaginary deadlock, namely a subject of a logical statement that defines its identity beyond specular reflections. Here it is important to pay attention to the logics supporting the process of subjectivation. In Number Thirteen and in Logical Time, a logical operation is required to arrive at an identity determined within a collectivity. This identity does not exist before or outside any reference to others involved, which allows Lacan to qualify this process as a ‘collective logic’. Yet, there are two more crucial aspects. First of all, although one may be tempted to reduce the moment of concluding to an existential, heroically ‘performative’ moment, one should not overlook the fact that the required formulae exist independent of any subject. The formulae function as text balloons awaiting a subject—be it the impersonal one of the instant of the glance, the specular ego of the time for comprehending, or the subject of haste in the moment of concluding—to formulate them or, more precisely, to occupy the different subject positions implied.That is why, as noted before, Lacan refers to the formulae as essential—that is, as determining and expressing their subject. Second, these logical operations are eventually forgotten by the one who considers herself or himself to be white like the others or of ‘equal weight’ (Number Thirteen). One considers oneself to be a human being not unlike fellow human beings, yet one also becomes oblivious of the logical and collective process that leads to this seemingly evident identity.This is aptly summarized by Lacan as ‘the collective is nothing but the subject of the individual’ (2006: 175), meaning that any personal and social identity is supported by an unconscious collective process that includes the meanwhile forgotten possibility that one would not be considered as a human being. As Lacan puts it in the concluding paragraphs of Logical Time, the seemingly unshakable conviction that I am human is based on an unconscious fear—compare the shift from time for comprehending to moment of concluding—that the others would convince me of the opposite (2006: 174). By way of intermediate conclusion, let us enumerate the basic qualities of individual identity: a. Social, in that one acquires it only with others. b. Collective, in that it is based on an immanently shared property.6 c. False, in that it involves the repression of both the logical process and the subjective moment of anxious haste.7 The social dimension could be explored in closer detail—the paranoid universe in which the imaginary other has a ‘fuller’ identity than I myself could ever obtain, the crucial post–World War II question—what is a human being?—provoked by the atrocities of the concentration and extermination camps, the promises and dangers of masses, and so on.8 But following Lacan, the most important aspect is the unconscious logical process that supports any formation of subjectivity. 47

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From the Others to the Other In Logical Time, one reads about the thorough social determination of the individual and its threefold appearance as an impersonal one, as an imaginary ego, and as a subject. The difficulty, however, remains to know what exactly accounts for this subject: is it indeed the collective logical reasoning or something else? The answer is to the extent that the question revolves around the subject, to be understood literally as ‘underlying support’. On the one hand, the subject involves the collectively shared logics required for and supporting any individual identity; on the other hand, the subject forms the base of this logic. This latter subject emerges only at the point where the logical process shows a gap in its movement from premises to conclusion. In that sense, the subject is the linking of a logical reasoning to its conclusion. Later on, Lacan will more clearly distinguish these two, naming them Other and subject, respectively. The Other is the grounding logical process—the ‘speech balloons’ surrounding, preceding, and awaiting the individual—needed for the formation of an individual ego, and the subject is the ground of this grounding, situated at the point where this Other is lacking, where the logic shows a gap and where a performative auto-insertion of the subject into the field of the Other is required (cf. the moment of concluding). In Lacan’s seminars and texts of the 1950s, he will develop this and distinguish between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic, between the (conscious) ego and the subject (of the unconscious), between mirroring demands and triangular desire, between the frustrated aspiration to fullness and the assumption of one’s castrated lack of being, between the other and the Other, and so on. Lacan not only makes these crucial distinctions but also argues that the symbolic precedes the imaginary and functions as its hidden—that is, unconscious—condition of possibility. Lacan’s Other or ‘the symbolic’ involves a rearticulating of Freud’s famous depiction of the unconscious as the other scene (andere Schauplatz)—that is, as an unconscious dimension that adds itself to the conscious domain of signification and mutual recognition. This Freudian ‘other scene’ is understood by Lacan as the Other—that is, as a space containing the signifiers that precede and determine any subjectivity. In that sense, one could imagine the Other existing without a subject, but—and this is Lacan’s point in the 1950s—psychoanalysis can take place only when a subject is supposed to the Other, as support and bearer, not to be confused with the patient’s ego (moi). Yet if the Other is the support of and determines one’s identity, what then is the subject properly speaking? As we have seen, the subject in Lacan’s work needs to be taken literally as a hypokeimenon, in the Aristotelian sense of ‘what lies under’. This means that the subject should not be conceived of as a conscious, more or less self-transparent agent but rather as the bearer of collective statements—‘signifiers’, as Lacan, inspired by structuralist linguistics, will call them from a certain moment onward—that precede and exceed the subject they imply. The subject emerges out of a logic belonging to the field of the Other, where it is invited to leave behind a position of exception and exclusion—the odd piece or the one wearing a black disk—and to find support in formulae (or signifiers). These formulae, however, are qualified as sophistic, because there is no sufficient ground to them, and it is precisely at this gap within the logical reasoning that one should locate the subject.The subject, therefore, is on the one hand a lacking signifier—$, as Lacan prefers to notate it—a mere void or the missing element within the field of the Other and is on the other hand the unconscious exception to the presumed universality of the Other. This basic conception of the subject as divided between a ‘nothing’ within the realm of signifiers and a ‘something’ beyond the signifier determines the future development of Lacan’s teaching. In the following section, this will be illustrated by Lacan’s commentary on three tragedies in his seminars from 1958 to 1960.9 48

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In the seminar on Desire and Its Interpretation (2013: 279–419), several sessions are devoted to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To answer the question the play raises—why does Hamlet procrastinate?—Lacan initially uses the distinction between the imaginary ego and the subject (of the unconscious).10 Hamlet, the ego, avoids the dimension of desire, an avoiding which is revealed in the relation toward Gertrud, his mother. She testifies to a desire that does not concern Hamlet, yet he remains puzzled by the question of what directs and limits this desire when it is obviously no longer his father who is able to function as the third element in the oedipal triangle. That explains why Hamlet mercilessly denounces this desire, as much as he needs it within the quest for his own position as a subject. Here Lacan points out that Hamlet seeks to be the imaginary phallus of the Other’s desire, namely the object that would undo the lack inherent to the dimension of desire. This positioning oneself as the imaginary phallus implies the misrecognition of lack as structural and an interpretation of desire as a demand (for love). This, however, can barely be considered as a stable solution, as is made evident by the play and condensed in the famous line to be or not to be. If Hamlet has lost his position as a subject and therefore ends up as entirely dependent on the others whom he actually despises, criticizes, and ridicules, the obvious question is if and when Hamlet can leave this fatal, imaginary dialectic and become the subject of desire. Or, using the terminology used in Logical Time, when will Hamlet end the time for comprehending with a moment of conclusion? The shift to becoming a subject of the symbolic—that is, when confronting the dimension of desire—occurs near the end of the play at the famous graveyard scene, in which people gather around the grave of Ophelia, who took her own life. Hamlet witnesses Laertes, Ophelia’s brother, mourning and engages in a competition on the magnitude of their mourning. Ophelia, whom he rejected in a most callous way, becomes the object of rivalry, not as a positivity— something that one could enjoy or that would make one more complete—but as a lost love. Although Hamlet enters the competition with Laertes in an imaginary way, which usually entails the jealous supposition of a fullness that the other enjoys, the aspect of Laertes that he identifies with is a lack and Laertes’s mournful expression of it. Bidding against Laertes, what Hamlet discovers is not a supposed plenitude but a lack that he identifies with and eventually considers as a sum ‘forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love’ make up (5.1.259–261). Lacan relates this to Hamlet’s sudden ability to exact the postponed revenge on his uncle, Claudius, and to act in his own name, as he exclaims ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.246–247). For the first time, the subject of a signifier appears—to be a Dane or a Danish prince is a symbolic identity which is granted, not chosen—a subject that came into being based on the recognition of a fundamental nonbeing. This reading is one of the best examples of Lacan’s structuralist reinterpretations of Freud, and in it, no recourse is made to ‘unconscious motives’ to account for Hamlet’s lack of decisiveness— for example, an identification with Claudius, the one who actually did what Hamlet-theneurotic can only dream of, killing his father and sleeping with his mother.11 Lacan’s reading introduces the Other as a symbolic system in which a subject (Hamlet) needs to find its allocated place (prince of Denmark). This is made possible only via Ophelia as the structurally lost object—neither the Other nor Hamlet ‘has’ her. Although the focus is on desire and its intimate connection with subjectivity, the reader cannot but be struck by the implication of this line of thought: to be a subject, to imply desire as a dimension that decenters the ego from its safe yet problematic place, one ends up becoming what one always already was for and within the Other. Doesn’t this seal off any possible connection between psychoanalysis and even the most modest idea of liberation or emancipation? Does this allow for any difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and its elective enemy, namely a psychotherapy aiming at an adaptation of the individual to his or her ‘proper’ place, allocated by society and its most important apparatus of 49

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self-reduplication, the family? From Lacan’s take on Hamlet we have seen that non-imaginary subjectivity is to be situated beside the identification with the other (as both an image of myself and an image that makes any ‘selfhood’ impossible), that this implies an anticipatory act concluding the time for comprehending, but also that the conditions of possibility for such an act ultimately depend on a signifier granted by the Other. The kind of act involved is not unlike the one performed by the prisoners in Logical Time: they choose to be what the Other always already had decided about their identity: ‘white’, ‘the Dane’. If ‘the unconscious’, as Lacan once famously stated, ‘is politics’ (1966–1967: lesson of 10 May 1967) then here the question is indeed whether this politics amounts to anything other than an invitation to accept the Other’s decision on the subject’s representation within the symbolic order. This is clearly a possible way of reading Lacan, which is, however, only possible if one overlooks the other dimension to the Other: its lack. As much as symbolic identity may be an inevitable result, Lacan’s focus concerns the unconscious, logical operations required for it. This may be the reason why, immediately after the lessons on Hamlet, Lacan returns to the question of desire. At the end of the tragedy, as soon as ‘Hamlet is Hamlet’, ‘he is abolished in his desire’ (2013: 488) and as tragic hero is no longer useful to detail the logic of desire. Although Lacan had introduced the notion of desire years before Seminar VI, the emphasis was put on its symbolic determination and attention focused mainly on the laws governing this symbolic dimension.The concluding sessions of Seminar VI—that is, after the commentary on Hamlet—however, discuss another aspect of this Other—that is, the Other not as the field where the subject is offered a symbolic identity but as lacking, as testifying to desire. Lacan describes the position of the subject with regard to the desiring Other by using a term borrowed from Freud, helplessness (Hilflosigkeit), and it is precisely to this paradoxical relation of both dependence and being left without recourse (2013: 502) that the subject needs to invent an answer, beyond the signifier— that is, made of a material neither borrowed from nor offered by the Other.

Not Without an Object In the two years after Desire and Its Interpretation (2013 [1958–1959]), in the seminars The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) and Transference (2015), two other tragedies play a pivotal role. In his analysis of both Sophocles’s Antigone12 and Paul Claudel’s early-20th-century trilogy The Hostage/Stale Bread/The Humiliated Father, one can discern Lacan’s preoccupation with the precise articulation of, on one hand, the dialectic of desire and the symbolic law and, on the other hand, the element that escapes this. The tragic fate of Antigone is well-known: against the prohibition of Creon, king of Thebes, she decides to bury her brother Polynices, who died during the battle he raised against Thebes. Not only is Polynices dead, but Creon wants to erase any memory of this traitor and enemy of the polis as well.13 In this way Creon, ‘who exists to promote the good of all’, makes a fatal error in judgment, because human laws are limited by unwritten, divine laws (Lacan 1992: 258). And, indeed, Antigone refers to a divine law, which permits her to ignore Creon’s and take care of Polynices’s burial. Does this mean that Antigone, according to Lacan’s reading, boils down to the tragic conflict between two sorts of law, a human and divine one? Not at all. Creon’s decision may run against an unwritten law, but Antigone herself is presented as autonomous, not in the sense that she would subject herself (auto) to another, divine law (nomos) but as a figure who positions herself at the place where the law originates from—that is, where it constitutes a break with any natural or ‘real’ foundation and becomes the law because . . . it is the law.14 This arbitrariness of the law or the symbolic order, the ‘nothing’ on which it rests, is what Antigone reveals to us in an aesthetic way. The tragedy is ancient in that respect that one may consider Antigone as performing an act according to a divine will, but Lacan crucially adds 50

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that in our modern times ‘the whole sphere of the gods’ has been erased (1992: 260). This suggests that a psychoanalytic approach to tragedy does not focus on the Other (the gods, law, etc.) as something that may or may not exist, but first and foremost as a desire, a will (volonté), or, in Lacanian terms, a lack or desire of the Other that concerns the hero as a subject. This becomes particularly clear in the sessions devoted to Claudel’s play (1972). In the first part, The Hostage, set in Napoleonic France, the tragic fate of Sygne de Coûfontaine, who lives by and for the aristocratic name ‘Coûfontaine’, unfolds. After years of sacrifices to restore the family estate, one asks her to marry Toussaint Turelure, one of the family’s former servants and the assassin of her parents. This demanding sacrifice will save the pope from being kept hostage and allow him to return to Rome. At the end of the first part—actually, in an originally unpublished version of this ending, nonetheless extensively discussed by Lacan—she takes a bullet destined for her husband,Turelure. Just before dying, he asks her why she saved his life and whether she did this out of love for him. Sygne does not utter a single word, she only gives ‘a sign of no’ (un signe que non). Before discussing the import of this ‘sign of no’ for Lacan’s subsequent elaborations of the subject, let us note that in the third part of Claudel’s play, The Humiliated Father, the enigmatic Pensée, a distant relative to Sygne de Coûfontaine, attracts all the gazes to herself, yet without being able to return them, because she is blind. She will eventually give birth to a child and therefore, after the complete dissolution of the Coûfontaine family to Sygne’s negating twitch of the head, stands at the beginning of a new symbolic universe. The three tragedies teach Lacan that the symbolic is not without its nonsymbolic exception. In Hamlet this role is fulfilled by Ophelia, in Antigone by the (empty) field of the gods, and in the Coûfontaine trilogy by Pensée. This leads Lacan to formalize this exception as objet a, the nonsymbolic and non-specular supplement that functions both as an indication of the Other’s desire and as a specific reply to this desire.15 In general, this applies to the three tragedies, but when looking at the details—and Lacan’s later teaching—important differences become clear. Before paying attention to these, we should add to our list two more aspects of subjectivity: d. Beyond specular identification with fellow human beings (‘the other’) and reliance on a consistent Other, one is the subject of the latter’s lack and desire. e. Symbolic identity requires the invention of a reply to the Other qua desiring Other.

The One and the Other In Hamlet the misrecognition and eventual abolition of desire is at stake; in Antigone the hero identifies with desire as the foundation, the lack of the Other; and in Claudel’s play these issues return under the guise of Sygne as a figure completely crushed by the signifier and of Pensée as the extra-symbolic element initiating a new symbolic universe. The differences, however, are important and thoroughly determine Lacan’s future elaborations. These changes are twofold: one concerns the effect of the signifier beyond granting a preformed place within the symbolic and the other consists in making the extra-symbolic element, the objet a, operational.

The One Sygne’s sign of no teaches Lacan that the insertion of the subject within the symbolic order is performed by a first signifier, S1, which is meaningless as such, because as a pure (negating) mark, it does not position the subject within a preexisting genealogy or narrative. It is only in 51

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combination with the other signifiers—formalized as S2—that the subject gets represented by and within the symbolic.16 This is a crucial differentiation between the signifier as a symbolic element relating to other signifiers and as a trait isolated from and repressed by the other signifiers. The importance of this becomes particularly clear when, years later, Lacan, in the midst of a discussion on Aristotelian logic, exemplifies the difference between a subject as represented (from S1 to S2) and the subject as marked by one signifier (S1). This is the whole difference, he explains, between the word ‘worker’ in the paternalist phrase ‘they are good workers’ and in ‘workers of the world, unite’, the famous line from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. In the first phrase, a predicate (good) gets connected to a subject (worker), and thereby the latter is identifiable (and disappears under) the combination of the two signifiers: good and worker. In the second phrase, however, no external instance differentiates the class of workers from other classes; one is merely invited to identify with one signifier, which has no precise meaning and of which it is unclear who and how many will obey the summons (Lacan 1967–1968: lesson of 7 February 1968).17 Here the signifier acts like a proper name—compare Hamlet, Coûfontaine— that is, without a direct meaning and isolated from other signifiers, yet unlike the proper name, it lacks any reference to a specific place one is invited to occupy within a family or other social structure. ‘Worker’ in this sense is, on one hand, an affirmation of the primacy of the Other— there is no pure, authentic subject, because any subject is a subject of the signifier—yet, on the other hand, as a mark, it suspends all meaning that is automatically produced as soon as there is an interplay between two or more signifiers. As an empty signifier, it both singularizes (this is what you are) and universalizes (the subject of the word ‘worker’ is the collection of those who identify with the word).

The Other Here ‘the other’ does not refer to the imaginary other, the fellow human being. It instead indicates the issue of how the Other qua symbolic order is not ‘one’ but ‘other’.The Other’s incompleteness or lack of unity (i.e., its desire) is guaranteed by an element that is nonsymbolic, the objet a. Within the context of this chapter, Lacan, interestingly, gradually made the objet a into an operative notion. We have seen this already with Pensée, who occupies a certain position and is capable from that position to initiate a symbolic order. Simply put, after the imaginary other as a means to constitute a collectivity and the symbolic Other allocating anyone to his or her proper place within a socio-symbolic structure, the other returns qua objet a, fulfilling another social and political role. This role can take on different concrete appearances and functions, including the excluded other allowing the formation of a collectivity (see Number Thirteen);18 the surplusjouissance that the capitalist extracts from the proletarian’s work (which then gets returned to the consumer by way of the commodity, which in many ways is more and different than a mere object satisfying a certain need); and the enigmatic presence of the analyst, occupying the position of the object, the cause of the subject’s desire. The latter instantiation of the objet a is made evident by the analytic discourse, as formalized by Lacan, next to the master, the hysteric and the university discourses (Diagram 3.1).19 In the figure of the analytic discourse above, the objet a takes in the upper-left-corner position of the agent, producing the S1 discovered during the analysis of Claudel’s The Hostage. From the formula, we can derive that this S1 is barred from any access to an S2, which implies that the inevitable effect of meaning—as soon as the interplay between two signifiers would take place—is suspended. That is why Lacan qualifies the work of analysis as a production of bêtises, stupidities, to be taken literally as mute signifiers (Lacan 1998 [1972–1973]: 12–22). 52

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Diagram 3.1  Lacan’s Four Discourses Source: Diagram adapted from Lacan, Jacques (2008) [1969–1970] The Seminar, Book XVII:The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Russell Grigg, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 29.

Conclusion It will be clear that Lacan’s work contains many useful elements for political theory; less clear, however, is if and how these elements can be synthesized into a coherent ‘political Lacan’. Referring to Lacan, one can emphasize the necessity of a primordial Other and end up deploring the current dissolution of symbolic structures known as ‘family’, ‘society’, and ‘community’. Or one can point toward the lack in the Other and take it to be the principle of liberal democracy, as a political thinking according to which the place of power needs to be kept structurally empty and no one claims to possess or to speak the truth. These two options belong to what one can call the symbolic Lacan. Next to this, one may want to focus on the extra-symbolic objet a. This notion raises the question of what functions as the exception to the symbolic universe and how it does this. Should one consider it as the exclusion inherent to the formation of any collective identity and as the reason to persistent racism and sexism, or should one consider it more structurally as the place of the exception out of which existing (unconscious) symbolic formations can be questioned, analyzed, and eventually created? The latter question seems to be the most important one, in the sense that it is closest to Lacan’s psychoanalytical purposes—what can psychoanalysis do and what happens when one person is speaking and the other is listening with and from the hypothesis of the unconscious?—and that it resonates with the fundamental problem, sketched 53

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earlier in this chapter, that preoccupies Lacan from the beginning to the later phases of his teaching. This problem is the problem of the subject as both situated within the Other and at an eccentric point outside of it (objet a). The wager of psychoanalysis consists in a confrontation with this abject object (the position of the analyst) and the promise that it will reveal a signifier, not so much determining or identifying the subject but rather singularizing it.Therefore, we can conclude that Lacanian psychoanalysis teaches us to look for the unconscious, logical operations required for politics ‘as what links people together’, to axiomatically consider the Other as primordial, collectivizing, and burdening its subject with an opaque desire and a structural lack and to conceive possible change in politics as a passing from the position of the excluded object to the singular and stupid yet potentially universalizing signifier S1. If this is the case, then we can add to our list one final characteristic of our Lacanian subject: f.

An ‘objective’ exception reveals a signifier inserting the subject into the field of the Other, a signifier beyond the individual and with the potential to create a non-totalizable collectivity.

Notes 1. The start of this period is usually identified with the original publication of the paper The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Lacan 2006: 197–268) and the opening of his public seminar, both in 1953. 2. See Khovanova (2015) for a recent review of approaches to this problem. Interestingly, Lacan, informed about this mathematical puzzle by François Le Lionnais, must have been on an international level among the first to publish a sound solution. For a detailed account of Number Thirteen, see Copin (2016: 41–57). 3. Even 20 years later, when Lacan famously states that ‘the unconscious is politics’, he identifies politics with what ‘links people together and opposes them’ (1966–1967: lesson of 10 May 1967). This echoes Freud’s statement: In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well. (Freud 1981 [1921]: 69) 4. This is another well-known puzzle, of which many variants exist, with names like ‘the muddy children’ and ‘the three wise men’, among others. The internet offers several detailed discussions of them. For further comments on Lacan’s text, see Hoens (2020). 5. This may sound odd, but one needs to take into account that the situation is the same for the three prisoners—each of them sees two white disks on the others’ backs—and it is supposed that each of them is capable, and motivated by the prospect of freedom, to perform the same logical reasoning. 6. This can be related to Lacan’s early statements on the decline of an external point of identification, the so-called paternal imago (2001: 60). 7. Here, of course, Lacan situates himself within a French tradition, starting with 17th-century moralists such as Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, of critiquing the ego or self as a vain illusion. 8. Not to mention Lacan’s critique of the increasing and misleading reduction of anything subjective to the individual or the ego; see, for example, Lacan 2006: 99. 9. Lacan’s seminars took place, at different locations, from 1953 to 1980.These yearly seminars are considered to be more accessible than the condensed results stemming from them, to wit the articles included in his Ecrits (2006 [1966]) and Autres Ecrits (2001). Many volumes of the seminars have been edited and published by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, although some important seminars, especially those belonging to the years 1964–1968, are available only as more or less reliable yet unofficial transcripts, such as at http://staferla.free.fr. 10. The following paragraphs on Hamlet are borrowed, with minor changes and a different emphasis, from Hoens (2016). 11. An analysis along those lines would be Freud’s, but Lacan takes care to criticize him indirectly, via his pupil Ernest Jones.

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Jacques Lacan 12. Lacan’s discussion of Antigone (1992: 243–283) provoked a wealth of secondary literature, too abundant to list it here. For a discussion of Antigone’s tragic act as a model of revolutionary action, and for further references, see the detailed account of a debate between Yannis Stavrakakis and Slavoj Žižek in Stavrakakis 2007: 109–149. 13. Creon wants to erase Polynices as a signifier—to strike him with a ‘second death’, as Lacan qualifies it. For more about this ‘second death’ and its background, see Nobus 2017: 47–72. 14. This reading of Antigone’s ‘autonomy’ is inspired by Marc De Kesel (2009: 223–225). 15. For more about the notion of objet a, see Hoens (2016). 16. Discussions of Lacan often equate ‘the symbolic’ with ‘the signifier representing the subject’, but this kind of equation overlooks the fact that the symbolic is a notion one can already find in texts belonging to the early 1950s, whereas the famous formula ‘a signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier’ is proposed by Lacan not before the end of 1961, during the unfortunately still unpublished seminar in which, significantly for the first time as well, Lacan tries to conceptualize the objet a; see 1961–1962: lesson of 6 December 1961. 17. The question of what ‘is’ a psychoanalyst and what unites psychoanalysts provides the background to Lacan’s question. Although obviously crucial, here we cannot explore Lacan’s articulation of the political question about what makes an analyst into an analyst and whether analysts can(not) or should (not) form a collection, class, group, or school. 18. For a Lacanian enquiry of a universality that is non-segregationist, see Šumič 2016. 19. Lacan’s four discourses—the master, hysteric, analytic, and university—cannot be discussed here. The reader may want to consult Lacan (2008 [1969–1970]) and Verhaeghe (1995) and various contributions to Clemens and Grigg (2006) and Tomšič and Zevnik (2016). For recent accounts of Lacan’s development of a fifth discourse, the capitalist one, see Tomšič (2015: 199–229), Vanheule (2016), and Žižek (2017: 197–223)

References Claudel, P. (1972) L’otage suivi de Le pain dur et de Le père humilié, Paris: Gallimard. Clemens, J. and Grigg, R. (eds.) (2006) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Copin, J. (2016) Les Prisonniers de Lacan: Une Introduction au Temps Logique, Paris: Hermann. De Kesel, M. (2009) Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, Jöttkandt, S. (trans.), Albany: State University of New York Press. Freud, S. (1981) [1921] ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 18, Strachey, J. (trans.), London: The Hogarth Press. Hoens, D. (2016) ‘The Object a and Politics’, in Tomšič, S. and Zevnik, A. (eds.) Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Hoens, D. (2020) ‘Comments on Logical Time’, in Hook, D., Neill, C. and Vanheule, S. (eds.), Lacan’s Ecrits: A Reader’s Guide—Volume 1, London and New York: Routledge. Khovanova, T. (2015) ‘Parallel Weighings of Coins’, in Beineke, J. and Rosenhouse, J. (eds.) The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Lacan, J. (1961–1962) Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’Identification, unpublished. Lacan, J. (1966–1967) Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La Logique du Fantasme, unpublished. Lacan, J. (1967–1968) Le Séminaire, Livre XV: L’Acte Psychanalytique, unpublished. Lacan, J. (1992) [1959–1960] The Seminar, Book VII:The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Porter, D. (trans.), London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1998) [1972–1973] The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Fink, B. (trans.), London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2001) Autres Ecrits, Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2006) [1966] Ecrits, Fink, B. (trans.), London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2007) [1954] ‘Du Symbole, et de sa Fonction Religieuse’, Le Mythe Individuel du Névrosé, Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2008) [1969–1970] The Seminar, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Grigg, R. (trans.), London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2013) [1958–1959] Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le Désir et son Interpretation, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Paris: La Martinière.

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Dominiek Hoens Lacan, J. (2015) [1960–1961] The Seminar, Book VIII: Transference, Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Fink, B. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity Press. Nobus, D. (2017) The Law of Desire. On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Roudinesco, E. (1997) Jacques Lacan, Bray, B. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Šumič, J. (2016) ‘Politics and Psychoanalysis in the Times of the Inexistent Other’, in Tomšič, S. and Zevnik, A. (eds.) Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London:Verso. Tomšič, S. and Zevnik, A. (eds.) (2016) Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Vanheule, S. (2016) ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, Frontiers in Psychology, 7. Verhaeghe, P. (1995) ‘From Impossibility to Inability: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses’, The Letter, 3, 76–100. Žižek, S. (2017) Incontinence of the Void, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

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4 WILHELM REICH Christopher Turner

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was one of the most celebrated of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils. The psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn described Reich in his memoir as ‘the Prometheus of the younger generation’, who ‘brought light from the analytic Gods down to us’ (Grotjahn 1987: 32, 148). In the 1920s, Reich’s second analyst, Paul Federn, called him the best diagnostician among the younger therapists; he was, in the eyes of many, Freud’s heir apparent. One person who knew them both would later describe Reich as having been ‘Freud’s fair-haired boy’ (author interview with Lore Reich Rubin, October 2004). Anna Freud reported that her father had called Reich ‘the best head’ in the Psychoanalytic Association, and he lived and had his rooms at Berggasse 7, just a block down the road from his mentor (Reich 1968: 42). Having worked for the Vienna Ambulatorium, the free clinic that Freud hoped would bring ‘therapy to the masses’, a radical social project that inspired the revolutionism of some younger analysts, Reich sought to reconcile Psychoanalysis and Marxism, an ambitious exercise that had a lasting influence on the Freudian Left. He was among the first to do this, thereby giving Freudianism an optimistic gloss, arguing that repression, which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition, could be shed, leading to what his critics dismissed as a ‘genital utopia’. Reich, who linked a militant advocation of free love to an idea of social emancipation, was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea to all ills, he thought, including the fascism that would force him from Europe (he was mocked as ‘the prophet of bigger and better orgasms’). ‘There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients’, he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm (1927): ‘the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction’ (Reich 1973: 37, emphasis in the original). In 1928, Reich joined the Communist Party, and among his comrades in the Red Housing Block in Berlin, he was the writer Arthur Koestler. ‘We sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners’, Koestler wrote in The God That Failed (1949) of their dogged, unglamorous brand of activism: Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He . . . had just published a book called The Function of the Orgasm, in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political

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consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds. (Crossman 2001: 43) Reich’s sexual dogmatism would eventually see him kicked out of both the psychoanalytic movement and the Communist Party. Nevertheless, Reich was an important figurehead of the sex-reform movement in Vienna and Berlin—before the Nazis, who deemed it a conspiracy to undermine European society and eventually crushed it. His books were burned in Germany, along with those of Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud. Reich—a Jew, a psychoanalyst, and a communist—fled to Denmark, Sweden, and then Norway, as fascism pursued him across the continent. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States, optimistic that his ideas about fusing sex and politics would be better received there. Because of his radical past, he was put under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) almost as soon as he arrived and, as a suspected communist, was interned on Ellis Island after the United States joined the war. In 1957, he would die in prison, considered the guru of ‘a new cult of sex and anarchy’, his ideas the rallying point for a new generation of dissenters. In an obituary, Norman Mailer celebrated Reich as a hero, an ‘intellectual martyr’ who ‘was on to something which will still change the course of human history’ (to Kenneth Tynan in 1972, Kenneth Tynan Papers, British Library). The debt to Reich was clear when Mailer described, in his Dissent essay ‘The White Negro’ (1957), how the hipster ‘seeks love . . . love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it’. Mailer initiated what Dan Wakefield, writing of New York in the 1950s, called ‘the Great Orgasm Debate’, which raged ‘not only in the pages of Dissent but in beds all over New York’ (Wakefield 1992: 241). In a subsequent issue, writer Ned Polsky argued that hipsters were ‘so narcissistic that inevitably their orgasms are premature and puny’. The orgasm became a battleground: was the ‘apocalyptic orgasm’ the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a distraction that camouflaged narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness? The debate encapsulated all the paradoxes and ironies of the sexual revolution, as a generation was intoxicated with Reich’s utopian optimism about the possibility of change but also unsuspecting accomplices in the authorship of more insidious forms of control.

The Fusion of Freud and Marx Reich’s political awakening occurred in the summer of 1927, after three members of a rightwing paramilitary group accused of murdering an eight-year-old boy and an elderly war veteran were acquitted of ‘all wrongdoing’ by a right-wing judge. In response, a huge number of workers went on strike and marched together to the square in front of the Justizpalast, the Palace of Justice, which was set ablaze by the angry mob. The 30-year-old Reich was a witness of the traumatic events that unfolded: he recalled that 200 meters away from where he was standing, a phalanx of police officers started to advance with their gun barrels lowered. When they were 50 meters away, their captain ordered them to shoot at the crowd. The killing went on for three hours: 89 people died, and about a thousand were wounded. Historian David S. Luft has called the violence ‘the most revolutionary day in Austrian history’ and refers to the ‘generation of 1927 . . . a generation whose adult political consciousness was defined in terms of the events of 15 July 1927’ (Luft 2003: 151). Reich, forced to hide behind a tree to dodge the bullets, was very much part of that generation (as was Elias Canetti); in his book People in Trouble, written in 1937 but not published until 1953, he wrote of the events 58

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he witnessed as the defining moment in his political awakening; the brutal police oppression was, he said, a ‘practical course on Marxian sociology’ (Reich 1976: 25). That evening, Reich joined the Arbeiterhilfe (Worker’s Help), a medical corps affiliated with the Austrian Communist Party, hoping to help the wounded. When Reich asked Freud for his opinion on the ‘civil war’, his mentor maintained a studied neutrality—he was fundamentally unsympathetic to the ‘primal horde’, and later that year, partly in response to the riots, Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, in which he stated that the masses were ‘lazy and unintelligent: they have no love for instinctual renunciation’ and had, more or less, to be educated and coerced by an elite into accepting repression as a requirement of civilization (Freud 1928: 7). Disappointed with Freud’s response, Reich turned instead to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. He realized that what Marx had done for economics was as radical as what Freud had done for psychiatry, and he imagined a fusion of their respective insights. Marx led him to Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State and to other critics of patriarchy like Johann Jakob Bachofen. Reich, then revising the manuscript of The Function of the Orgasm (1927), chose to add a new chapter to his book on ‘the social significance of genital strivings’. This represented his first attempt at applying his insights on the orgasm to social problems, thereby reconciling Marx and Freud. If Reich thought that all neuroses were caused by sexual repressions, he extended this idea when he thought of possible solutions to mass neuroses. It was sexual frustration, he now argued, that led to social disorder and that held people back from embracing revolutionary change: Reich, arguably the inventor of the phrase ‘the sexual revolution’, thought that sexual repression was the one obstacle that had defeated the 1919 efforts of the Bolsheviks. ‘If people were sexually satisfied, liberated and willingly polygamous’, he suggested, there would be no war, sadism, or drive to destructiveness but a kind of genital utopia instead. Freud evidently didn’t share Reich’s belief in the potent orgasm as the summation of (revolutionary) human achievement. He wrote to the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé in Berlin: ‘We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobbyhorse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis’ (Freud 1972: 174). Reich believed that sexual repression, as encouraged by the institution of the family, was not an intrinsic part of the civilizing process, as Freud maintained, but instead functioned to support the existing class structure. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had argued that one of the main tasks of the social revolution was to abolish the nuclear family. In a meeting with Freud, Reich declared the family to be ‘a factory for authoritarian ideologies’ that suppressed the natural sexuality of children, and Reich spoke of it as a disease—‘familitis’—proposing that children be brought up in collectives instead. Freud warned him: ‘You’ll be poking into a hornet’s nest’ (Reich 1968: 74). In 1928, Reich joined the Austrian Communist Party. Now marginalized by psychoanalysts in Vienna and increasingly disillusioned with psychoanalysis itself, he referred to the party as a ‘second home’ (Reich 1976: 204). Reich and his revolutionary friends, he later explained, were full of belief in the ‘inevitable collapse of capitalism’ and ‘the immutable course of history’ (Reich 1976: 94). Whenever demonstrations were announced in the communist newspaper the Red Flag, Reich would join them, marching with the unemployed. The following year, Reich founded and appointed himself ‘scientific director’ of the Socialist Society for Sex-Counseling and Sex-Research; to launch his enterprise, Reich placed an ad in the Social Democratic newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, offering ‘Free counseling on sexual problems, the rearing of children, and general mental hygiene to those seeking advice’ (Danto 2005: 197). Over the next three years, Reich’s organization—whose motto was ‘free sexuality within an egalitarian society’— established six free clinics in Vienna, which were open one or two days a week. ‘The new centers 59

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immediately became so overcrowded’, Reich wrote, ‘that any doubt as to the significance of my work was promptly removed’ (Reich 1976: 108). Reich also operated a van that doubled as a mobile clinic on the weekends, taking his message of liberation to the people, distributing sex education pamphlets and contraceptives door to door and inviting his audience to throw off their repressions as he lectured to them on ‘the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism’ in rural squares and local parks. Reich spoke from his soapbox about the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family, arguing for a ‘politics of everyday life’. It was perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date. Reich abandoned his doctor’s office to get to the ‘sickbed of society, on the streets, in the slums, among the unemployed and poverty-stricken’. It was new, Reich said, ‘to attack the neuroses by prevention rather than treatment’, trying to stop the causes of illness rather than just treating the sick (Reich 1976: 108). When she was interviewed in the early 1970s by the British writer Kenneth Tynan, Reich’s mistress Lia Laszky painted a picture of the success of their agitprop enterprise that greatly differed from Reich’s self-aggrandizing portrait: We would stop in a workers’ district, hand out pamphlets and make speeches explaining birth control, which was a forbidden subject in a Catholic country. But we attracted no publicity, except in the most conservative papers, which just made fun of our efforts. Willi spent almost everything he earned on these pamphlets and public meetings. He would go down to the basement of a coffee-house and talk to maybe a hundred people about reconciling Freud and Marx. And then Pravda would say: ‘Mass Assembly of Viennese People to hear Dr. Wilhelm Reich’. (Kenneth Tynan Papers, British Library) Despite these disappointing audiences, which were exaggerated by the Soviet propaganda machine, ‘Reich loved it’, remembered Laszky, ‘it was meat and potatoes to him’ (Sharaf 1984: 132). That August,Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie Reich made a pilgrimage to Moscow. It was the year of the Wall Street crash, and there was mass unemployment in Europe (between 1928 and 1932, after five years of relative prosperity, unemployment doubled in Austria). The Russia that the Reichs visited was a utopian place of his sexual theories. He thought it demonstrated irrefutably that common property, matriarchy, a lack of rigid family organization, sexual freedom for children and adolescents, openness and generosity in character structure, are just as interrelated as private property, patriarchy, asceticism in children and adolescents, enslavement of women, rigidity in family and marriage, character armoring, sexual perversion, and mental illness, all of which are the ever-present symptoms of sexual suppression. (Reich 1976: 121) However, Reich’s vision of a sexually permissive future, where primitive sexuality was unleashed, didn’t appeal either to orthodox Marxists or to Freudians. The German Communist Party was alarmed by the youth cult that was growing around Reich as a consequence of his popular appeal to sexual freedom, especially of adolescents. One communist sports organization complained that students influenced by Reich had demanded they be provided with rooms where they could pursue their sexual relationships. When the Communist Party, which feared alienating Catholic voters, wavered on whether or not to clear for publication Reich’s book 60

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endorsing adolescent sexuality, The Sexual Struggle of Youth, Reich simply founded and financed a press devoted to sex education literature and published the book by himself. The book took him several weeks to write and was intended to counter the Nazis’ nationalistic appeals to youth; 10,000 copies were printed, almost half of which sold within six weeks of publication. The party hierarchy didn’t like being sidestepped in this way and subsequently branded Reich a ‘counterrevolutionary’, accusing him of making brothels of their youth associations and of turning the class struggle into the battle between adolescents and adults. As one critic put it at the time, was Reich politicizing sexuality or sexualizing politics? Reich called for the ceaseless politicization of sexual life in response to the rising danger of the Nazi party, but the communists had dwindling sympathies for Reich’s ‘psychoanalytic’ arguments. Marxist physician and leading luminary in the sex-reform movement Martha Rubenn-Wolff echoed the party line when she argued that there were no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat, because neurosis was a bourgeois disease. In December 1932, Sex-Pol’s publications, which Moscow declared ‘ideologically incorrect’, were banned from party bookstores, and Reich was excluded from the Comintern. When the Nazis burned this and other books, Reich was forced to escape Berlin, and he took up residence in Copenhagen. He absorbed himself in Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda in an attempt to explain why, when the conditions seemed so ripe for revolution, the German masses had turned to Nazism rather than communism. Reich applied all his thinking on sex and politics to the crisis at hand and wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), his classic study of dictatorship. According to Reich, who continued to extend his orgasm theory into politics, the systematic repression of the child’s natural desires by the patriarchal family created citizens who were used to being told what to do and who were therefore prone to submissiveness, blind obedience, and irrationality. In Nazi propaganda, Hitler exploited sexual anxieties and idealized the family, because it taught the child to police his or her unruly instincts and represented ‘the authoritarian state in miniature’ (Reich 1976: 30). The masses feared the freedoms promised by a genuine revolution in which they—not an absolute ruler—would have to take responsibility for their own fate, an existential leap which only the ‘genitally satisfied’ could do. At the same time that the Communist Party was beginning to disown him, Freud told his American patient Joseph Wortis that Reich, a talented psychoanalyst, will probably have to leave the [psychoanalytic] movement because he has turned Communist and altered his views. He believes, e.g., that the aggressive instinct and sex problems are products of the class struggle instead of inborn biological drives. (Wortis 1954: 106) When Reich submitted an article on masochism to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1932—in which he claimed that sadism and masochism, which Freud explained as the work of the death drive, were not biologically innate in humans but products of capitalism—Freud insisted that it should be accompanied by a disclaimer saying that Reich toed the Communist Party line: ‘Bolshevism places restrictions on the freedom of scientific research’, Freud wrote, ‘similar to those of the Church’ (Reich 1976: 192). Freud thought that Reich had so departed from orthodoxy that he needed to cut Reich off as he had done earlier dissenters and revisionists, such as Jung, Adler, Stekel, and Rank. Freud responded to the increasing radicalism of the latest heretic with a blunt New Year’s resolution for 1932. He made a note of it in his diary: ‘Step against Reich’ (Freud 1992: 13). ‘We see once more that Politics and Science do not mix any better than oil and water’, Ernest Jones said in 61

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his opening address to the 1934 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, Switzerland, and it was obvious to everyone that he was referring to Reich (Steiner 2000: 177). Reich was summoned for a hearing before the executive committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), where Anna Freud, the vice-president and her sick father’s gatekeeper, accused Reich of trying to fuse politics with psychoanalysis and of subordinating Freud’s ideas to his own revolutionary ‘Bolshevik’ message; the senior psychoanalysts objected to his communism, just as the communists did to his psychoanalysis. Reich was to be expelled, she told him, for founding a movement to assert these radical ideas. Reich refused to accept his exclusion and told the committee that he viewed himself ‘as the legitimate representative of natural-scientific psychoanalytic thought’ (Reich 1976: 248). He accused them, in turn, of political backsliding and of accommodating fascism (he always maintained that it was his publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which Reich was forbidden from promoting at the conference, that had resulted in his expulsion). Since it was obvious that the IPA had already secretly and undemocratically excluded him, Reich finally capitulated and said that he’d continue alone with the libido theory under the banner SEX-ECONOMY. Reich’s behavior at Lucerne cemented his reputation as the madcap of the profession. He camped in a tent outside the conference center and was said to have carried a large knife in his belt, which reminded one analyst of an Arab sheik, and to have cavorted with his mistress in front of the other analysts, who took the opportunity to insinuate that she was a prostitute (Reich divorced Annie later that year). Paul Federn, who had lobbied to exclude Reich from the executive committee since the late 1920s, now went so far as to label him a ‘psychopath’ who slept with all his female patients (‘Either Reich goes or I go’, he said) (Sharaf 1984: 187). His own analyst, Sandor Rado, who had described Reich as suffering from a ‘mild paranoid tendency’ in 1930, now claimed to have observed signs of an ‘insidious psychotic process’ at this time, and Paul Federn also later maintained that he had detected ‘incipient schizophrenia’ during his (earlier) analysis of Reich (Sharaf 1984: 194).

The United States and the New Cult of Sex and Anarchy In 1939, soon after he emigrated to the United States, where he joined Malinowski at the New School, Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator—a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. Reich considered his Orgone Energy Accumulator an almost magical device which could improve its users’ ‘orgastic potency’ and by extension their general, and above all mental, health: he claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere (a force which he christened ‘orgone energy’)—mysterious currents that in concentrated form could not only help dissolve sexual repressions but also treat the illnesses it caused, such as cancer and a host of minor ailments. Achieving ‘orgastic potency’ was the end goal of orgone therapy: ‘Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body’ (Reich 1976: 102). As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, thus acting as a ‘greenhouse’ and, supposedly, causing a noticeable rise in temperature in the box. Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles, but after two weeks of tests, Einstein refuted Reich’s eccentric claims. Nevertheless, the orgone box became fashionable in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, when Reich rose to fame as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country, and were used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, J.D. 62

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Salinger, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. To bohemians, the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, whereas to conservatives, it was Pandora’s box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague—the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex. In April 1947, Mildred Brady’s article, ‘The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy’, appeared in Harper’s magazine. Outside of a handful of radicals on both coasts, it was the first that most Americans had heard of Reich. He was unflatteringly portrayed as the misguided inventor of the orgone box and the intellectual inspiration for a nascent youth movement in the San Francisco Bay area that gathered around the novelist Henry Miller (famous for his banned works of erotica: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn). Brady skewered this fringe community for their avant-garde posturing. She ridiculed them for their confident belief that they formed ‘a biological elite’ of the ‘orgastically potent’, beacons to a non-repressed world amid a sea of ‘orgastic cripples’. Reich was their guru—their ‘ultimate authority’. According to Brady, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), which was translated into English in 1942, was ‘the most widely read and frequently quoted bible of the avant-garde group’ (Brady 1947: 314). After reading Trotsky’s polemic, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), and having been disillusioned by Russia’s invasion of Finland, Reich referred to Stalin as ‘the new Hitler’ and to Stalinists as ‘red fascists’. Having renounced communism, Reich proposed instead a new political, non-bureaucratic structure that he now called work democracy, which represented to many enthusiasts a kind of anarchism. By 1946, Reich had self-published translations of three of his books—The Function of the Orgasm (1942), Character Analysis, and The Sexual Revolution (both 1945)—all of which had been extensively revised to include the story of his discovery of orgone energy and to reflect his new politics (Reich substituted ‘progressive’ for ‘communist’ and ‘social responsibility’ for ‘class consciousness’). His work appealed to intellectuals and bohemians on both coasts. In 1947, Reich boasted that ‘ “everyone” in New York is talking about my work’ and that his literature was selling ‘like warm bread’ (Reich and Neill 1982: 178). In his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas wrote that ‘Reich’s Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky’s Art and Revolution had been a decade before’ (Atlas 2000: 162). After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich’s updated theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism’s failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich presented guilty ex-Stalinists and Trotskyites with an alternative program of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals—many of them GIs (US Air Force personnel and US Army soldiers) returning from a Europe perceived as sexually loose—to view their promiscuity as political activism. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the ‘frozen’, gray corporate consensus. He showed them how they might lead more authentic, unfettered lives against the grain of an increasingly affluent society. People sat in the orgone box hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. After they lost faith in communism, Reich was their next enthusiasm. The orgone box’s empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which the radical left then found themselves. In 1947, after ‘the new Cult of Sex and Anarchy’ appeared, the Food and Drug Administration began investigating Reich for making fraudulent medical claims about the accumulator, and in 1954, a court ruled that he must stop hiring out and selling his machine. When he broke the injunction, he was sentenced to two years in prison despite having failed a psychiatric evaluation (by now, he thought the world was under attack by UFOs, and he sought to battle them with 63

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an orgone gun that he built in his house in Maine).The remaining accumulators, along with the pamphlets and Reich’s 26 books (including copies of The Sexual Revolution) that were thought to constitute ‘false advertising’ for them, were incinerated, as they had been in Nazi Germany. Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary of a heart attack on 3 November 1957, eight months into his sentence. Two years before Reich’s death, Marcuse published Eros and Civilization (1955 [1998]), which took up where Reich left off in trying to fuse Freud and Marx—though, in a concession to the climate of more general political despair that permeated the mid 1950s, Marx isn’t mentioned by name anywhere in the book. Eros and Civilization points the way to the possibility of a utopian society free from sexual repression. During the Second World War, other members of the Frankfurt School, notably Adorno and Horkheimer, embraced Freud’s theory of the death drive to help explain current events, which Reich had never done, and emphasized Freud’s political pessimism as a result. If Civilization and Its Discontents, which stated that sexual repression was an eternal and indispensable part of culture, was Freud’s answer to the threat posed by Reich’s youthful radicalism, then Marcuse’s glancingly titled book was an ingenious attempt to twist Freud’s reactionary pessimism so that the revolutionary, liberationist Freud once again came to the fore. Marcuse singled Reich out as the most significant figure of the left-wing Freudians, and he paid tribute to Reich as an intellectual predecessor—both émigrés were heroes to a younger generation. But he gently criticized Reich for ignoring Freud’s idea of the death drive and the inevitability of repression. Marcuse also believed that Reich’s dogmatic insistence on the orgasm as a panacea for all social malaise marred his significant insights with ‘a sweeping primitivism’ that foreshadowed ‘the wild and fantastic hobbies of his later years’ (Marcuse 1998: 239). Marcuse accepted that some degree of repression was necessary if a society were to function, something Reich never seemed to fully accept, but Marcuse believed that capitalism demanded excessive libidinous sacrifices of its subjects. However, he distinguished between ‘basic repression’, required for any civilization, and ‘surplus repression’—a term taken from Marx’s notion of surplus-value—which he believed was historically contingent and a tax often way above the necessary requirements of civilization. A capitalist sex-economy, he argued, employed surplus repression to concentrate the libido in the genitals, so as to leave the rest of the body free for exploitation as an instrument of labor. Marcuse looked to the perversions, which Freud defined ‘as the persistence into adult life of id impulses that have escaped repression’, to short-circuit Freud’s somber pessimism: ‘The perversions’, Marcuse argued, ‘express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order’ (Marcuse 1998: 49). A liberated body, he hoped, would be a non-aggressive but disruptive force for social change, leading to a utopia founded on the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the child, for whom Freud thought the entire body was capable of erotic sensation. He proposed a polymorphously perverse version of Reich’s work democracy, in which work would not be alienating but in itself a form of sexual play. Marcuse was the theorist who did most to explain the machinations and paradoxes of sexual liberation. Whereas Reich offered the sexual revolution to the world in a box, Marcuse, after the initial optimism of Eros and Civilization, lifted the lid and saw the horrors contained within it. In One-Dimensional Man, written in 1964, Marcuse became cynical about the revolutionary power of sex and the possibility of a sexual utopia in which technology could be used to free people and not to dominate them. ‘It makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before’, he wrote, ‘[b]ut the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the world to hell’ (Marcuse 1964 [2002]: 98). Marcuse 64

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coined the new term ‘repressive desublimation’ to analyze how societies manage to ‘extend liberty while intensifying domination’; radicalism was blunted because all liberated desire was swept into an existing capitalist system of production and consumption. Marcuse provided the most rigorous critique of the darker side of liberation, and he ended his career with a series of brilliant analyses of how the establishment adapted all these liberated ideas into an existing system of production and consumption. Advertisers, Marcuse argued, eagerly exploited for profit the new realm of unrepressed sexual feeling and used psychoanalysis to encourage the consumer’s apparently infinite desires and to foster what he called false needs. Radical sexuality, for which he’d previously held grand hopes, was co-opted and contained: the libido was carefully, almost scientifically, managed and controlled. Marcuse held out hope for the ‘misfits’, the conscientious objectors who might join with him in the ‘Great Refusal’ of society’s irrational values. In his foreword to the 1966 edition of Eros and Civilization, he confirmed his position as the antiwar movement’s favorite philosopher by endorsing the radical slogan, ‘Make love, not war!’ However, Marcuse’s residual optimism sat uneasily with his comments on the place sexuality had in a one-dimensional, increasingly totalitarian world that could contain all apocalyptical orgasmic explosions.

Conclusion Reich created the modern cult of the orgasm and, influentially, held that ecstasy was a point of resistance, immune to political control. Of course, the birth control pill—licensed by the FDA for treating women with menstrual disorders in 1957 (the year Reich died)—ultimately provided the technological breakthrough that facilitated the sexual liberation of the following decade. But Reich, perhaps more than any other sexual philosopher, had already given the erotic enthusiasm of the 1960s an intellectual justification, and he laid the theoretical foundations for that era. His ideas became a rallying point for a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that ‘Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box’: With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free? (‘Morals:The Second Sexual Revolution’, Time, January 24, 1964) In 1968, Reichian slogans were graffitied on the walls of the Sorbonne by student revolutionaries, and in Berlin, copies of Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism were hurled at police. At the University of Frankfurt, 68ers were advised, ‘Read Reich and Act Accordingly!’ According to historian Dagmar Herzog, ‘No other intellectual so inspired the student movement in its early days, and to a degree unmatched either in the United States or other Western European nations’ (Herzog 2005: 159). However, despite such posthumous influence, even in his lifetime, Reich came to believe that the sexual revolution had gone awry. Indeed, his ideals 65

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seemed to run aground in the decade of free love, which saw erotic liberation co-opted and absorbed into what historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky calls a ‘sexualized dreamworld of mass consumption’ (Zaretsky 2004: 9). Reich had propagated an expressive vision of the self, but his sexualized politics of the body soon dissolved into mere narcissism, as consumers sought to express themselves through things. In the process, as Marcuse was early in detecting, sex and radical politics became unstuck. As Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to Brave New World, a novel about a futuristic dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law, ‘as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator . . . will do well to encourage that freedom . . . it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate’ (Huxley 1946: 10). Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in ‘a more devious and discreet form of power’ (Foucault 1980: 11).

References Atlas, J. (2000) Bellow: A Biography, New York: Random House. Brady, M. (1947) ‘The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy’, Harpers. Crossman, R. (2001) The God That Failed, New York: Columbia University Press. Danto, E. (2005) Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality,Volume 1: An Introduction, New York:Vintage. Freud, S. (1928) The Future of an Illusion, London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1992) The Diary of Sigmund Freud: 1929–1939: A Record of the Final Decade, Molnar, Michael (ed.), London: Hogarth. Freud, S. and Andreas-Salomé, L. (1972) Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé; Letters, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Grotjahn, M. (1987) My Favorite Patient:The Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst, Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang. Herzog, D. (2005) Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Huxley, A. (1946) Brave New World, New York: Harper and Bros. Koestler, A. in Crossman, R. ed. (2001 [1949]) The God That Failed, New York: Harper and Bros. Luft, D. (2003) Eros and Inwardness in Vienna:Weininger, Musil, Doderer, Chicago: University of Chicago. Marcuse, H. (1998 [1955]) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud, London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (2001) Towards a Critical Theory of Society, New York: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (2002 [1964]) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London: Routledge. Reich, W. (1970 [1933]) The Mass Psychology of Facism, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reich, W. (1968) Reich Speaks of Freud, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reich, W. (1973) Selected Writings; An Introduction to Orgonomy, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reich, W. (1976 [1953]) People in Trouble, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reich, W. and Neill, A.S. (1982) Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence Between Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill, 1936–1957, London: Gollancz. Sharaf, M. (1984) Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, London: Hutchinson. Steiner, R. (2000) ‘It is a New Kind of Diaspora’: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac. Wakefield, D. (1992) New York in the Fifties, Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence. Wortis, J. (1954) Fragments of an Analysis with Freud, New York: Simon and Schuster. Zaretsky, E. (2004) Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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5 CARL JUNG Peter T. Dunlap

Global warming, the divide between rich and poor, the surge of refugees, issues of social justice, and abuse of institutional power are the most obvious examples of the species’ inability to coalesce a collective intelligence or to develop the ‘generational attention’ needed to solve these problems (Dunlap 2013a). In fact, there is evidence of a significant decline in stability, echoed by a recent review of a pentagon study, concluding that ‘international order is unraveling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling’ (Ahmed 2017). Donald Trump’s presidency may be a good example of this; it has been described as running on chaos, which may suit those opposed to existing governments. Alt-right politico Steve Bannon describes this commotion as the perfect environment to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’ (Fineman 2017). In the midst of political confusion, right-leaning advocates are glad to see globalization checked while those on the left find evidence that the right has, for decades, conspired to enable ‘unaccountable private power’ while undermining any use of ‘democratic public will’ (Lukacs 2017). The stakes are high: will we pursue a global system of governance to attend to issues of climate change, social justice, and the wealth divide, or will we reassert national borders, homogeneous cultural identities, and freedom to use wealth and social position for private gain? This chapter adopts a left-leaning position but not from a political lens. Instead, I follow politico Arianna Huffington when she wrote, ‘we need less policy analysis and more psychology. Specifically, we need to hear from that under-appreciated political pundit Carl Jung’ (2010). Huffington is interested in tapping into Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, which he defines as the shared unconscious structures of the human species’ psyche that is constantly in motion, sending to consciousness guiding, compensatory ‘archetypal images’ that help resolve human problems, at individual and cultural levels. Huffington wants to help the political left overcome its one-side rational approach to politics to draw from these universal images to help activate the collective emotions needed to address issues like climate change and social justice. She is concerned that the political right is more capable of tapping into such collective images and feelings. However, simply learning how to manipulate voter identification through effective ‘framing’ does not truly tap into the political potency of Jung’s thinking. Although Jung was a psychiatrist, the twists and turns in the development of his own thinking led to a speculative understanding of how people come to contribute to society as cultural leaders, which can be characterized as his nascent theory of psychocultural development. Although 67

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Jung did not use this phrase, he did speak of ‘development’, ‘evolution’, and ‘differentiation’ to refer to the developmentally reciprocal relationship between the individual and society. Here, ‘development’ is simultaneously used descriptively, to refer to what is witnessed, and normatively, to note what ought to be—that is, improvement or moral advancement (Jung 1939: 279, 287; Stein 2015). Unlike many contemporary social scientists, Jung is looking to science to determine our moral advancement. Jung is part of a group of 20th-century thinkers who see development as the primary means of solving sociopolitical problems. Albert Einstein puts it simply when he writes, ‘no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’, which I interpret to mean that human problems can be overcome only by growing into increasingly complex and integrated psychocultural ‘identities’ that account for the unintended consequences of prior actions. In this manner, human beings and communities develop psychoculturally. From a developmental lens, it is easy to agree with the critical perspective that describes how Western culture exists within a public atmosphere of hyper-individualism, which has undermined ‘compassion and solidarity’ as well as frayed ‘collective bonds’; but, a developmental perspective does not reduce the cause of this ‘situation’ to a conspiracy of the political right (Lukacs 2017, also see Lilla 2017). Instead, using Jung’s psychology, we can view the current conflict between the right and the left as evidence of a significant impediment to the species’ psychocultural development. While Lukacs may be right that the seeds for the current attack on our collective bonds may have been sown 40 years ago, during the years of Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberalism, I suspect that such political analysis is wholly inadequate to account for our current psychocultural condition. But I suspect he is right that the dismantling of ‘collective democratic will’ has left us resorting to fantasies that individual efforts to live ‘green’ will make a difference when collective attention and action is what is needed. This chapter introduces Jung’s theory of psychocultural development, exploring his connection to the preeminent political philosopher and American pragmatist John Dewey and to social psychologist Erik Erikson. This chapter will then apply the theory to the lives of both Jung and Dewey to show how each of them embodies a distinctive type of psychocultural leadership within Western culture that diverges from one another along a public/private fault line that has been recognized by current social scientists as a serious restraining force to modern democracy (Bellah et al. 1985: 43–46; Tronto 1993; Samuels 1993: 55; Sandel 1996: 18; Dunlap 2008: 196–199). From this perspective, it becomes possible to contextualize Jung’s thinking as invaluable but incomplete. Despite his own significant limitations, Carl Jung’s unitary vision of human development can be used to examine the divide between our public and private experience, which will result in alternative political interpretations that focus on the species’ psychocultural development, creating opportunities for a new generation of psychocultural practitioners to intervene and direct political energies toward undoing what currently restrains the species’ future development. To unpack this idea, we need to identify Jung’s understanding of the role of leadership in cultural evolution.

Jung’s Theory of Psychocultural Development and Leadership Jung began his career treating mental illness in institutions where such illnesses were being differentiated from physical ones. Following the creative work of Sigmund Freud (though later breaking from Freud in 1913), Jung developed a reputation for innovative analyses of mental

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illness, noticing patterns in dream images and waking fantasies of severely mentally ill patients. Based on his experience, he began noticing similar patterns in comparatively healthy patients in his psychotherapy practice. He thought of these patterns as ‘archetypal’, connecting the individual’s psyche with the depth of human instinct. He found such images to compensate for the excesses of consciousness that led to mental illness, whether severe or merely neurotic. By attending to these images and the emotions they evoke, Jung was able to help people to restore their health and open avenues of unique creativity and opportunities for cultural leadership. Jung came to think of this as the work of ‘individuation’, through which the individual becomes capable of making an original contribution to the species’ cultural evolution. Jung’s theorizing in this territory implies optimism about the role of the individual in cultural evolution that has not yet made its way into that field. Recent research in the field of cultural evolution emphasizes the role of adult support of children’s social learning as the means for transmitting continuously expanding skill sets (Christiansen and Richardson 2013: 14). While Jung would agree with such thinking, he identifies an additional role for adults. Following Jung, an adult can face a personal crisis that can be ‘suddenly transformed into a general question embracing the whole of society’ (1971 [1921]: 80). He identifies that the personal crisis and the social question having the same ‘psychological elements’ helps the individual to regain a lost dignity that ends the isolation suffered when the crisis was thought to be personal. Jung described how this takes place as ‘intuitive’ individuals become aware of repressed religious, political, and social conditions brewing in the ‘collective unconscious’ (1958a [1916]: 314). However, Jung’s individual does not suddenly become aware. Rather, he or she first experiences what has been collectively repressed personally, through attending to some underdeveloped part of their own consciousness, which Jung speaks of as the individual’s personal ‘shadow’ that acts independently of consciousness, having its own problematic drive to power (1959: 8–10). Whatever reality has been denied creates emotional intensities wherever the person’s consciousness is weakest, which is then projected outward onto other people and whole groups. Jung thought that attending to these ‘projections’ is a significant ‘moral achievement’, possibly felt as a religious experience that transforms their knowledge of the world (Jung 1959: 9). The emotional intensities activated by a religious experience break the consciousness at its point of weakness or inferiority.Through disciplined attention, a person’s self-awareness expands to include what previously had been repressed. As a result, subjectivity expands, enabling a person to ‘see’ their own and their society’s limitations more objectively (1971 [1921]: 9). They are able to recognize and integrate the differences that others reject and scapegoat. As a result, an individual becomes capable of articulating a new ethic, supporting the integration of previously untenable differences. Jung speaks of this development as the emergence of a new ‘language’. He wrote that ‘if the translation of the unconscious into a communicable language proves successful, it has a redeeming effect. The driving forces locked up in the unconscious are catalyzed into consciousness and form a new source of power’ (1947: 314–315). However, Jung is quite concerned with how this power is used. Jung thought that it is only too easy for the individual to identify with a political movement and to project the unconscious energy as a power drive in some mass-minded manner (Odajnyk 1976: 32). He invites the cultivation of a more private religiosity requiring a person to attend to the new consciousness by withdrawing from society for a time and developing a practice to help them explore and integrate the implications of the religious experience, which often appears as an overwhelming waking fantasy or dream. In his pursuit of evidence for his thinking, Jung explored the transformation of Nicholas of Flue into

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the 15th-century saint Brother Klaus. Jung focuses on Klaus’ experience of the archetypal image of the Trinity as confirmation for his theorizing: In his ecstasy there was revealed to Brother Klaus a sight so terrible that his own countenance was changed by it–so much so, indeed, that people were terrified and felt afraid of him. What he had seen was a vision of the utmost intensity. (Jung 1934: 9) Jung wrote that such experiences ‘cause mental confusion and disintegration’, requiring Klaus to leave his family and home (11). Over time, Klaus brought his newfound wisdom to political leaders across Europe and was recognized as a cultural leader. Is Klaus exemplary of the intuitive individual Jung is looking for to account for one way that cultural evolution takes place? Turning to Jung’s own experience will help us see what initiated his pursuit of Klaus’s story. In his autobiography, Jung tells of a profound struggle he had with a waking fantasy that shaped his ‘entire youth’ (Jung 1961: 36–41). At first, he resisted even allowing the fantasy to come to mind, because it began as emotional foreboding. After days of little sleep and an intense debate about whether God would abandon him to heretical fantasies, Jung allowed the image to occur: it was God defecating on a cathedral and utterly destroying it (39). Allowing the image to enter his consciousness brought him tremendous relief and grace. However, he also found a great deal of shame in it, which he kept to himself, though in doing so, it made him extremely lonely and established ‘the pattern of [his] relationship to the world’ (41). Integrating this image was no easy task, but it became Jung’s calling. Jung came to see how the experience revealed the limitations of his religion, communicating how his church was not representing the voice of God—that is, not maintaining an effective connection between instinct and culture, which Jung came to think of as a primary function of religion (Odajnyk: 34–40). Later, as an adult, Jung had a similarly disturbing experience. Prior to World War I, he had a waking fantasy of blood flooding across a map of Europe (Jung 2009: 231). Again, he first questioned his own sanity only to have the events of the war help him to see his fantasy as a premonition, a true perception of an emerging cultural reality. Based on these and other experiences, no wonder Jung looked for other examples of unusual, gifted people bringing something new into the world. He came to suspect that this ‘more individual and introverted’ activation of the ‘religious instinct’ offered an antidote to the mass-psychosis that enveloped whole peoples, enabling the energies of the unconscious to be expressed in a morally coherent and developmentally advanced manner, through the well-differentiated experience of an individual (Odajnyk: 123). Out of these experiences, Jung developed a unique form of psychotherapy that focuses intently on cultivating the individual’s imagination, but he also was quite interested in working with the emotion evoked through an encounter with the unconscious. He wrote, ‘In the intensity of the emotional disturbance itself lies the value, the energy . . . to remedy the state of reduced adaptation’ (1958b [1916]: 82, original italics). Jung recognized that emotion is the trail to inferiority, but he did not reflect on its role in the new consciousness. Elsewhere, I speculate that the encounter with a religious image can activate a new and distinctive ‘public emotional intelligence’, appropriate for the cultural leadership needed by a period of time (Dunlap 2017: 126–149). It is no wonder that Jung’s psychology has run up against significant resistance. After all, the path he pursued was unique for his and our time. What are we to make of his notion that individuals are connected to something he called the ‘collective unconscious’ and that something he called archetypal imagery can come to the individual through a religious intuition that requires they face collectively repressed emotions, reconnect to them consciously to enable them, in the 70

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process, to become cultural leaders? Jung’s personal experiences and subsequent research necessitated his break with Freud’s psychoanalysis, requiring him to broaden his research into other historical and philosophical traditions. Jung’s unique thinking can more easily be understood in the light of the more mainstream thought of American pragmatist John Dewey, and the creative work of Erik Erikson will help broaden our understanding of what Jung is asserting.

Jung, Dewey, Erikson, and Acts of Cultural Leadership At the beginning of the 20th century, efforts were made to apply evolutionary theory to human culture. In Europe, Wilhelm Wundt explored this idea of cultural evolution in his Volker psychology (Buxton 1985: 39). In the United States, William James was interested in the idea of individual ‘adaptation’, placing a psychology of the individual within an evolutionary frame (122). James’s student Dewey extended James’s interest in adaptation by exploring the possibility that it leads to cultural evolution. To understand Jung’s position in the 20th century, it is valuable and may be even necessary to compare him to Dewey. Both men cultivated similar perspectives in terms of the potency of the individual to impact psychocultural development; however, while Dewey went toward exercising individualism within the context of citizenship, Jung pursued, following his earlier life experiences, a more introverted path of cultivating an autonomous individual whose identity was formed through the withdrawal of projections from any social structure. Comparing the similarities and differences between these men will help contextualize Jung’s psychocultural thinking. Both Dewey and Jung adhered to the following principles: (1) the relationship between the biological and the psychocultural is developmentally continuous; (2) the individual subject is an essential catalyst to cultural evolution; and (3) human experience is teleological—that is, capable of continually moving toward greater levels of cultural evolution (Dunlap 2013b). Following these three principles, Dewey asserted a ‘postulate of continuity’ between biological and cultural experience, meaning that no theoretical or actual break in kind between the biological, psychological, and cultural domains of experience is supported by evidence (Dewey 1938: 23). He claimed that the rise of ‘subjectivity’ marks a significant development as it enables the species to embody a broader range of capacities supporting the rise of scientific knowing (Dewey 1925: 13; Dewey and Bentley 1949: 80). For Dewey, the biology of the animal exploring its environment ‘becomes teleological’ in humankind—that is, open to unknown but knowable futures (Dewey 1931: 30). Jung also asserted that biological and psychological experiences are analogous to one another, both being environmentally adaptive. He wrote, ‘Just as the living body with its special characteristics is a system of functions for adapting to environmental conditions, so the psyche must exhibit organs or functional systems that correspond to regular physical events’ (Jung 1927: 153). Jung thought that subjectivity leads to cultural knowledge as the individuals withdraw from repressive collective norms to find their own unique experience (Jung 1971 [1921]: 9). While Dewey’s subject contributed to objectivity through collaboration in a community of peers, Jung’s approach arises out of his own personal experience and is more private. While private, Jung’s individual becomes capable of objective discernment as she or he encounters the unconscious as a source of both cultural history and the species’ future (Jung 1939: 279). Dewey and Jung asserted these pragmatic principles to show a developmental trajectory along which the species could evolve beyond its current conflicts. Dewey was optimistic about democratic practices, whereas Jung was embedded in an aristocratic vision of the heroic individual who rises out of mass-consciousness through an in-depth encounter with the unconscious. Jung 71

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believed that relatively few individuals would be called to explore the unconscious. Certainly, he was a pioneer; however, he was also isolated and prone to overgeneralizing from his personal experience and privileged social position. What Jung did not seem to account for was the possibility that the practices that he and others were cultivating would democratize the individual’s pursuit of more advanced consciousness, a notion developed by Erik Erikson. Although Erikson is often thought of as a post-Freudian, he could as well be described as post-Jungian. Erikson knew of Jung’s work through his connection to Jungian Joseph Wheelwright during World War II (John Beebe, personal communication, June 2009). Erikson extended Freud’s idea that children go from passively experiencing the world to actively engaging in it (Erikson 1968: 28). He discussed how the experience of an ‘identity crisis’ that he noticed in soldiers returning from World War II had, at first, been passively experienced by a few veterans. He compares this to how young adults in the 1960s chose to have an identity crisis, actively forming an adult identity to develop beyond the roles established for them by society (15–19). Such crises become opportunities that create new adaptive forms of identity and new social values. Erikson wrote, Some young individuals will succumb to [a] crisis in all manner of neurotic, psychotic, or delinquent behavior; others will resolve it through participation in ideological movements passionately concerned with religion or politics, nature or art. Still others, although suffering and deviating dangerously through what appears to be a prolonged adolescence, eventually come to contribute an original bit to an emerging style of life: the very danger which they have sensed has forced them to mobilize capacities to see and say, to dream and plan, to design and construct, in new ways . . . [and] . . . create something potentially new: a new person; and with this new person a new generation, and with that, a new era. (Erikson 1958: 14–15, 20, italics added) Erikson’s theorizing about how identity forms in relationship to societal crises extends Jung’s idea of the intuitive individual generating new ‘ideas’. Erikson’s twist, that of forming a new ‘person’, follows Dewey’s own idea: the problem of ‘constructing a new individuality consonant with the objective conditions under which we live is the deepest problem of our time’ (Dewey 1929: 32). Dewey expresses this psychological dimension even more overtly when he identifies the task to be the formation of ‘a new moral and psychological type’ (83). The desire of these early theorists to use individual experience to leverage human development is captured poetically by James Joyce, who ends his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with his main character Stephen Daedalus proclaiming, ‘within the smithy of my soul I create the uncreated future of my race’ (Joyce 1916: 237). While Jung’s use of terms like archetypal image and collective unconscious is esoteric, his vision is shared by other thinkers of his time. All of these early 20th-century thinkers follow the precept that political solutions require some change of identity to foster the leadership needed for cultural evolution. Among these forerunners, a theory of psychocultural development was emerging. What will happen if we immediately apply the theory, turning it back on the theorists? Do Dewey and Jung represent the emergence of new psychological and moral types? If so, what does each of their types represent for our understanding of our current state of psychocultural development? And, by comparing them, what can we glean about Jung? Jung and Dewey approach cultural leadership from opposite sides of the psychocultural divide between public and private experience that arose in Western culture during the 19th century. From the ‘public’ side, Dewey recognized the difficulty of forming humane institutions 72

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and championed the liberalization of our institutions through scientific, educational, and political means (Dunlap 2008: 165). The center of this project was the modern individual whose adoption of egalitarian values supported the pursuit of freedom through the development of a publicly minded citizen. And Dewey put his shoe leather right next to his theorizing, having helped start the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), marched for women’s rights, and headed up the Dewey Commission, which acquitted Leon Trotsky of charges made against him by Joseph Stalin. Dewey is an example of a new psychological and moral type that I think of as the political individual (Dunlap 2008: 128). Arising from the psychocultural crises of the 19th century, this type has its own theory of positive change focusing on changing institutions. While invaluable and while this theory of change still dominates much of the political left, there is evidence that it is inadequate, focusing too intently on changing institutions, not sufficiently on changing individual identities. Jung offers an alternative, balancing theory. While Dewey cultivated a public political philosophy with a strong psychological orientation, Jung’s psychology is focused on what has become known as our private lives, turning attention to the suffering of the individual in her or his search for a theory and a praxis of change and cultural leadership. Dewey’s and Jung’s respective lives and work represent two distinct responses to the fragmenting experience in Western societies between our ‘public’ and ‘private’ lives. However, each theorist did make a little room for the other’s position. Dewey’s politics has a psychological wing: his interest in forming a new moral and psychological type. Jung’s psychology has a political wing: his recognition of the risks to the individual of being submerged in the mass-mind and of the possibility of gaining freedom. Despite Dewey’s psychological interests and Jung’s political interests, no angel materialized between these two wings in the 20th century. Their distinctive theories of change and identity types did not reach one another, the breach between the public/political and the private/psychological was too big. Dewey’s image of a new psychological and moral type is too abstracted, offering little reason for the political individual of his time to attend to the internal work of forming a new psychological identity. Similarly, Jung’s individuating psychological person is too introverted; it’s middle-incomed comforts and determination to be outside of the materialistic mass culture preclude devoted citizenship (Dunlap 2008: 66, 72–73). Neither theorist was able to fully articulate the theory and practices required to bridge the divide between our public and private experiences. In fact, each had some contempt for the other side of this psychocultural divide. For example, the inward turn manifest in American Transcendentalism, European Existentialism, and Spiritualist groups that pulled away from political solutions turning toward an inner world of self-exploration frustrated Dewey: Many American critics of the present scene are engaged in devising modes of escape. Some flee to Paris or Florence; others take flight in their imagination to India, Athens, the middle ages or the American age of Emerson,Thoreau and Melville. Flight is solution by evasion. (1929: 126) While Dewey’s public-mindedness is evident, the retreat from mass culture was still psychoculturally potent but at a cost. It drew the attention of many cultural elites and their increasingly well-off followers away from the travesties of modernity and toward an exploration of forms of isolated individualism, not imagined by the founders of the original Enlightenment vision of a modern individual engaged with their communities (Baumeister 1986: 68). This retreat is one point of origin of the divide between our public and private experiences (Dunlap 2008: 65–83). Baumeister noted how during the Victorian age, many in the middle-class simply stopped 73

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seeking social solutions and ‘elevated the importance of private-life to a refuge from society and as a locus of personal happiness and fulfillment’, which lives on in the political right’s ongoing attack on ‘democratic public will’ (Baumeister 1986: 71; Lukacs 2017). And this attitude is inadvertently championed by Jung. While Dewey points contempt at those retreating from public engagement, Jung points it toward those engaging in politics. He wrote, I despise politics wholeheartedly: thus I am neither a Bolshevik, nor a national socialist, nor an anti-Semite. I am a neutral Swiss and even in my own country I am uninterested in politics because I am convinced that 99% of politics are merely symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. About 50% of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. (Jung 1936: 564) Jung’s distain for the average person is as abrasive as Dewey’s for the middle-class retreat from the commons. Efforts to bridge this divide have not prevailed; in fact, the scientific disciplines emerging in the 19th century followed the divide between public and private experience, concretizing it under economic pressures to professionalize their disciplines (Bellah et al. 1985: 299). Psychological theories too often focus on the child’s relationship to caregivers and family, but not the socioeconomic context of the family (Burack 1994: 36). Similarly, when society and politics are studied, insufficient attention has been brought to the individual’s impact on sociopolitical experience. Instead, there is a primary focus on institution building, not pursuing the need to transform individual identity for the sake of establishing more humane institutions (Dunlap 2008: 99–113). It turns out that it is quite difficult to see sociopolitical and psychological experience as being in a developmental system with one another, which Dewey’s ‘postulate of continuity’ and Jung’s vision of unity of human experience attempt but fail to rectify. Although Jung begins his career in a profession that treats individual suffering in relation to family repressions, we can remember that his own experiences prepared him to look for broader connections to what is socially repressed. In this psychocultural context that he imagined, his psychology attends to the projective process of the personal and collective shadow, which belies the narrow definition of psychology as relating only to the private side of human experience. Unfortunately, Jung’s vision of his psychology has not been realized by subsequent generations of Jungian theorists and practitioners. In fact, there is overall a substantial neglect of his vision. Historian Sonu Shamdasani offered this critique: ‘The history of Jungian psychology has in part consisted in a radical and unacknowledged diminution of Jung’s goal’ (2003: 15). Can today the international Jungian communities respond to this diminishment?

The Emerging Public Use of Jung’s Psychology Because there is already significant effort going on across the social and psychological sciences to bridge the public/private divide, this section focuses on work taking place within the international Jungian community. Joseph Cambray understands emergence as a process within which self-organization, arises in response to ‘environmental pressures. . . . The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence’ (Cambray 2002: 414). In the context of this chapter, we can speak of 20th-century psychology largely as a set of lower-level rules responsive to the isolated individual but not to seeing the individual as part of a larger developmental system. Fortunately, there is a set of higher-level rules emerging within international Jungian communities. 74

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Using Jung’s language, we could say this community is attending to compensatory signals from the collective unconscious to imagine a higher-order language. The international Jungian community is actively considering that despite his vision of the unity of human experience, Jung still held significant prejudices. For example, Jung was deeply prejudiced against groups, because they can only become ‘mobs’ (Jung 1939: 125). Fortunately, this prejudice has been challenged by Arthur Coleman, who describes how this prejudice has been internalized by Jungian Institutes. Coleman wrote that such organizations assume ‘the sacredness of the individual psyche and the profanity of the group psyche’, which led to ‘an almost phobic attitude toward trying to understand our own unconscious group process’ (Coleman 1995: 45, 4). I have also challenged this prejudice within the Jungian communities (Dunlap 2016). Reconsideration of the value of group consciousness is made possible by the work of many other Jungians, including Robert Sardello, who described obsessive interest with personal development to lead to people becoming a ‘noble egoist’ (1995: 22); alternatively, Sardello wants to take ‘depth psychology out of a consulting room and into the world’ (3). And there are many Jungians with this same interest. For example, Betty Sue Flowers works with international organizations, helping them develop scenarios by bringing Jung’s understanding of myth together with the power of active imagination to tell stories about the future that help diverse groups tell a shared story of the future that integrates differences and helps create a different present, ‘a kind of narrative therapy for groups that works through building shared stories of the future’ (Flowers, personal communication, July 2017). There is also a range of work being done by Jungians with refugees. For example, Renos Papadopoulos consults with the United Nations while ‘working with refugees and other survivors of political violence, torture and disaster in many countries’ (Kiehl, Saben and Samuels 2016: xiv). Papadopoulos’ work parallels Erikson scholar Vamik Volkan’s work with refugees (2006). Similarly, Eva Pattis Zoja is establishing an international network of lay sand-play practitioners, who offer free services to children victimized by domestic violence, being uprooted by civil war and poverty (Kiehl et al. 2016: xiv). Unfortunately, the work of these creative psychologists is up against a limited ability to scale—that is, their work isn’t self-supporting but requires some capacity for fundraising. These practitioners and consultants go beyond addressing people’s private lives to include their sociopolitical context. Also, they are treating not just individuals but groups, which takes them well beyond the left’s vision of solving problems through individual acts of activism. They are working with groups to create collective action and are successfully responding to the public/private divide not just as a sociopolitical reality but also as a psychological condition, one in which armchair psychological analysis is insufficient; instead, they are offering forms of treatment for what are being called cultural complexes (Kimbles and Singer 2004: 1–9). Here the idea of a cultural complex has been developed by Sam Kimbles and Tom Singer and is used to identify psychocultural patterns that restrict human freedom. Following Kimbles and Singer, a cultural complex can be thought of as a pattern of individual and collective thought, feeling, behavior, communication, and worldview that restricts the emergence of new individual consciousness and the equivalent of consciousness at the group level—that is, more complex and integrated communication and organizational patterns. Jerome Bernstein uses this idea to apply Jung’s archetypal theory to understanding and treating destructive engagement at all levels in politics. He brings Jungian theory to bear in hands-on applications and testing in conflict resolution. Once the public/private divide is thought of as a cultural complex, it becomes possible to imagine a new generation of psychocultural practitioners who establish their professional identity by developing the theory and practices that would support the remediation of this 75

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condition. Such works would include consolidating the pioneering efforts described already in this chapter and those of others, so that we can see what works and go about this by systematically connecting to other relevant disciplines and practitioners. Andrew Samuels is also moving in this direction as he identifies how the public/private divide causes us to turn our feelings about politics against ourselves, as if we can barely imagine that such emotions include a political energy that can be explored through community engagement (Samuels 1993: 13). Similarly, imaginal psychologist Aftab Omer, president of Meridian University, identifies how psychocultural leadership takes place through attending to repressed emotion (2002). He describes how Mahatma Gandhi and others challenged the repressed shame of the British people for how they treated Indian nationals by putting their bodies and lives on the line during the salt march from Sabarmati to Dandi: Gandhi’s acts of cultural leadership transmuted his own and his follower’s fear into courage and the British people’s shame into a rudimentary conscience, one capable of recognizing the social trauma of prejudice and their own active and passive perpetuation of this horror. Martin Luther King’s own path followed Gandhi’s as he helped the American people face their shame for the treatment of African Americans. King recognized the role of affect in leadership development when he extoled his followers ‘if he puts you in jail, you go into that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and dignity’. (Dunlap 2014: 141–151) In this description, we may be seeing one of the primary mechanisms for psychocultural development: training community leaders to attend directly to the cultivation of their emotional intelligence but not simply in relationship to their private lives, the way that traditional psychotherapy primarily works. Rather, it is possible to train community leaders directly in the cultivation of a ‘public emotional intelligence’, thus bringing together the cultural practices restrained by the public/private divide—that is, psychotherapy that fosters individuation and community engagement that fosters activism and leadership (Dunlap 2017: 136–137). In a group training setting, such leaders work on their personal shadow projections while learning about group dynamics and leadership capacity development, thus drawing the best from Jungian psychology and applying it to community engagement. Given that there are thousands of well-trained psychotherapists and tens of thousands of community leaders, such a group training model could be scaled and self-financed, meaning that these psychotherapists could be trained to understand the current state of our psychocultural development and offer such groups as part of their political practice. Such an extension of the scope of practice for a psychotherapist would support the treatment of the public/private divide, thus their becoming a new type of psychocultural practitioner (Dunlap 2017 126). In one such group training, a participant reported the following: It’s abundantly clear to me that raising the psychological awareness of leaders (and followers) is a cornerstone of their effectiveness in setting and meeting objectives. . . . [This] . . . group is making me a more effective leader and follower by increasing my sensitivity to personal and group dynamics that build (or, in their absence, erode) engagement and alignment. One of the practices used in this group draws from a political clinic developed by Samuels. In a workshop setting, Samuels helps group participants to recognize and begin to reconcile 76

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the divide between their public and private lives by recounting the trajectories of their political histories, thus helping them connect to their political selves and political energy (Samuels 1993: 50). Elsewhere there are descriptions of other practices used in cultural leadership training groups (Dunlap 2008: ch. 12). The results of this group work are promising. The participants are becoming a new psychological and moral type of leader. They are simultaneously cultivating the deep psychological capacities possible after effective individuation practices and the public emotional intelligence needed in community groups to meet the hyper-individualism that makes group cohesion and action difficult or impossible. A psychotherapist who takes on learning to facilitate this work is one type of psychocultural practitioner operating with higher-order rules/languages that creatively bridge the public/private divide along the lines that both Jung and Dewey imagined, but they lacked the resources for such an integration of disparate psychocultural identities.

Conclusion Within different Jungian organizations, Jung’s legacy can be seen as both a driving and restraining force for the species’ psychocultural development. While he articulates a vision of what is possible when the individual thinks and focuses psychoculturally, his prejudice against groups continues to limit the ability of these communities to cohere around his vision of psychology because each member has been trained to privilege their own path of individuation while neglecting organizational shadow work (Coleman 1995: 4, 45; Dunlap 2016: 85–97). Fortunately, there is evidence of working out the impact of Jung’s Eurocentric privileging of a heroic, male, aristocratic individualism, which has required attending to his prejudices against women and Indigenous peoples and his highly conflicted relationship with the German National Socialists movement. Currently, the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP) is crafting a formal apology to Africans and African descendants for that organization’s prior failure to acknowledge Jung’s prejudices against Africans. This effort is being led by analysts Fanny Brewster and Andrew Samuels. While the IAAP community has not yet agreed to this apology, it is engaging in the issue with political energy. A great deal of conversation and debate have also taken place within the Jungian communities in relation to the issue of Jung’s relationship to Jewish peoples and to Nazi Germany, including in Andrew Samuels’ 1993 book The Political Psyche (287–336). More is being published about this and the conversation is ongoing, including exchanges on the International Association of Jungian Studies (IAJS) LISTSERV today, 24 July 2017. In the midst of attending to issues of Jung’s legacy, there are efforts within these communities to expand beyond limited private/psychological or public/political thinking to psycho­ cultural thinking—that is, moving from a lower to a higher order of understanding of the complexity regarding current psychocultural conditions. It is within this context that the hyper-individualism and the retreat from collective democratic will are not thought to be simply political phenomena stemming from a 40-year-old right-wing conspiracy, nor any other narrowly political analysis. Rather, they are understood to be representative of a psychocultural condition that has a much longer history. Implied by this way of thinking is the possibility of cultivating a new type of leadership arising from a new psychological and moral type as a psychocultural practitioner. Examples of the pioneering efforts of such practitioners have been offered. They are responding to the public/private cultural complex bringing understanding and treatment practices to bear on this divide as it exists in our individual identities, organizations, and communities. 77

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References Ahmed, N. (2017) ‘Pentagon Study Declares American Empire is “Collapsing”  ’, Insurgeintelligence, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing746754cdaebf. Baumeister, R. (1986) Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self, New York: Oxford University Press. Bellah, R., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W., Swindler, A., Tipton, S. (1985) Habits of the Heart, Berkeley: University of California Press. Burack, C. (1994) The Problem of the Passions: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory, New York: New York University Press. Buxton, C. (1985) Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology, Orlando: Academic Press. Cambray, J. (2002) ‘Synchronicity and Emergence’, American Imago, 59(4), 409–434. Christiansen, M. and Richardson, P. (2013) Cultural Evolution, Cambridge: MIT Press. Coleman, A. (1995) Up from Scapegoating: Awakening Consciousness in Groups, Wilmette, IL: Chiron. Dewey, J. (1925) Experience and Nature, New York: Dover. Dewey, J. (1929) Individualism Old and New, New York: Capricorn Books. Dewey, J. (1931) Philosophy and Civilization, New York: Minton, Balach, & Co. Dewey, J. (1938) Logic the Theory of Inquiry, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Dewey, J. and Bentley, A. (1949) Knowing and the Known, Boston: Beacon Press. Dunlap, P. (2008) Awakening our Faith in the Future:The Advent of Psychological Liberalism, London: Routledge. Dunlap, P. (2013a) ‘Generational Attention: Remembering How To Be a People’, Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, 8. Dunlap, P. (2013b) ‘The Unifying Function of Affect: Founding a Theory of Psychocultural Development in the Epistemology of John Dewey and Carl Jung’, in Semetsky, I. (ed.) Jung and Educational Theory, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Dunlap, P. (2014) ‘Jung’s Relationship to Science and His Concept of Psychocultural Development’, in Jones, R. (ed.) Jung and the Question of Science, London: Routledge, 141–151. Dunlap, P. (2016) ‘Renewing our Faith in Groups: A Moral Imperative for Our Community’, International Journal of Jungian Studies, 8(2), 85–97. Dunlap, P. (2017) ‘How Do We Transform Our Large-Group Identities?’ Journal for Jungian Scholarly Studies, 12, 126–149, www.jungiansociety.org/index.php/publications/journals/journal-12-2017. Erikson, E. (1958) Young Man Luther, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Erikson, E. (1968) Identity,Youth, and Crisis, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Fineman, H. (2017) ‘The Hard-Right Sticks With Trump No Matter What’, Huffington Post, www.huffington post.com/entry/the-hard-right-sticks-with-trump-no-matter-what_us_5970eddae4b062ea5f9092e5. Huffington, A. (2010) ‘Sarah Palin, “Mama Grizzlies”, Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes’, Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sarah-palin-mama-grizzlie_b_666642.html. Joyce, J. (1916) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Colonial Press. Jung, C.G. (1927) ‘The Structure of the Psyche’, in Collected Works vol. 8, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1934) ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, in Collected Works vol. 9.i, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1936) ‘Press Communiqué on Visiting the United States’, in Collected Works vol. 18, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1939). ‘Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation’, in Collected Works vol. 9.i, London Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1958a [1916]) ‘The Psychological Foundations of Beliefs in Spirits’, in Collected Works, vol. 8, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1958b [1916]) ‘The Transcendent Function’, in Collected Works vol. 8, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1959) ‘The Shadow’, in Collected Works vol. 9.ii, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (1961) Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, New York:Vintage Books. Jung, C.G. (1971 [1921]) ‘Psychological Types’, in Collected Works vol. 6, London: Routledge and Kegan. Jung, C.G. (2009) The Red Book, Shamdasani, S. (ed.) New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Kiehl, E., Saben, M. and Samuels, A. (2016) Analysis and Activism, London: Routledge. Kimbles, S. and Singer,T. (ed.) (2004) ‘Introduction’, in The Cultural Complex, NewYork: Brunner-Routledge. Lilla, M. (2017) The Once and Future Liberal, New York: Harper Collins.

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PART II

Traditions

6 MARCUSE AND THE FREUDIAN LEFT Douglas Kellner

Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Marcuse 1974a [1955]) imagined the counterculture and the liberation movements of the 1960s in its vision of a liberated Eros, play, a new sensibility, and the transformative effects of the aesthetic dimension. The power of Marcuse’s work lies in his articulating the dialectic between the forces of domination and liberation, a project shared by the so-called Freudian Left (Robinson 1967). I will argue that Marcuse provides his most developed vision of liberation in Eros and Civilization, together with a sharp critique of contemporary Western civilization. In this study, I specify the contributions that Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization toward developing a critical theory of contemporary society and notions of a radical subjectivity that could be a transformative force in producing a non-repressive civilization—a project exemplary of the Freudian Left. I argue that his utopian perspectives continue to be useful today in imagining a freer and happier society and liberating individuals and that his radical critique of the contemporary organization of society is more important than ever.

Toward a Critical Theory of Society Eros and Civilization is Marcuse’s first systematic attempt to sketch out a critical theory of contemporary society and to project a vision of a non-repressive society. While he had explicated the history of Hegel, Marx, and social theory in Reason and Revolution (Marcuse 1968) and provided contributions to delineating a dialectical theory of the contemporary moment and made many contributions to social theory and critique, it is really in Eros and Civilization that the full Marcusean vision first comes to fruition. Written in the depths of radical despair during an era dominated by McCarthyism and Stalinism, and with his wife Sophie dying of cancer, Marcuse summoned his radical imagination to develop utopian perspectives on liberation and to sketch the possibility of a non-repressive civilization. In this groundbreaking text, Marcuse uses Marx, Freud, Kant, Schiller, and the resources of aesthetics to develop his vision of a free and non-repressive civilization during a historical epoch characterized by repression and attacks on radical thought. His emphasis on liberation, play, love, and Eros anticipated the ethos of the 1960s counterculture, which in turn made him a guru of young radicals throughout the world. In addition, the text provides an extremely

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sharp critique of contemporary civilization, which was to make Marcuse a darling of the New Left and one of the most influential thinkers of his epoch. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse employs Freud’s theory to produce an account of how society comes to dominate the individual, how social control is internalized, and how conformity ensues, providing an exemplary account of how the Freudian Left conceptualizes the relation between the individual, society, and social domination. Marcuse concludes that ‘Freud’s individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 16), and he repeatedly emphasizes that Freud’s psychological and psychoanalytic categories are historical and political in nature. Hence, Marcuse boldly fleshes out the ‘political and sociological substance of Freud’s theory’ to develop what I call a critical theory of socialization. Whereas most theories of socialization stress its humanizing aspects by claiming that socialization makes individuals more ‘human’—and thus legitimate dominant social institutions and practices—Freud exposes the repressive content of Western civilization and the heavy price paid for its ‘progress’. Although industrialization has resulted in material progress, Freud’s analysis of the instinctual renunciations and unhappiness it has produced raises the question whether our form of civilization is worth the suffering and misery (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 3ff). In Marcuse’s view, typical of the Freudian Left, Freud’s account of civilization and its discontents questions the whole ideology of progress, productivity, the work ethic, religion, and morality, by ‘showing up the repressive content of the highest values and achievements of culture’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 17). Thus, Marcuse, like Foucault, stresses the social construction of subjectivity and the ways that subjectification (i.e., the ways of producing a socially submissive subject) are involved in a process of social domination. But whereas Foucault and many post-structuralists call for resistance to domination, they often have no theoretical resources to construct a notion of agency that would efficaciously resist repression and social control.1 For Marcuse, however, there is a ‘hidden trend in psychoanalysis’ which discloses those aspects of human nature that oppose the dominant ethic of labor and renunciation, while upholding ‘the tabooed aspirations of humanity’: the demands of the pleasure principle for gratification and the absence of restraint (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 18). Marcuse argues that Freud’s instinct theory contains a depth dimension that suggests that our instincts strive for a condition in which freedom and happiness converge, in which we fulfill our needs and strive to overcome repression and domination. For Marcuse, memory contains images of gratification and can play a cognitive and therapeutic role in mental life: Its truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which had once been fulfilled in the dim past and which are never entirely forgotten. (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 18–19) Thus, Marcuse subtly reformulates the therapeutic role of memory stressed in Hegel and psychoanalysis. Drawing on the distinction between Gedachtnis (a standard term for memory) and Erinngerung, or remembrance, Marcuse interprets Erinnerung, re-membrance, as bringing together repressed elements of the past, utopian longings, and struggles for a better world. For Marcuse, The restoration of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is one of the noblest tasks of thought. In this function, remembrance (Erinnerung) appears at the conclusions of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit; in this function it appears in Freud’s theories. (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 232) 84

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In Freud’s theory, the suppression of memory takes place through the repression of unpleasant or traumatic experiences, which are usually concerned with sexuality or aggression; the task of psychoanalysis is to free the patient from the burden or repressed, traumatic memories— whose repression often produces neurosis—by providing understanding and insight that would enable the individual to work through painful experiences of the past and to dissolve neurotic behavior. Although Marcuse preserves the psychoanalytic linkage between forgetting and repression and the distinction between passive and active memory, he stresses the liberating potentialities of remembrance and the recollection of pleasurable or euphoric experiences, as well as the unpleasant or traumatic experiences stressed by Freud. In his reconstruction of Freud, Marcuse suggests that the remembrance of past experiences of freedom and happiness could put into question the painful performances of alienated labor and the manifold oppressions of everyday life. These recollections are embedded in individual experiences of a happier past and historical conditions that offered more and better freedom, gratification, and happiness. Marcuse will link these emancipatory dimensions of remembrance with phantasy and will argue that both human beings and their cultural tradition contain resources that can be mobilized against suffering and oppression in the present. Remembrance for Marcuse thus re-members, or reconstructs, experience, going to the past to construct future images of freedom and happiness. Whereas romanticism is past oriented, remembering the joys of nature and the past in the face of the onslaught of industrialization, Marcuse is future oriented, looking to the past to construct a better future.2 Marcuse’s analysis implies that society trains the individual for the systematic repression of those emancipatory memories and devalues experiences guided solely by the pleasure principle. Following Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, Marcuse criticizes the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization: the faculty was chiefly directed toward remembering duties rather than pleasures; memory was linked with bad conscience, guilt and sin. Unhappiness and the threat of punishment, not happiness and the promise of freedom, linger in the memory. (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 232) Marcuse claims that for Freud, phantasy is a crucial mode of thought activity that is split off from the reality principle (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 14, 140ff). For Freud, phantasy was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This is the act of phantasy-making (das Phantasieren), which begins already with the game of children, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons its dependence on real objects. (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 140) Building on this conception, Marcuse suggests that phantasy—in day-dreaming, dreams at night, play, and its embodiments in art—can project images of integral gratification, pleasure, and reconciliation, often denied in everyday life. Hence, along with memory, Marcuse argues that phantasy can imagine another world and generate images of a better life by speaking the language of the pleasure principle and its demands for gratification. He stresses the importance of great art for liberation because it refuses ‘to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 149). Art for Marcuse practices the Great Refusal, incarnating the emancipatory contents of memory, phantasy, and the imagination through producing images 85

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of happiness and a life without anxiety. In Marcuse’s view, phantasies and hopes embody the eruption of desires for increased freedom and gratification. The unconscious in this account contains the memory of integral gratification experienced in the womb, in childhood, and in peak experiences during one’s life. Marcuse holds that the psychoanalytic liberation of memory and restoration of phantasy provide access to experiences of happiness and freedom that are subversive of the present life. He suggests that Freud’s theory of human nature, far from refuting the possibility of a non-repressive civilization, indicates that there are aspects of human nature that are striving for happiness and freedom. In defending the claims of the pleasure principle, Marcuse believes that he is remaining true to a materialism that takes seriously material needs and their satisfaction and the biological ‘depth-dimension’ of human nature. In his view, defending the validity of the claims of the pleasure principle has critical revolutionary import in that Freud’s analysis implies that the human being can tolerate only so much repression and unhappiness, and when this point is passed, the individual will rebel against the conditions of repression. Freud’s theory thus contains elements of an anthropology of liberation that analyzes those aspects of human nature that furnish the potential for radical opposition to the prevailing society. Marcuse concludes that Freud’s theory contains implications that have been covered over, or neglected, and that he wishes to restore in their most provocative form. He argues that this requires a restoration of Freud’s instinct theory, preserving his claims for the importance of sexuality and acknowledgment of its vital and explosive claims. Neo-Freudians who deny the primacy of sexuality have, in Marcuse’s view, repressed Freud’s deep insights into human sexual being by relegating sexual drives to a secondary place in their theory (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 238ff). Marcuse believes that Freud’s theory discloses the depth and power of instinctual energies, which contain untapped emancipatory potential. He describes these instinctual energies that seek pleasure and gratification as Eros. A liberated Eros, Marcuse claims, would release energies that would not only seek sexual gratification but also flow over into expanded human relations and more abundant creativity. The released Eros would desire, he suggests, a pleasurable aesthetic-erotic environment requiring a total restructuring of human life and the material conditions of existence. In addition, Marcuse also accepts Freud’s concept of Thanatos, the death instinct, as well as the Freudian notion of ‘the political economy of the instincts’, in which strengthening the life instincts enable Eros to control and master Thanatos and so to increase freedom and happiness while diminishing aggression and destruction.Thus, surprisingly, Marcuse adopts a rather mechanistic concept of the instincts, building on Freud’s biologistic energy-instinct model—which has been sharply criticized and rejected both in various circles of psychoanalytic theory and in critical theory (Habermas and his students) and post-structuralism. I believe, however, that one can construct a Marcusean theory of subjectivity without deploying the problematic aspects of Freud’s instinct theory.

Subjectivity in Marcuse The key to Marcuse’s reconstruction of the concept of subjectivity, I suggest, is the philosophical interlude in Eros and Civilization, in which he develops a critical analysis of the presuppositions of Western rationality and its concept of the philosophical subject. Marcuse claims that the prevalent reality principle of Western civilization presupposes an antagonism between subject and object, mind and body, reason and the passions, individual and society. Nature is experienced on this basis as raw material to be mastered, as an object of domination, as provocation or resistance to be overpowered (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 110). The ego in Western thought is thus 86

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conceptualized as an aggressive, offensive subject, fighting and striving to conquer the resistant world. Through labor, the subject seeks continually to extend its power and control over nature. The logos of this reality principle is, Marcuse argues, a logic of domination that finds its culmination in the reality principle of advanced industrial society, the performance principle.The performance principle is hostile to the senses and receptive faculties that strive for gratification and fulfillment. It contains a concept of repressive reason which seeks to tame instinctual drives for pleasure and enjoyment. Its values, which are the governing norms of modern societies, include profitable productivity, assertiveness, efficiency, competitiveness; in other words, the Performance Principle, the rule of functional rationality discriminating against emotions, a dual morality, the ‘work ethic’, which means for the vast majority of the population condemnation to alienated and inhuman labor, and the will to power, the display of strength, virility. (Marcuse 1974b: 282)3 This hegemonic version of the reality principle has been challenged, Marcuse argues, from the beginning of Western philosophy. Against the antagonistic struggle between subject and object, an opposing ideal of reconciliation and harmony has been formulated, in which the individual strives for fulfillment and gratification. This ‘logos of gratification’, Marcuse suggests, is found in Aristotle’s notion of the nous theos and Hegel’s ideal of spirit coming to rest and fruition in absolute knowledge (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 112ff). In these philosophical conceptions, the human being is to attain a condition of reconciliation after a process of struggle, suffering and labor, in which alienation and oppression are finally overcome. Schopenhauer advocates a similar idea of the restless, ever-striving ‘will’ seeking peaceful Nirvana. In addition, Marcuse finds a logic of gratification and a different conception of subjectivity in Nietzsche’s emphasis on the body, the passions, joy, and liberation from time and guilt (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 119f). The values affirmed in this reality principle would be the antithesis of the repressive performance principle and its dominating subject and would affirm: receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness, and so on.These characteristics appear indeed as opposites of domination and exploitation. On the primary psychological level, they would pertain to the domain of Eros, they would express the energy of the life instincts against the death instinct and destructive energy. (Marcuse 1974b: 284) This alternative reality principle and conception of subjectivity also finds expression in Freud’s notion of the Nirvana principle, which holds that all instincts aim at rest, quiescence, and the absence of pain (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 5ff, 124ff). In addition, Marcuse draws on Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education and play, arguing that in aesthetic and erotic experience, play, and fantasy, the conflict between reason and the senses would be overcome so that ‘reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 180). Operating through the play impulse, the aesthetic function would “abolish compulsion, and place man, both morally and physically in freedom”. It would harmonize the feelings and affections with the ideas of reason, deprive the “laws of reason of their moral compulsion’ and ‘reconciles them with the interest of the senses”. (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 182) 87

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In the language of post-structuralism, Marcuse thus envisages an embodied subjectivity in which the opposition between reason and the senses, central to the modern philosophical concept of the subject, is deconstructed. For Schiller and Marcuse, the play impulse is connected with the aesthetic function that would mediate between the passive, receptive sensuous impulse and the active creative form impulse, thus reconciling reason and the senses. The play impulse aspires to a condition of freedom from restraint and anxiety, involving ‘freedom from the established reality: man is free when the “reality loses its seriousness” and when its necessity “becomes light” ’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 187). This freedom to play and to create an aesthetic reality requires liberation of the senses and, as both Schiller and Marcuse called for, ‘a total revolution in the mode of perception and feeling’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 189). The resultant conception of an aestheticized and eroticized subjectivity preserves the connotation of Sinnlichkeit as pertaining to sensuality, receptiveness, art, and Eros, thus redeeming the body and the senses against the tyranny of repressive reason and affirming the importance of aesthetics, play, and erotic activity in human life. Hence, against the rational and domineering subject of mastery, Marcuse advances a notion of subjectivity as mediating reason and the senses, as seeking harmony and gratification. Thus, he affirms an intersubjective ideal of a libidinal subjectivity in harmonious and gratifying relations with others and, one might add, with nature itself. Instead of controlling and dominating objects, Marcusean subjectivity seeks gratifying and peaceful relations with others and with the external world. Moreover, Marcuse proposes a new concept of reason that he describes as ‘libidinal rationality’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 223ff). In this conception, reason is not repressive of the senses but instead acts in harmony with them, helping to find objects of gratification and to cultivate and enhance sensuality. Marcuse rejects the dominant philosophical paradigm, which sees reason as the distinctly human faculty and the senses as disorderly, animalic, and inferior. The concept of reason operative in this model, Marcuse suggests, is repressive and totalitarian and does not adequately allow for aesthetic-erotic gratification and development (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 119ff), due to its embrace of the mind/body split. Marcuse’s ideal is a form of human life in which reason becomes sensuous, protecting and enriching the life instincts, and whereby the unity of reason and the senses help create a ‘sensuous order’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 223ff). He assumes that as more restrictions are taken away from the instincts and as they freely evolve, they will seek lasting gratification and will help generate social relations that will make continual gratification possible. In this way, ‘Eros redefines reason in its own terms. Reasonable is what sustains the order of gratification’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 224). This could make possible freer, more fulfilling human relations and could create a social order and community based on freedom, gratification, cooperation, and rational authority. Then, ‘repressive reason gives way to a new rationality of gratification in which reason and happiness converge’ (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 224).

The New Sensibility, Emancipation, and Revolution Hence, against the notion of the rational, domineering subject of modern theory, Marcuse posits a partly psychoanalytically inspired subjectivity that is libidinal and embodied, evolving and developing, while striving for happiness, gratification, and harmony. Such subjectivity is always in process, is never fixed or static, and is thus a creation and goal to be achieved and is not posited as an absolute metaphysical entity. Marcusean subjectivity is thus corporeal, gendered, and oppositional, and it struggles against domination, repression, and oppression and for freedom and happiness.There is thus nothing essentialist, idealist, or metaphysical here. Instead, Marcuse’s conception of subjectivity is both materialist and socially mediated while active in cultivating the aesthetic and erotic dimensions of experience as it strives for gratification and harmonious 88

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relations with others, nature, and itself. Marcuse’s radical subjectivity is also political, refusing domination and oppression, struggling against conditions which block freedom and happiness and for a freer and better world. There is widespread agreement today that we need the discourse of subjectivity and agency for ethics, politics, and the positive reconstruction of self and society. Within this context, I have argued that Marcuse’s perspectives on subjectivity stand up to at least aspects of the poststructuralist and other critiques of the subject and provide resources for reconstructing the concept of subjectivity in the contemporary era. Importantly, for Marcuse, the reconstruction of subjectivity, the creation of eroticized rationality, and the development of a free creative self can take place only through practice and the transformation of social relations and activity. Marcuse argued that the existing society is organized precisely to prevent such a reconstruction of subjectivity and new social relations, prescribing instead a regime of domination, authority, repression, manipulative desublimation, and submission. Especially in One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964) but prefigured in Eros and Civilization and throughout his work, Marcuse presents a critique of hegemonic forms of subjectivity and domination and a challenge to overcome the onedimensional, conformist, and normalized subjectivity of advanced technological society. From Eros and Civilization until his death in 1979, Marcuse was vitally concerned to discover and theorize a new sensibility, with needs, values, and aspirations that would be qualitatively different from subjectivity in one-dimensional society. To create a new subjectivity, there must be the emergence and education of a new type of human being free from the aggressive and repressive needs and aspirations and attitudes of class society, human beings created, in solidarity and on their own initiative, their own environment, their own Lebenswelt, their own “property”. (Marcuse 1969a: 24) Such a revolution in needs and values would help overcome a central dilemma in Marcuse’s theory—sharply formulated in One-Dimensional Man—that continued to haunt him: How can the administered individuals—who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions . . . liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken? (Marcuse 1964: 250–251) To break through this vicious circle, individuals must transform their present needs, sensibility, consciousness, values, and behavior while developing a new radical subjectivity, to create the necessary conditions for social transformation. Radical subjectivity for Marcuse practices the ‘Great Refusal’ valorized in both Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. In Eros and Civilization (Marcuse 1974a [1955]: 149f), the ‘Great Refusal is the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—“to live without anxiety” ’. In OneDimensional Man (Marcuse 1964: 256f), however, the Great Refusal is fundamentally political, a refusal of repression and injustice, a saying no, an elemental opposition to a system of oppression, a noncompliance with the rules of a rigged game, a form of radical resistance and struggle. In both cases, the Great Refusal is based on a subjectivity that is not able to tolerate injustice and that engages in resistance and opposition to all forms of domination, instinctual and political. In the late 1960s, Marcuse argued that emancipatory needs and a new sensibility were developing within contemporary society. He believed that in the New Left and counterculture, there was the beginnings of ‘a political practice of methodical disengagement and the refusal of the 89

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Establishment aiming at a radical transvaluation of values’ (Marcuse 1969b: 6) that was generating a new type of human being and subject. The new sensibility ‘expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt’ (Marcuse 1969b: 23) and contains a ‘negation of the needs that sustain the present system of domination and the negation of the values on which they are based’ (Marcuse 1969b: 67). Underlying the theory of the new sensibility is a concept of the active role of the senses in the constitution of experience that rejects the Kantian and other philosophical devaluations of the senses as passive, merely receptive. For Marcuse, our senses are shaped and molded by society yet constitute in turn our primary experience of the world and provide both imagination and reason with its material. He believes that the senses are currently socially constrained and mutilated, and he argues that only an emancipation of the senses and a new sensibility can produce liberating social change (Marcuse 1969b: 24ff; Marcuse 1972: 62ff).4 Instead of the need for repressive performance and competition, the new sensibility posits the need for meaningful work, gratification, and community; instead of the need for aggression and destructive productivity, it affirms love and the preservation of the environment; and against the demands of industrialization, it asserts the need for beauty, sensuousness, and play, affirming the aesthetic and erotic components of experience. The new sensibility translates these values and needs into ‘a practice that involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a non-aggressive, non-exploitative world’ (Marcuse 1969b: 6). This total refusal of the dominant societal needs, values, and institutions represents a radical break with the entirety of society’s institutions, culture, and lifestyle and supplies prefigurations of a new culture and society. The new sensibility would be developed, Marcuse claimed, by an aesthetic education that would cultivate imagination, fantasy, the senses, and memory. The new sensibility would combine the senses and reason, producing a new rationality, in which reason would be bodily, erotic, and political. Far from being an irrationalist, Marcuse always argued that the senses and reason need to be mediated, that reason should be reconstructed, and that critical and dialectical thinking are an important core of the new sensibility. Marcuse maintained that aesthetic education constituted a cultivation of the senses and that theory and education were essential components of transformative social change.5 In the writings of the late 1960s, Marcuse believed that the new sensibility was embodied in the liberation movements of the day, the counterculture, and the New Left (see, especially, Marcuse 1969b). Of course, he was disappointed that the new sensibility did not become the agent of revolutionary change that he envisaged; he was also dismayed that the New Left and counterculture fell prey to the seductions of the consumer society or were repressed and fragmented (see Marcuse 1972 for a poignant account of Marcuse’s failing hopes and continued attempts to theorize emancipation and radical social change). In the 1970s, however, he sought precisely the same values and subjectivity in new social movements, in particular feminism, the environmental movement, the peace movement, and various forms of grassroots activism, which came to be described as new social movements. In his aforementioned 1974 lecture ‘Marxism and Feminism’, Marcuse notes for the first time the constitutive role of gender while theorizing the differences between men and women in terms of his categories in Eros and Civilization. Notably, his conception of the feminine is associated with the traits he ascribes to the new sensibility, whereas his conception of the masculine is associated with the features of the Western ego and rationality of domination that Marcuse long criticized, thus anticipating ‘difference feminism’, which would also valorize the feminine and maternal against the masculine.6 In this article, which generated significant debate, Marcuse argues that ‘feminine’ values and qualities represent a determinate negation of the values of capitalism, patriarchy, and the performance principle. In his view,‘socialism, as a qualitatively different 90

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society, must embody the antithesis, the definite negation of aggressive and repressive needs and values of capitalism as a form of male-dominated culture’ (Marcuse 1974b: 285). He adds, Formulated as the antithesis of the dominating masculine qualities, such feminine qualities would be receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness and so on. These characteristics appear indeed as opposite of domination and exploitation. On the primary psychological level, they would pertain to the domain of Eros, they would express the energy of the life instincts, against the death instinct and destructive energy. (Marcuse 1974b: 285–286) Marcuse was, however, criticized by women within the feminist movement and others for essentializing gender difference, although he insisted the distinction was a historical product of Western society and not an essential gender difference. Women, he argued, possess a feminine nature qualitatively different from men because they have been frequently freed from repression in the work place, brutality in the military, and competition in the public sphere. Hence, they developed characteristics that for Marcuse are the marks of an emancipated humanity. He summarizes the difference between aggressive masculine and capitalist values as against feminist values as the contrast between repressive productivity and creative receptivity, suggesting that increased emancipation of feminine qualities in the established society will subvert the dominant masculine values and the capitalist performance principle. During the same decade, Marcuse also worked with Rudolf Bahro’s conception of surplus consciousness. He argued that just as Bahro claimed that in the socialist countries a new consciousness was developing that could see the discrepancy between what is and what could be and was not satisfied with its way of life, so too was such oppositional consciousness developing in the advanced capitalist countries.7 Surplus consciousness, in the Bahro-Marcuse conception, is a product of expanding education, scientific and technical development, and refining the forces of production and labor process. On this account, contemporary societies are producing a higher form of consciousness and create needs that cannot be satisfied in the labor process or everyday life, producing resentment and the potential for revolt. In effect, Bahro and Marcuse are arguing that critical consciousness is produced by the very social processes of the technological society and that this subjectivity comes into conflict with existing hierarchy, waste, repression, and domination, generating the need for social change. This position maintains that existing social processes themselves are helping produce a subjectivity that demands participation and fulfillment in the labor process and sociopolitical life, as well as increased freedom, equality, and opportunities for advancement and development. If these needs are not satisfied, Bahro and Marcuse suggest, rebellion and social transformation will ensue. Curiously, precisely this process happened in the socialist world, in which rebellion against irrational and repressive bureaucratic social forms led to an overthrow of what Bahro termed actually existing socialism.8 The critiques of Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s in the increasingly hegemonic discourses of post-structuralism and postmodern theory among the radical Western intelligentsia, connected, I believe, with the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, helped produce a rejection of Marxism while defaming revolution as utopian and, in many cases, deconstructing concepts of oppositional subjectivity and politics. Such extreme versions of post-structuralism and postmodernism,9 however, vitiate the project of emancipation and social reconstruction and undermine efforts to develop oppositional politics and alternative conceptions of society, culture, and subjectivity—alternatives found in the work of Herbert Marcuse, who I believe continues to provide important resources for theory and politics in the contemporary era. 91

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Conclusion I conclude by trying to compare Marcuse’s project with this contemporary orientation, where the postmodern/post-structuralist conception of subjectivity that stresses decentering, fragmentation, and flexibility does reproduce aspects of the crisis of contemporary subjectivity overwhelmed by big corporations, new technologies, seductive media culture, and the complex and contradictory forces of globalization. Many postmodern critiques of traditional notions of the subject or subjectivity thus end with fragmentation, crisis, decentering, and dispersal, that they either cynically affirm without hope of reconstruction or valorize positively as conditions of the possibility of more flexible subjects that can be in turn rejected, reconstructed, and re-created at one’s will and on a whim. Another possibility, however, is to call for a reconstructive concept of subjectivity and agency in the face of theoretical critique and practical fragmentation and dissipation. This is the position of Marcuse and much of critical theory that begins by recognizing theoretical flaws in the modern concept of the (rational, unitary, ideal) subject, as well as the crisis of subjectivity in contemporary society. Critical theory is dialectical, resisting both claims to the primacy of structure or agency, thus overcoming both determinism and idealism. As we have seen in this chapter, Marcuse problematizes subjectivity and agency, recognizes the force of domination, and yet militates for liberation and transformation. Opposing mechanistic theories of history without agency and subjectivity, as well as idealist notions that see history as the development of humanity or subjectivity (i.e., the subject, spirituality, God, and so on), critical theory seeks to overcome unproductive dichotomies and to produce more sophisticated and transformative perspectives. This problematization of subject and history discloses an intersection between critical theory and postmodern theory and significant differences between some of the versions. Both unveil the abstractness and mythological constitution of the subject; both reject a universal subject and the equation of the subject with metaphysical rationality. On the whole, critical theory is more reconstructive, with theorists like Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Habermas offering quite different perspectives on the reconstruction of subjectivity and agency, thus signaling their kinship with the Freudian Left. By contrast, many postmodern theorists either revel in difference and heterogeneity (Lyotard), cynically reject any possibility of reconstruction and transformation (Baudrillard), or assume neutral and/or micrological perspectives that eschew ambitious theoretical or political reconstruction (followers of Foucault, Rorty in some moods, and postmodern camp followers who don’t yet see its transformative potential); other postmodern theorists, however, urge reconstruction of subjectivity and agency, à la feminism and critical theory, and thus present supplementary positive reconstructive positions to critical theory. Hence, some versions of postmodern theory reproduce liberal reformism and pluralism in their emphasis on difference, reform, and rejection of broader perspectives of social transformation. There is also a tendency in which fragmentary, aleatory, and nomadic postmodern subjectivity replicates the self-centered, competitive, and yet interactive subjectivity of contemporary capitalism.10 Yet in view of the complex and contradictory development of contemporary capitalist culture and subjectivity, the sort of critical and oppositional perspectives offered by Marcuse are needed more than ever. As in Marcuse’s day, the ambivalent unity of the positive and negative, of production and destruction, continues to operate in the global restructuring of capitalism with its technological revolution and seductions, growing discrepancies between the haves and the have nots, and increasing power of the forces of domination and destruction. Now, much more than ever, critical consciousness and oppositional subjectivity are needed to counter the forces of domination which appear more in the guise of the seductions of the Internet, the activities of certain global corporations and the global maneuvering of 92

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near-invisible forces like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank than in the boots and repression of a Big Brother.11

Notes 1. This is true of the Foucault in texts like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978, 1995); the late Foucault, however, like Marcuse, was engaged in a search for a stronger conception of agency; I argue, however, that Marcuse offers a more robust account of resistance and agency than Foucault. On Foucault’s later quests to develop a theory of subjectivity and resistance and its limitations, see Best and Kellner 1991, and Venn 1997. 2. This conception might be contrasted with Walter Benjamin, who in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ claims that ‘images of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren’ drive the oppressed to struggle against their oppressors (Benjamin 1969: 260). Benjamin’s conception is similar to that of Freud, who holds that past traumas enslave individuals and who argues, in a different register than Benjamin, that working through the source of trauma can free individual from past blockages and suffering. A dialectical conception of memory merging Marcuse and Benjamin might argue that both remembrances of past joys and suffering, happiness and oppression, can motivate the construction of a better future if oriented toward changing rather than just remembering the world. 3. I am quoting from Marcuse’s 1974 lecture ‘Marxism and Feminism’ here to suggest that he continued to hold to many key ideas in Eros and Civilization through his later work and that his strong adherence to feminism was deeply rooted in some of his fundamental ideas; I take up ‘Marxism and Feminism’ (Marcuse 1974b) later in this study. 4. In Counterrevolution and Revolt (Marcuse 1972), Marcuse connects his notion of the new sensibility with the analysis of the early Marx on the liberation of the senses; his conception is also influenced by Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education (Marcuse 1972: 63ff.). 5. For a systematic study of Marcuse’s perspectives on art and education, see Reitz 2000. 6. For an argument parallel to mine developed through an engagement with French feminism and poststructuralism, see Oliver 1988, which provides an extended argument: we can talk about subjectivity (and agency) without presupposing or needing a subject, claiming that subjectivity does not necessarily imply a ‘subject’ and that we are better off without such a concept. She develops notions of subjectivity as relational and intersubjective at its ‘center’ and contrasts varying discourses and forms of masculine and feminine subjectivity. This project is parallel, I suggest, to Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, disclosing a provocative affinity between critical theory, French feminism, and poststructuralism. 7. Marcuse 1979: 21. See also Marcuse’s reflections on Bahro in Marcuse 1980. 8. One could, of course, argue that the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist systems overthrown in the late 1980s were not really Marxist or socialist at all but constituted a bureaucratic deformation of Marxian socialism, an argument shared by the New Left and much of the Freudian Left. This is indeed Bahro’s and Marcuse’s position that continues to have force in explaining the collapse of Soviet-style communism; see my analysis in Kellner 1995. 9. For fuller summaries of the varieties of postmodern theory, similarities and differences with critical theory, and reflections on productive and problematic versions of postmodern politics, see Best and Kellner 1991, 1997, and 2001. 10. Such a conception of postmodern subjectivity is found in a highly developed form in Turkle 1995. 11. For an argument that Huxley’s Brave New World and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man provide more salient perspectives on contemporary global capitalism than Orwell’s 1984, see Kellner 1990. For my perspectives on globalization, see Kellner and Cvetkovich 1996 and Kellner 1998.

References Benjamin, W. (1969) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York: Schocken Books. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, London and New York: MacMillan and Guilford Press. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1997) The Postmodern Turn, London and New York: Routledge and Guilford Press. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (2001) The Postmodern Adventure, London and New York: Routledge and Guilford Press. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality,Volume I: An Introduction, London: Pantheon.

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Douglas Kellner Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, London:Vintage. Kellner, D. (1990) ‘From 1984 to One-Dimensional Man: Reflections on Orwell and Marcuse’, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223–252. Kellner, D. (1995) ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism?’ in Magnus, B. and Cullenberg, S. (eds.) Whither Marxism? London and New York: Routledge, 3–30. Kellner, D. (1998) ‘Globalization and the Postmodern Turn’, in Axtmann, R. (ed.) Globalization and Europe, London: Cassells, 23–42. Kellner, D. and Cvetkovich, A. (eds.) (1996) Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies, Boulder, CO: Westview. Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marcuse, H. (1968) Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1969a) ‘The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity: A Reconsideration’, Praxis, 5(1), 20–25. Marcuse, H. (1969b) An Essay on Liberation, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1972) Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1974a) [1955] Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1974b) ‘Marxism and Feminism’, Women’s Studies, 2(3), 279–288. Marcuse, H. (1979) ‘The Reification of the Proletariat’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 3, 1. Marcuse, H. (1980) ‘Protosocialism and Late Capitalism: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis Based on Bahro’s Analysis’, in Wolter, U. (ed.) Rudolf Bahro: Critical Responses, White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 24–28. Oliver, K. (1988) Subjectivity Without Subjects, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. Reitz, C. (2000) Aesthetic Education and the New Sensibility in Marcuse, Albany, N.Y.: SUNY University Press. Robinson, P. (1967) The Freudian Left, New York: Harper and Row. Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster. Venn, C. (1997) ‘Beyond Enlightenment? After the Subject of Foucault, Who Comes?’, Theory, Culture & Society, 14(3), 1–28.

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7 LACANIAN LEFT Sean Homer

The Lacanian Left, according to Yannis Stavrakakis’s eponymous book, describes ‘a new theoretico-political horizon’ that explores ‘the relevance of Lacan’s work for the critique of contemporary hegemonic orders’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 3–4).The field is heterogeneous and there is no preexisting unity between the theoretical projects included. Indeed, it is the existence of internal division that testifies to the emergence of the field as such. As Stavrakakis writes, ‘Lacanian Left’ can only be the signifier of its own division, a division which is not to be repressed or disavowed but, instead, highlighted and negotiated again and again as a locus of immense productivity, as the encounter—within theoretical discourse—of the constitutive gap between the symbolic and the real, knowledge and truth, the social and the political. (2007: 4–5) Stavrakakis’s adumbration of the field in the mid 2000s focused on four key figures—Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and, to a lesser extent, Alain Badiou—while his pivotal political category, radical democracy, served a delicate balancing function between an acknowledgment of contingency and negativity, on the one hand, and the positive institutional framework enabling concrete transformations, on the other. This chapter will diverge from this initial, admittedly partial, sketch of the field in two respects. First, the Lacanian Left just outlined is overwhelmingly male and elides the pioneering work of feminists, especially the Lacanian-inspired work around the journal m/f. Second, the focus on radical democracy precludes the work of the Lacano-Althusserians in the mid 1960s and beyond, in particular the Cercle d’Épistémologie.1 This chapter will therefore provide a more historical narrative of the emergence of the Lacanian Left that includes the revolutionary left from Althusser through to Badiou and the feminist critique of the aporias of the Marxist Left. As with Stavrakakis, I work on the assumption that the Lacanian Left ‘does not exist’ in the full Lacanian sense of the term (Stavrakakis 2007: 4).

Structures of Misrecognition Althusser’s groundbreaking essay ‘Freud and Lacan’ (1984a [1964]) recognized, for the first time, that Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas had a role to play in thinking about politics, ideology, and 95

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subjectivity. Prior to Althusser’s intervention, psychoanalysis had been viewed within the Communist Party of France (PCF) as simply a ‘reactionary ideology’, an essentially North American import to manage and finesse class conflict through the psychologization of political struggles (Turkle 1992: 89). Althusser sought to rehabilitate psychoanalysis for Marxist theory through a critique of the prevailing view of psychoanalysis as a subdiscipline of psychology by distinguishing psychoanalysis as a science from psychology as an ideology. He suggested that Marxism and psychoanalysis converge on a specific problematic: a particular structure of misrecognition. For Marxism, this is the misconception that individuals make history; for psychoanalysis, it is the subjects’ misrecognition of themselves as autonomous, centered egos. These two structures of misrecognition converged through ideology as a system of representation (1984b [1970]). Rejecting notions of false consciousness or class affiliation, Althusser insisted that ideology is unconscious in the sense that it fails to work the moment we recognize it as ideological. Ideology is not a set of ideas, a system of beliefs, or a political program through which subjects are indoctrinated; it is a system of representations, a system of images, concepts, and above all ‘structures’, which are lived. In short, ideology represents a subject’s imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence. Althusser’s language—the subject, structure, imaginary, and real—clearly resonated with Lacan’s, and as we will see below, it paved the way for a more sustained engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis from the Marxist Left, but it soon became evident that the split subject of psychoanalysis was manifestly not the ideologically interpellated subject of Althusserianism.2 For Althusser, the subject is always unified, and there simply is no such thing as a split or divided subject in the Lacanian sense. This misconception was interestingly staged in the work of the North American Marxist Fredric Jameson. Jameson’s influential essay ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (1977), first published in Yale French Studies and reprinted in Shoshana Felman’s widely read collection Literature and Psychoanalysis (1982), concluded with Althusser’s account of ideology and the Lacanian split subject as a model for a properly Marxist theory of ideology (Jameson 1982: 393–395)—that is to say, a vision of the future that is at once collective and aims not at the renunciation of the subject but at the realization of desire (Jameson 1982: 395).When Jameson came to republish the piece, however, in his collected essays The Ideologies of Theory (1988), the unequivocal endorsement of Althusser’s theory of ideology had been replaced by Lacan’s account of the four discourses (Jameson 1988: 110–115). The model of supplementation, as Ernesto Laclau defined it (1990: 93), whereby the deficiencies of historical materialism could be addressed through the importation of the Lacanian subject, proved to be inadequate to the task. The year Althusser published ‘Freud and Lacan’ coincided with the denouement of Lacan’s decade-long dispute and final ‘excommunication’ from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). At the invitation of Althusser, Lacan transferred his seminar to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where Althusser encouraged his students to attend. A precocious group including Jacques-Alain Miller, Robert Linhart, Jean-Claude Milner, and Jacques Rancière enthusiastically embraced Lacan and the possibility of a unified theory of Marxism and psychoanalysis.The group formed the Cercle d’Épistémologie and published the journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse from 1966 to 1969. Lacan had established the École Freudienne de Paris shortly after his move to the ENS, and to gain entry into the school, Miller, Milner, and Duroux formed a cartel on the theory of discourse. Their initial report, ‘Action of the Structure’, written in 1964 but not published until 1968, can retrospectively be seen to define the project of the Cahiers as it set out to address the aporias of Althusserian structuralism, specifically the transformation of one structure to another and the place of the subject, through the reincorporation of the subjective back into structure. Unlike the semiotic, or ‘weak’, forms of structuralism deriving from Saussure, Lacanian psychoanalytic structuralism recognizes the subjective as ‘ineliminable’. Miller thus distinguishes 96

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his notion of structure from previous forms of structuralism through two functions: structuration and subjectivity. A structure is ‘that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes’ (Miller 2012a: 71). In order to think of the transition between one structure and another, we must think of structure as both structuring and structured: [I]f we now assume the presence of an element that turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects it and signifies it, an element capable of redoubling itself on its own account, then a general distortion ensues, one which affects the whole structured economy and recomposes it according to new laws. (Miller 2012a: 72) In short, to break out of the circularity of Althusserian structural causality, the Lacanian subject must be reintroduced into structure, not as a substantive element but as a ‘placeholder’, as the element of lack, its weakest link. For Miller, ‘suture’ names this paradoxical relationship of the subject to structure, or, as he will formulate it, the logic of the signifier. The subject is the element that is lacking in the chain of discourse. But it is not simply absent; it implies a ‘stand-in’ or a ‘taking the place of ’. Drawing on Frege’s number theory, Miller identified this lack, which takes the form of a stand-in with the number zero. The zero sutures logical discourse insofar as it designates ‘the concept of not-identical-with-itself’ (Miller 2012b: 97 emphasis in the original). Similarly, the subject as lack, as non-identical-to-itself, exists within discourse not as a substantive entity but as a ‘placeholder’, a ‘flickering in eclipses’ (Miller 2012b: 101). As the journal became increasingly mathematical and abstract, pushing toward the limits of logic and formalization, it also became increasingly divorced from quotidian politics. Indeed, this theoretical edifice of high structuralism and first intimation of an emerging Lacanian Left would shortly be shattered on the streets of Paris in May 1968, as politics superseded theory.

From Interpellation to Discourse The Cahiers pour l’Analyse initiated an intellectual shift from Althusserian Marxism to Lacanian psychoanalysis and, with its stated aim of developing a general ‘theory of discourse’, registered the impact of Michel Foucault’s work on the young normaliens. As Peter Hallward writes, The grand effort of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse was to develop, on the basis of an Althusserian conception of structure and a Lacanian “logic of the signifier”, a general theory of discourse that includes a place for the subject in [an] implacably evanescent and in-substantial sense. (Hallward 2012: 35) As the cadre of the Cercle d’Épistémologie dispersed on the barricades, however, a general theory of discourse would be left to two other former Althusserians, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to elaborate. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) consolidated the shift from ideology to discourse. Drawing on the experience of the new social movements, Laclau and Mouffe argued that politics in the traditional sense of party politics was finished and the political must now be rethought as something that permeates every aspect of society and our lives.The political, argues Mouffe, ‘cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every 97

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human society and that determines our ontological condition’ (Mouffe 1993: 3). Where Laclau and Mouffe differed from other social theorists in the 1990s was their insistence, following Lacan, that the subject and society are constituted through lack. What characterizes the struggles of the new social movements ‘is precisely the multiplicity of subject positions which constitute a single agent’ (Mouffe 1993: 12). In other words, we are not simply members of a particular social class or ethnic or gender group, but rather our subjectivity is crisscrossed by a number of different identities. At any given moment, subjects occupy a number of intersecting positions inscribed through gender, race, sexual preference, professional status, and familial position. The renewal of radical democratic politics, therefore, requires the rejection of the individual as a self-contained unified entity existing independently of society and its conception as ‘a site constituted by an ensemble of “subject positions,” inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification’ (1993: 97). Transposing Lacan’s idea that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ to society, Laclau and Mouffe argue that there ‘can be no such thing as society’. From a Lacanian perspective, there is no identity prior to its discursive constitution. All identity is equivalent to a ‘differential position in a system of relations’, or, to put it another way,‘all identity is discursive’ and based on difference (Laclau 1990: 217). Social identity, just as much as individual identity, cannot be said to be based on some ultimate self-identity with its object, on the capacity of society to fully constitute itself, to be, if you like, objectively given and knowable. There is always something in excess, something that slips away from the attempt to ideologically fix it.The social, in other words, is an ‘impossible object’. As Stavrakakis has pointed out, although there was clearly a terminological and conceptual cross-fertilization between Laclau and Mouffe’s early theory of hegemony and Lacan’s ideas, there were also some notable absences, specifically the theorization of affect and jouissance (Stavrakakis 2007: 71). Post-Marxist discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis share a certain constructivist view of individual and social identity as well as a negative ontology. What Laclau and Mouffe’s early work lacks, however, was an account of the positivization of the real in the form of the objet petit a. In response to a coauthored critique with Jason Glynos and Stavrakakis (2003), Laclau insisted that affect and jouissance had in fact always been present in his work as an internal element of discourse itself. As Laclau’s theory of discourse rejects the distinction between the discursive and extra-discursive (Laclau 1990: 97–132), and because jouissance results from an experience of satisfaction/dissatisfaction, which manifests itself in the symptom, it is senseless to talk about language and jouissance as distinct from one another. Jouissance is always already an internal component of discourse. Indeed, in his later work, Laclau would go one step further and insist that ‘the Real is within the Symbolic’ (Laclau 2005: 118, emphasis in the original) and what he calls an ‘empty signifier’ functions in the same way as the objet a (Laclau 2005: 127), and the logic of hegemony is ‘simply identical’ with the logic of Lacan’s objet petit a (2005: 116). Laclau is, of course, fully aware of the ‘extimate’ nature of the Real, what Lacan calls its ‘intimate exteriority’ (Lacan 1992: 139), as can be observed from his frequent discussions of the Thing, but to stress the predominant role of representation in the constitution of political identities, he plays down its exteriority to the symbolic. Indeed, for Laclau, this aspect of the Real as the void is always within signification (Laclau 2005: 105, emphasis in the original). The retrospective inclusion of affect within discourse, as Stavrakakis notes (2007: 84), is rather weak and untenable, but Laclau’s subsequent position is more promising: [T]here is a constitutive relational moment linking the linguistic and the affective, they [Glynos and Stavrakakis] have concentrated on the duality as such, while my intention has been mostly directed to the relation which makes the duality possible. (qtd. in Stavrakakis 2007: 86) 98

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This second line of enquiry presupposes traversing the fantasy of an all-encompassing discourse and exploring the multiple forms of displacement, transformation, investment, cathexes, transfer, exclusion, and inversion as potential forms of relation between jouissance and representation. But this in turn presupposes the two orders in question remain distinct but intimately related (Stavrakakis 2007: 102). It is to the work of Slavoj Žižek that we must turn for the interrogation of the fantasy structure underlying our ideological constructions; before addressing this particular body of work, though, I want to acknowledge a slightly different trajectory of the Lacanian Left. If political theory is concerned to give an account of how social norms are successfully internalized by subjects, what a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious forces us to recognize is how this internalization necessarily fails. For Jacqueline Rose (1986), it is this resistance to any stable identity at the heart of psychic life that creates a particular affinity between psychoanalysis and feminism. The inherent instability of identity undermines traditional conceptions of political identity and solidarity, but it also opens up the possibility for nonnormative theories of subjectivity. The implications for feminist politics of this encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis would be most fully explored in the pages of the journal m/f (Adams and Cowie 1990). In its opening editorial, m/f declared itself to be a journal committed to the women’s movement and against the prevailing view of a Marxist-feminist synthesis (1990: 3). Although the journal’s title, m/f, has a number of possible connotations—male/female, masculine/feminine—they do not preclude Marx/Freud or Marxism/feminism. At the same time, the journal rigorously critiqued the essentialism, to which many parts of the feminist movement still subscribed. m/f set out to systematically interrogate the categories of gender and sexual difference and to show how these identities are not pre-given but produced through complex sets of social and psychic investments. Following Lacan, the category ‘woman’ cannot be said to exist, as there is no inherent feminine nature or fixed identity to which the term applies. One result of Lacanian feminism, therefore, was to dissolve the boundary between men and women, on which the women’s movement was founded: If there is no one subject position, there can be no sexual division between feminine subjects and male subjects, for sexual division always requires full subjects already sexually differentiated, that is organized into two unitary groups. (Adams and Cowie 1990: 29) What is at stake for feminism, therefore, is the organization of sexual difference through social practices and within social relations.The legacy of m/f, as Chantal Mouffe succinctly puts it, was to make ‘a general theory of women’s oppression a thing of the past’ (qtd. in Adams and Cowie 1990: 4). The politics of representation provided the privileged ground on which this politics of sexual difference would be fought. As Laclau puts it, representation presupposes an absence in presence; to be represented as such presupposes an identity of a subject who is not present at the level of representation: ‘Representation can therefore only exist to the extent that the transparency entailed by the concept is never achieved; and that a permanent dislocation exists between the representative and the represented’ (Laclau 1990: 38–39). In a Žižekian register, by canceling out the real, the symbolic gives us ‘social reality’ or the order of representation. Representation, then, provides the space in which differences are acknowledged and struggled over, but from a Lacanian perspective, there can be no recourse to an original essence behind the representation and against which that image can be judged. This is not to say that Lacanian politics is simply another form of social or discursive constructivism; 99

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there is always the real that is eclipsed in the operation of representation. In her account of sexual difference and riposte to feminist critics of Lacanian phallocentrism, Joan Copjec (1994) definitively refutes the notion that sexual difference is a discursive construct. Sex, she argues, is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification; it is only where discursive practices falter that sex comes in. Controversially, the Lacanian feminists insisted that, whereas sexual difference is of the order of the real, racial, class, and ethnic differences are all symbolic: ‘Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference’ (1994: 207). Copjec’s seminal essay would provide the model for Žižek’s account of sexual difference. It also highlighted once again the necessity of analyzing the fantasy structures that sustain representation rather than merely critiquing the truth of the image.

The Socio-ideological Fantasy Post-Marxism effectively curtailed the politico-theoretical drive toward a unified theory of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and consolidated the Foucauldian notion of discourse as the central category of radical democratic politics (Barrett 1991). Althusserianism, however, was to receive an unexpected second life with the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), a work that reanimated the field of the Lacanian Left, positioning fantasy and the real at the core of the political. Žižek’s initial work served to reposition our reading of Lacan around the later seminars and especially notions of the death drive and the real,3 insisting that Althusserian interpellation was not the final, mistaken, word on the subject of ideology but only a first step. A properly psychoanalytic theory of ideology must take into account the constitutive role of fantasy, or, what he called the socio-ideological fantasy. In The Sublime Object, Žižek argued that it is not the case that ideology is merely the false or illusory representation of reality but rather that it is reality itself that is ‘ideological’. The very idea of ideology as ‘false’ consciousness presupposes that we can attain a ‘true’ consciousness of reality—that is to say, that our representation of reality can be self-identical (or nonideological) to that which it represents. What psychoanalysis teaches us through notions of unconscious desire and fantasy is that this is inherently impossible, that there will always be something that escapes, the objet a as a remainder of the real. The function of the socio-ideological fantasy is to mask the trauma that society itself is constituted by this inherent lack. Not only is the subject constituted through lack, but so is the Other, the symbolic order.The recognition that the Other is lacking is a traumatic moment for the subject, and the function of fantasy is to mask this trauma, to make it bearable for the subject in some way. Lacan described this traumatic moment as our impossible encounter with the real. In terms of the social, Žižek identifies this traumatic moment as the fundamental antagonism at the root of all societies. We like to think of our society as naturally and harmoniously evolving over time and through the democratic consensus of the people. For Žižek, this is not the case; all societies are founded on a traumatic moment of social conflict, and the socio-ideological fantasy masks this constitutive antagonism. As Žižek writes, the ‘ideological’ is precisely ‘a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence’ (1989: 21). That ‘essence’ is the moment of barbarity, conflict, and antagonism that must be repressed if a society is to claim legitimacy as a ‘natural’, peaceful, and democratically evolving state. Žižek has demonstrated this well in his analysis of the conflicts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s. Many Western commentators explained the eruption of so-called ethnic violence in the Balkans as the return of ancient ‘tribal’ conflicts and hatred suppressed by 50 years of communism. Žižek, on the other hand, suggests that what we see unfolding in the Balkans is nothing less than the eruption of the real into 100

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the symbolic. As the symbolic network of the former communist ideology and Yugoslav state disintegrated, we were confronted with the social antagonism constitutive of new ‘democratic’ societies (Žižek 1993: 200–237). Furthermore, as these new microstates gained independence, they began the process of elaborating new myths of national identity, but to do that, they would first have to suppress the knowledge of the bloody conflict and ethnic cleansing at their moment of origin. Thus, the function of ideology, writes Žižek, ‘is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel’ (Žižek 1989: 45). Through a detailed analysis of racist and ethnic violence in the Bosnian war, the discursive struggle around ‘normalization’ and Tito’s ideology of ‘self-management’, Renata Salecl would extend this analysis to the gendering of the nation and the limits of liberal theory in Eastern Europe: ‘[T]he failure of Eastern Europe to adopt the model of liberal democracy is not a consequence of the “backwardness” of Eastern Europe but rather of the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy itself ’ (Salecl 1994: 77). In short, Eastern Europe is the symptom through which the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy become visible. What liberal theorists, such as John Rawls, leave out of their notions of justice, democracy, and human rights is precisely that these are sustained by how subjects organize their desire through fantasy. Thus, to understand the violence that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, we must first understand the fantasy structures that underpin that violence. It is difficult to underestimate the success of Žižek’s work in the 1990s. The only comparable figure who attempted to bridge the gap between Hegelian Marxism, Althusserian structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis was Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981), and he was relentlessly criticized for the attempt. How are we to account for this apparent discrepancy? There was clearly Žižek’s ability to tell a joke and his embrace of North American popular culture; more significantly I believe, Jameson continued to work within the horizon of Western Marxism, whereas Žižek was read within the context of post-Marxism and the project for radical democracy. Insofar as he endorsed a strict Lacanian anti-utopianism—that is to say, a belief in the impossibility of ‘a universality without its symptom, without the point of exception functioning as its internal negation’ (Žižek 1989: 23)—he remained within the Lacanian Left. For Stavrakakis, it is the acceptance of the irreducibility of lack that differentiates the Lacanian Left from the old, obsolete ‘Utopian’ left, and Žižek, he argues, has eventually fallen from the former to the latter (Stavrakakis 2007: 124). Žižek’s radical turn came in the early 2000s, with the theoretical break from his post-Marxist interlocutors and a more sustained engagement with the work of Alain Badiou. In 2001, Žižek hosted a conference in Essen on ‘The Retrieval of Lenin’. The conference was contemporaneous with the publication of his dialogue with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). What started out as a dialogue ‘to establish the common trajectory of [their] thought and to stage in a productive way the different intellectual commitments’ (2000: 1) they shared degenerated into an increasingly acrimonious exchange between Laclau and Žižek. In his final contribution to the volume, Laclau expresses his exasperation—he can discuss politics with Butler because she talks about the real world and the strategic problems that people face in their actual struggles, while with Žižek, it is hopeless. ‘The only thing one gets from him’, writes Laclau, ‘are injunctions to overthrow capitalism or to abolish liberal democracy, which have no meaning at all’ (Butler, Laclau and Zizek 2000: 290). In the unlikely event, he continued, that Žižek’s ideas were ever accepted, they would set the Left back 50 years. What has increasingly set Žižek apart from Laclau and others on the Lacanian Left is his advocacy of a ‘strict egalitarian justice’ and ‘disciplinary terror’ as key elements of a new form of 101

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‘Jacobin-Leninist’ politics (Žižek 2009a: 125, emphasis in the original). Indeed, his reflections on violence have moved from the fantasy structures that sustain nationalist violence to the distinction between revolutionary and systemic state violence, specifically the idea that an authentic political act involves violence. Revolutionary terror is not, Žižek insists, some kind of Stalinist aberration but rather an intrinsic part of Marxism’s historical legacy and one that Marxists must acknowledge. The problem today, he argues, ‘is not terror as such—our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror’ (Žižek 2009a: 174). In The Parallax View, he notes that ‘in every authentic revolutionary explosion, there is an element of “pure” violence’, and it is this that liberals and the ‘soft’ left cannot accept (Žižek 2006: 380). More recently, in a discussion on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Žižek writes that ‘the great divide between the liberal and the radical left concerns the question: how are we to counter this violence?’ (Žižek 2009b: 468). This combination of utopianism and a radical politics of the act distinguishes Žižek from others identified here with the Lacanian Left, with the exception of his comrade Alain Badiou. Žižek is, however, by no means the final word on Lacano-Marxism. The most systematic account of Marx’s influence on Lacan is unquestionably Samo Tomšič’s (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious. Tomšič notes that before the events of May 1968, there are few references to Marx in Lacan’s work, but after May 1968, he set out to thoroughly map the connections between Capital and psychoanalysis. Following Žižek’s early work, Tomšič observes not only that Marx invented the symptom but that the subject implied in Marx’s critique of capital is nothing less than the subject of the unconscious (Tomšič 2015: 5). Furthermore, since both Marxism and psychoanalysis are grounded in the constitutive alienation of the subject within society, this suggests the possibility of a homology between Marx and Freud based on their respective ‘logics’, especially via the Lacanian objet petit a—that is to say, their respective analyses of the insatiable demand for production, or production for production’s sake: ‘The shared discovery of Marx and Freud is that production produces more than being, it produces surplus-value and surplusjouissance’ (Tomšič 2015: 201). Thus,Tomšič reads Marx’s account of labor power as a theory of the subject and takes Freud’s references to work (labor) literally, suggesting that Freud formulated a ‘labour theory of the unconscious’ (Tomšič 2015: 11 emphasis in the original). This is a particularly tendentious reading of Marx, though. Lacan’s Marx is a Structuralist avant le letter, and the Freudian unconscious is a continuation of a materialist theory of the subject to be found in capital. The Capitalist Unconscious is an impressive achievement and in many ways complements and completes Fredric Jameson’s opening chapter of The Political Unconscious (1981) and his, at the time, scandalous attempt to bridge the gap between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian Marxism, but it remains circumscribed within the limits of Althusserian anti-humanism and anti-historicism.

The Subject as Lack and Force In an interview on the demise of the Lacano-Althusserian journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Alain Badiou remarks that he is the only one of the original group to remain true to the journal’s initial anti-humanist project: the correlation between a theory of the subject and a formal theory of structures (Hallward and Peden 2012: 288). After 1968, he notes, the editorial team underwent a three-way split: those ‘renegades’, as he calls them, who turned to psychoanalysis (Miller, Milner, and their followers) and cut off the project from any form of radical politics, reinstitutionalizing the theory; those who got caught up in the general reactionary political drift of the 1970s, waging war on ‘totality’ and totalitarianism; and finally the Lacano-Maoism of Badiou, who believes that the philosophical conceptual space opened up by the journal continues to have relevance today (with the proviso that he is no longer strictly Lacanian or strictly Maoist). Indeed, the 102

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belated translation of Badiou’s early Lacanian-influenced Theory of the Subject (2009a [1982]) has refocused academic attention on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse and given renewed impetus to the Lacano-Althusserian anti-humanist project. Badiou has consistently reformulated his notion of the subject since his first major work, but as he acknowledges in Logics of Worlds, he has never completely abandoned the problematic or some of the key formulations of that earlier work (Badiou 2009b: 523). In Theory of the Subject, he insists on the need to traverse Lacan, to go beyond Lacan without rejecting the insight of the Lacanian subject per se. Thus, Badiou makes a crucial distinction between the process of subjectivization and the subjective process. Both processes can be found in Lacan. The former obeys the logic of the signifier and the structural law of lack, and it can be found in Lacan’s work up to the mid 1960s. The latter is governed by the topological logic of the Borromean knot, the real as excess and consistency, and it can be found in his post-1968 work. Badiou diverges from Lacan in two respects: he argues first that the real confers on the subject a degree of consistency and second that Lacan does not have a conception of force. The subject emerges out of the crossing of these two operations or temporalities; subjectivization is an interruption of the state of things and is distinguished from the subjective process through the anticipation of its own certainty. The subjective process operates après-coup to confer consistency on the effects of subjectivization: ‘the subjective process amounts to the retroactive grounding of the subjectivisation in an element of certainty that the subjectivisation alone has made possible’ (Badiou 2009a: 251). The subject is the product of this dialectical division of destruction and recomposition, of Lacan’s structural law of lack, the empty place, and the excess of the real that exceeds this place. As Badiou writes, the subject proceeds from a subjectivisation by forcing the empty place, which a new order grounds retrospectively qua place, by having occupied it. . . . Any splace [the place of the subjective] is thus the after effect or après-coup of the destruction of another. Subjectivisation is the anticipation whose structure is the empty place; the subjective process, the retroaction that places the forcing. (Badiou 2009a: 264) The subject is the splace, which comes from what has been destroyed. Badiou’s subject is at once the empty place and that which comes to fill the place. What differentiates this subject from Lacan’s is that the real confers on the subject a degree of consistency that allows it to reconfigure the consequences of its initial act of destruction. As Badiou will put it in Being and Event, a ‘subject is nothing other than an active fidelity to the event of truth’ (Badiou 2005 xiii). It is this that gives consistency to the subject and facilitates its affirmative agency. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou reaffirms the dialectic of the splace he outlined in Theory of the Subject (Badiou 2009b: 45–46). What is new in the later book, he argues, is an ‘entirely original theory of the subject-body’ (Badiou 2009b: 99). Against the contemporary doxa—‘there are only bodies and languages’ (Badiou 2009b: 1)—that Badiou defines as democratic materialism, he opposes the materialist dialectic and the proposition that ‘there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths’ (Badiou 2009b: 4). The ‘except that’ in the proceeding proposition refers to the subject insofar as a body is capable of producing effects that exceed the hegemony of body languages, then this body will be said to be subjectivated; it becomes a subjectivized body or body-of-truth.Truths, in Badiou’s sense, are incorporeal bodies, languages devoid of meaning, generic infinities that emerge and remain suspended between the void and the event; in short, ‘truths exist as exceptions to what there is’ (Badiou 2009b: 4). Insofar as a truth has no substantial existence, it insists as an exception to what ‘there is’. Where Badiou departs from the majority 103

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of the Lacanian Left considered here is in his assertion of a need for an affirmative forcing of the real and not simply an acknowledging of its negative, critical function.

Conclusion Contemporary work within the Lacanian Left has shifted from the purely discursive, the critique of ideology and the fantasy structures that underpin it, to addressing the problem of affect or jouissance, more specifically, the analysis of how forms of enjoyment are structured in advanced or consumer capitalism. When we turn our attention from the plasticity of identity to more enduring forms of identification, such as the nation or consumerism, we are confronted with, as Stavrakakis puts it, ‘what sticks’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 163–188), the stubbornness of certain attachments and identifications. It is this resistance to change and social transformation that the dialectic of jouissance seeks to address. The analysis and critique of nationalism, racism, and consumerism cannot be reduced to conscious or rational processes but instead must address how different forms of jouissance are mobilized and invested in these discursive constructs. For example, what gives consistency to nationalist fantasies is the promise of full enjoyment, usually projected back into some mythical past, but because this imaginary scenario can never be fulfilled, the fantasy must also be able to accommodate the failure of jouissance. This is where the Lacanian notion of the theft of enjoyment has particular purchase: subjects cannot fully enjoy their (mythical) pleasures, because they have been stolen by the other and thus can be achieved once again only through the expulsion of the other. Nation, race, and consumerism all involve a libidinal investment to sustain them, but at the same time, the fantasy structure that sustains them must be able to account for their ultimate failure of satisfaction. Todd McGowan has defined this as the command society or the ‘society of the death drive’ (McGowan 2013: 283–286). Contrary to Tomšič, McGowan argues that the political project of psychoanalysis offers an alternative to the utopian promise of Marxism and an explanation for its failures, through a recognition of the inherent impossibility of the good society. Elevating Freud’s concept of the death drive to the central category of psychoanalysis, the emancipatory promise of the Lacanian Left revolves around the turning away from a society of consumption and accumulation toward enjoyment and the subject’s identification with the failure or limits of jouissance. For Stavrakakis and McGowan, therefore, it is time to abandon the utopian aspirations of the old left and embrace the partial jouissance we have access to. The political project of the Lacanian Left is no longer the Marxist fantasy of a good society but a political discourse that recognizes and transforms how subjects structure their enjoyment. As stated in the introduction, the heterogeneous field inscribed by the signifier ‘Lacanian Left’ is marked by internal division. It encompasses the early discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, the Lacanian feminists of the 1980s, and the particular trajectory of Lacano-Althusserianism from the Cercle d’Épistémologie through Jameson, Žižek, and Badiou. Today, as we have seen in the work of Stavrakakis and McGowan, there has been a shift toward the analysis of jouissance and affect within consumer society. In this recent shift, the notion of transcending capitalism and achieving some form of socialist or communist society is considered a pernicious utopian fantasy that rests on an imaginary scenario of full enjoyment. From the perspective of this author, however, one can maintain a commitment to the Lacanian split subject and what Fredric Jameson calls the utopian impulse without falling into the phantasmatic trap of a harmonious society without division. Indeed, I contend that this is precisely what Jameson, Žižek, and Badiou manage to achieve. What all of the trajectories outlined in this chapter share is a commitment to the divided subject and a critique of contemporary capital; where they diverge is how we are to traverse Lacan and move beyond impoverishment and immiseration of capital. 104

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Notes 1. Stavrakakis does acknowledge that a more historical account of the Lacanian Left than the one he outlines in his book would include the work of Althusser and Jameson (see Stavrakakis 2007: 33, ft 23). 2. See Barrett 1991 for an account of the theoretical implosion of Althusserian Marxism and the incompatibility of Althusser and Lacan. 3. I will return to this later in the chapter, when I come to address Todd McGowan’s Enjoying What We Don’t Have:The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013).

References Adams, P. and Cowie, E. (eds.) (1990) The Woman in Question: m/f, London:Verso. Althusser, L. (1984a [1964]) ‘Freud and Lacan’, in Essays on Ideology, London:Verso. Althusser, L. (1984b [1970]) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Essays on Ideology, London:Verso. Badiou, A. (2005 [1988]) Being and Event, Feltham, Oliver (trans.), London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2009a [1982]) Theory of the Subject, Bosteels, B. (trans.), London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2009b [2006]) Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, Toscano, A. (trans.), London: Continuum. Barrett, M. (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London:Verso. Copjec, J. (1994) Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Glynos, J. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2003) ‘Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing Out the Limits of Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan’, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 1(1), 110–128. Hallward, P. (2012) ‘Introduction: Theoretical Training’, in Hallward, P. and Peden, K. (eds.) Concept and Form:Volume One, Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, London: Verso. Hallward, P. and Peden, K. (eds.) (2012) Concept and Form: Volume Two, Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, London:Verso. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1982 [1977]) ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’, in Felman, S. (ed.) Literature and Psychoanalysis, The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jameson, F. (1988) ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’, in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory, London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Miller, J.-A (ed.) Sheridan, A. (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Miller, J.-A (ed.) Porter, D. (trans.), London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London:Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London:Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. McGowan, T. (2013) Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, J.-A. (2012a (1968]) ‘Action of the Structure’, Kerslake, C. (trans.) in Hallward, P. and Peden, K. (eds.) Concept and Form:Volume One, Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, London: Verso. Miller, J.-A. (2012b [1964]) ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’, Rose, J. (trans.) in Hallward, P. and Peden, K. (eds.) Concept and Form: Volume One, Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (1993) The Return of the Political, London:Verso. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality and the Field of Vision, London:Verso. Salecl, R. (1994) The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism, London: Routledge. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London:Verso.

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Sean Homer Turkle, S. (1992) Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, 2nd ed., London: Free Association Books. Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, S. (2009a) First as Tragedy,Then as Farce, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2009b) In Defense of Lost Causes, London:Verso.

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8 PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINISM Lisa Baraitser

In what sense might the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis be thought of as political? Feminism and psychoanalysis are clearly political projects in their own right: feminism understood as an umbrella term for the political and social movements that have strived for equality between the sexes; psychoanalysis understood as a theory of the divided subject but also of the origins of political and social formations permeated by sexuality, violence, and sexual difference. Yet are there particular political questions that unfold when one term comes into relation with the other? Or is their relation now a historical one, forged in the crucible of 19thcentury modernity with the invention of hysteria as the scene of their address? Despite intensive debates about female sexuality and the roles of castration and penis envy in the development of femininity during Freud’s lifetime, Jane Gallup has argued that hysteria, the quintessential ‘female malady’, became consolidated only ‘around 1981’ (Gallup 1992), as academic literary feminism reclaimed it as a form of feminism, a cultural rather than medical condition that furnished women with a bodily language to speak back to patriarchy (Devereux 2014).This would imply that the relation between psychoanalysis and feminism becomes truly political only during feminism’s second wave, when Freud and Breuer’s early encounters with hysterical women (encounters that were to set in motion the whole development of psychoanalysis) are retroactively animated by feminist discourse. This raises the further question that if 1981 consolidates the scene of 1885 as political, what do feminism and psychoanalysis have to do with one another in what could be dubbed the #MeToo era, in which feminism has reemerged as a politically mobilizing term while becoming thoroughly entangled with neoliberalism?1 One of the difficulties with bringing psychoanalysis and feminism into a relation with one another is that they are unstable, heterogeneous terms and practices that are constantly on the move. Psychoanalysis, for instance, is now barely recognized as a mode of treatment in public health settings, a situation that recalibrates psychoanalysis as a powerful master discourse that feminism once pitted itself against during heated debates about the function of the phallus in the formation of the subject in European and US academia during the 1980s.2 Furthermore, the universality of the tacit subject of early second-wave feminism—white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western women—has been thoroughly decentered and critiqued, as feminism itself has been transformed by its engagements with critical race theory, trans scholarship, and crip and queer perspectives. Pointing toward the exclusions that are produced when the category ‘woman’ does not acknowledge its white determinants (hooks 1981), decades of third world and 107

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subaltern feminist scholarship broke open the unitary notion of ‘woman’ as an ontological or universal category of experience, independent of history or culture. These theoretical and political developments have profoundly challenged psychoanalytic feminism to give ground on sexual difference as the difference that inaugurates all differences. Many feminists have subsequently developed psychosocial and intersectional accounts of sexual difference that cannot be thought outside of the effects of power that have differential and asymmetric consequences for individual subjects, preferring the term gender, as a socially constructed category, a material reality, and a site of fantasy, affect, and meaning, to that of sexual difference. The performative turn in gender theory associated with Judith Butler’s work has de-essentialized gender categories further, including complicating our understanding of ‘sex’ as the material substrate through which gender is performed (Butler 1990, 1993). This has led to a theoretical framework being incorporated within psychoanalytic feminism that can account for the limits of psychoanalytic discourse as it is complicated by race, coloniality, and forms of kinship that deviate from traditional Western family formations. Jane Flax argues, for instance, that when psychoanalytic feminism listens in an intersectional way, it may be able to hear the question, ‘how dark is it?’ running alongside the question, ‘is it a boy or a girl?’, a question that it could then articulate as a law, not simply a social fact (Flax 2004). Just as psychoanalytic feminism interrupts assumptions about what feminism is, by displacing any account of sexed identity as either natural or socially constructed through an insistence that it is a fragile achievement operating in the psychic realm, so does feminism in its broadest political sense push psychoanalysis to its own conceptual and indeed political limits. We would have to begin then from the minimal position that psychoanalysis and feminism are both heterogeneous, that they are both ways of asking questions about the sexual and difference, and that their relation upsets one another, especially the relation between the sexual and difference itself. In the following sections of this chapter, I discuss psychoanalytic feminism, but not what has come to be termed feminist psychoanalysis.3 The latter seeks to understand how feminist principles can underpin clinical practice, including a full consideration of the psychic effects of living under patriarchy, which would include the systematic and structural exclusion of women from power and the control, naturalization, objectification, sexualization, and (in its most extreme form) destruction of women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities. This may therefore include clinical interventions that explicitly aim to enhance female power and assertiveness and promote a more womanist culture, a perspective particularly developed by black feminism.4 However, our interest here is psychoanalytic feminism; theories of the unconscious that seek to account for how subjectivity, sexuality, and sexual difference come to be knotted together to explain how a female subject, or what Freud calls femininity, emerges and is constituted in psychosocial life. Psychoanalytic feminism has argued that we cannot assume that there are already constituted men and women whose relations produce psychic consequences, however true this also is. As Freud famously put it, ‘psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition’ (Freud 1933: 116). How ‘she’ comes into being is neither a product of a predetermined developmental sequence nor that of sociological imprinting, since it is this distinction between the natural and the social that psychoanalysis fundamentally troubles. From a Freudian perspective, the bisexual child is psychically not yet either male or female.Their instinctual life functions prior to sexual difference in a realm of experience that Freud calls psychic reality, which is why psychoanalysis has remained shy of the terms sex and gender. Instead, it gives primacy to sexuality—the drive that inhabits and determines psychic reality—and sexual difference—the unstable achievement of the drive’s maturation. The drive has no pre-given aim that might derive from ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. Freud’s view was 108

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that sexuality is the product of this specifically human slippage from instinct to drive, and its structuring occurs through the primal fantasy of castration that leads to the psychic positions, male and female, without which there is no social subject. Feminists have been split on what to do with this Freudian heritage. On the one hand, Freud appears to offer a deeply unappealing account of the development of the female subjective position, one in which femininity becomes synonymous with passivity in relation to masculine activity, leaving the female subject consumed with penis envy and prone to masochism, with a weak superego and capacity for sublimation and a normative destiny laid out for her that is heterosexual and reproductive if she is to avoid neurosis. He offers a universalist theory that is ahistorical, heterosexist, biologistic, and phallocentric. On the other, he facilitates a radical unsettling of the relationship between anatomy and its psychical meanings, pointing the way, as Jacques Lacan then elaborates, toward a psychosexuality that is neither fixed nor rooted in the materiality of sex. While this solves certain problems for feminism, the Freudian/Lacanian account remains structured around a binary (masculine/feminine, father/mother, law/body) that feminists have argued is itself problematic, regardless of the multiplicity of positions one can take up on either or both sides. This becomes central to feminist, queer, and trans debates about the limits of psychoanalytic accounts of both the sexual and difference. Equally, accounts of the female subject that emerge from the object relations tradition5 and draw on notions of primary femininity, or the formative relation with the maternal body and its contents, both appeal to and also fail to provide adequate answers to the question of sexual difference. Psychoanalysis therefore holds out enormous potential for feminism, given the dislodgement of sexual difference from biological or cultural determinism and from the essentializing of women that has dogged the history of Western philosophy and the experiences of women under patriarchy. However, it also makes trouble, as the social subject remains posited in a gender binary, blind to other forms of difference that exceed binaries and structure subjectivity. Feminism has therefore engaged seriously with Freud’s theories and their developments, but it has also tested their limits and impasses and developed its own psychoanalytic feminist theories that offer ways to supplement the Freudian account of female subjectivity and sexuality.

Oedipus, Castration, and the Primal Scene To understand the arguments that feminists have made about psychoanalysis, we need to understand Freud’s question about how a woman develops out of a bisexual disposition. The brief answer to this question is that femininity is one psychic solution to the crisis of the Oedipus complex in the psychic life of all children. Freud offers a theory of the unconscious and of sexuality that come together in the Oedipus complex in such a way as to produce sexual difference. Freud’s early claim, with Josef Breuer, was that hysteria is caused by a repressed and troubling idea that is converted into a bodily symptom (Breuer and Freud 1895). The troubling idea is a memory of an actual sexual trauma that is retroactively animated by a later less overtly traumatic event, leading to the conversion of the repressed memory into a symptom. The talking cure was a way to bring the repressed memory into consciousness. Rebinding the repressed memory to its repressed affect would dissolve the symptom. By 1905, however, Freud abandoned his seduction theory and replaced it with a theory of infantile sexuality in which the neuroses are caused by unconscious fantasies: conflicts and repressions of unconscious tabooed wishes and desires (Freud 1905a). Although Freud never denied the realities of childhood sexual abuse, his distinctive and in some ways radical move was to universalize the event of trauma, so that sexuality traumatizes in and of itself, coming both too soon for the infant’s yet-to-develop psychic apparatus to make sense of and too late in the sense of the later event’s production of the first as 109

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traumatic. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a), infantile sexuality is a primordial unconscious force rather than something imposed on the infant by adult sexuality.6 This force becomes organized and partially satisfied in a developmental chain, as the infant’s preoccupations move from oral to anal to phallic areas of the body—until after a period of latency, it consolidates as genital sexuality while retaining residues of its earlier ‘polymorphously perverse’ forms. A person is therefore ‘formed through their sexuality, it is not “added” to him or her’ (Mitchell 1982: 2). What dominates unconscious life are the tabooed, infantile, incestuous desires toward one’s parental figures. Despite Freud’s early articulation of a rather simple Oedipus conflict (Freud 1900), in which the little girl heterosexually desires her father and feels hostile to her mother, and conversely for the boy, a number of problematics lead Freud to a second phase of his work on the Oedipus complex, from around 1920 through until the end of his life, in which he rethinks the relation between sexuality and sexual difference (Mitchell 1982: 9).The problematics involve his analysis of Dora (Freud 1905b), in which he retrospectively recognizes that Dora doesn’t simply desire her father but identifies with him too in her desire for Frau K, and they involve the question of homosexuality, which leads Freud to suggest that both boy and girl have mixtures of each in one another. With this latter suggestion, Freud shifts the meaning of bisexuality from an infantile state to the uncertainty of sexual difference itself (Mitchell 1982: 9). For the boy child, castration sets the oedipal conflict in motion. Until the phallic phase, children of both sexes are attached to the mother, and both boys and girls experience similar oral and anal impulses. Both are bisexual. The boy child, at the ages of between three and five years encounters the catastrophe of the threat of castration—the no from a paternal figure that puts a limit on what can be desired. His incestuous desire for the mother, operating up until that point without consideration of the conventions that determine an acceptable sexual object, is opposed by an incest taboo, which structures this desire into a socialized form. The boy’s desire for the mother comes up against paternal authority backed up by the father’s real and imagined power to harm him, which Freud conceptualizes as appearing in the boy’s mind as the threat of castration. The child’s consequent terror results in repressing his passion for mother and identifying with father. Identification brings the promise of deferred gratification but also aggression derived from the boy’s rivalry with the father and his phantasy that the father is murderously hostile toward him. This threat instigates not only the repression of sexual desire but a new ‘structure’ within the mind, the superego, that unconsciously scrutinizes the ego’s compromise formations. The girl’s Oedipus complex is not a simple inversion of the boy’s (hence Freud’s rejection of Jung’s term Electra complex), a position followed by Lacan, who emphasized that every child, regardless of anatomy, has to come to terms with the structuring power of the father’s authority and the relinquishment of desire for/of the mother. The girl, in Freud’s account, has the more difficult developmental process. She must cope with two emotional losses: first, giving up her active phallic focus on her own ‘penis’—the clitoris—and, second, transferring her desire from mother to father, taking up the ‘passive’ or feminine position in psychic life. In effect, this means that where the boy uses repression and identification to avoid castration and deal with the impossibility of ‘being’ the answer to his mother’s desire, the girl has to respond to the realization that she, like her mother, is already ‘castrated’ and will perpetually want to ‘have’ the answer to her mother’s desire. This generates, in the girl, a general sense of her own inferiority linked with the relative ineffectiveness of her genitals in providing satisfaction for the sexual drive; a hateful rage at the mother for having created her like that, in her own image; and envy of the penis possessed by father and brother alike. The girl thus shifts from mother-love to father-love because everything she wants resides in the latter. Where the boy’s castration complex ends the 110

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Oedipus complex, the girl’s castration complex pushes her into the oedipal situation, in which her desire is to displace her mother to get a share in her father’s power. This leaves young girls contending with an unconscious hostility toward their mothers; it is also the source of the shift of sexual object from mother to father necessary for normative, heterosexual femininity. Freud viewed failures of navigating the oedipal process as leading to lesbianism or neurosis in girls. Finally, the girl’s desire for the penis must itself be renounced and replaced by desire for a baby.

The Great Debate It is not difficult to see why there were objections right from the start: little girls must accept that they are first ‘masculine’ and then take up the passive feminine position, agreeing to wait for a penis substitute in the form of the boy child they may bear. Heterosexual reproductivity will bring some partial relief from this situation, but their superego will remain weak due to the lack of a paternal no that really sutures their position in the symbolic, and they are therefore deemed incapable of anything more than an ironic or mimetic relation to culture and society. What is more, the no of the father is meaningful only if there are people—females—who are seen to be lacking a phallus (Mitchell 1982). Their constitutive lack is what allows ‘lack’ (the phallus that everyone lacks) to function. Their lack is therefore doubled, and they remain the placeholders of culture that allow culture to operate but cannot ‘take place’ in culture. In some ways, Freud’s account returns women to the most biological of functions: the reproduction of both the species and culture itself, yet assigned an impossible, or in Julia Kristeva’s terms, a psychotic place at the border between biology and signification (Kristeva 1980: 239). Juliet Mitchell has argued that there was much opposition to Freud’s theory of female sexuality, not just in the 1930s after Freud’s paper on ‘Female Sexuality’ (Freud 1931) and his famous 1933 lecture ‘Femininity’ (Freud 1933) but in the earlier debate in the 1920s on the castration complex (Mitchell 1982). At the core of this debate was whether biology, environment, object relations, or the castration complex accounted for the psychic distinction between the sexes. Numerous early analysts took issue with Freud’s account of penis envy, female masochism, and the role of castration.7 Karen Horney sought to redress the imbalance emerging in psychoanalytic theories of the difference between the sexes by arguing that social subordination was responsible for the inferiority that women experienced. Horney was concerned that psychoanalytic theory was itself infected by the ‘dogma of the inferiority of women’ (Horney 1926: 331) and was unable to see its own blind spots. Otto Rank argued that all babies experienced the loss of the womb, and this evened out the later losses of castration (1924). Karl Abraham put forward the view that castration encompassed the fear of the loss of sexual potency that gripped both boys and girls equally (Abraham 1922). These accounts, in assuming an innate masculinity and femininity that mapped onto biological males and females also posited a ‘natural’ heterosexuality. Karen Horney wrote about the ‘biological principle of heterosexual attraction’ (Horney 1926: 332) and argued that the girl’s masculine phase was a defense against her primary feminine anxiety that her father would penetrate and damage her (Horney 1926). Klein elaborated the notion of the girl’s primordial infantile feminine sexuality and with it an unconscious knowledge of the vagina (Klein 1924, 1928). Jones also argued for a primary femininity, whereby penis envy was a defense against the ‘injury’ of biological asymmetry, coining the term phallocentrism as a critique of Freud’s account of sexual difference (Jones 1927). For Jones, the girl’s phallic phase was a temporary refuge while she felt her primary femininity to be in danger (Jones 1927, 1933). Equally, Klein argued that there is a period when the girl is undifferentiated from the boy, in which the boy has a primary feminine phase, and both of them love and identify with the mother (Klein 1928). 111

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Yet all relied on the idea of an already constituted difference between the sexes that they also sought to explain, and they all failed to deal with Freud’s insistence that the father’s no relied on an already castrated subject (the mother) to lend it authority. As Juliet Mitchell puts it, ‘the absence of the penis in women is significant only in that it makes meaningful the father’s prohibition on incestuous desires. In and of itself, the female body neither indicates nor initiates anything’ (Mitchell 1982: 17). This, of course, has been a further source of controversy for feminism—that only the paternal no initiates anything, despite both male and female children being constituted through different relations to the missing phallus. Mitchell argues that this simply reflects patricentric culture and has gone on in later work to develop a notion of a ‘law of the mother’ that prohibits murder between siblings (Mitchell 2003). Judith Butler has taken issue with this, asking the crucial question of how any law comes to operate as law in a social field of mutable norms. One thing feminism cannot do is simply lie back and accept that patriarchy (and the way it enters our theorizing) is the only possible way to organize psychosexuality (Butler 2012). What is clear is that the questions of femininity, female sexuality, and sexual difference were hotly debated and discussed by psychoanalysts through the 1920s and 1930s and never settled. Although Freud’s views were challenged, they set in motion a variety of ways of thinking psychoanalytically about how a woman ‘comes into being’ and what it is she may want.

Post-structuralist Feminist Critique: Irigaray, Kristeva, and Butler By the 1940s, there was feminist pressure from outside psychoanalysis as well as from within. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, devoted a chapter of The Second Sex to ‘The Psychoanalytic Point of View’ (de Beauvoir 1949). Although she agrees with Freud that one is not born a woman but becomes one, she challenges the determinism in Freud’s account and the ways it strips the human subject from its self-defining capacities. In particular, she questions Freud’s lack of critique of the social determinants of masculinity, paternal power, and privilege. For de Beauvoir, women envy men’s actual social position and the power that comes with it, forcing women to choose between femininity, on the one hand, and subjectivity, independence, and agency, on the other. Psychoanalysis, she claims, denies women freedom (including the freedom to mother), because the ahistorical, universalizing, and determinist elements of identity are deemed inescapable. However, the most significant entanglement between psychoanalysis and feminism emerges after 1968, in the wake of post-structuralism in the French context, with a body of theory that is often dubbed French feminism. I will focus here on the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, although there are many others (many of whom are not French) who have made significant contributions to this debate.8 But a brief account of Lacan’s theory of sexuation is needed first to follow the contours of the discussion. Lacan follows Freud in giving primacy to the paternal no of the incest taboo that takes its force from the threat of castration. Castration for Lacan, however, has to do with the assumption of symbolic identity and a position in the human system of meaning through the use of language that both precedes and precipitates human subjectivity. Punning on the French homophones non (no) and nom (name), the no of the father is also the Name-of-the-Father, so that the child becomes subject to the law and to language simultaneously (Lacan 1956).This means that desire (or lack) is the necessary price for the condition of speaking being. All speaking beings lack the phallus, which Lacan argues is not the same as the penis.The phallus is the signifier of lack itself, necessary to get the whole system of signification going but without ever signifying anything (Lacan 1958). Those identifying as ‘men’ and ‘women’ have different relations to the phallus. As 112

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we have seen, Freud points toward men wanting to be it and women to have it, deriving from women’s relation to the maternal body. For Lacan, the realization of maternal desire pointing elsewhere means that she too is lacking and desiring, and this, combined with the ‘law of the father’, warns the child that they too are not the answer to maternal desire.Through the psychic positioning that Lacan calls sexuation, ‘men’ and ‘women’ deal with the impossibility of their relationship to the phallus by relating to a different substitute, which also avoids a meeting with another subject (Lacan 1972–1973). To be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is not to assume an identity, as such, but to fail to take on identity as self-certainty, and both subjects fail, albeit in different ways. To line up on one side or the other of the sexual divide is to be constituted as split.To have made the choice is to produce difference as such. So far, so equal. However, the psychic positions ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are disjunct. The masculine side of Lacan’s famous formula of sexuation (Lacan 1972–1973) entails accepting subjection by/to the law while consoling oneself with the belief that there is at least one exception to that law, which is the fantasy of unmediated pleasure that only the Father of the primal horde enjoys. The man pays the price of full jouissance to be included in the universal, to be castrated, and to enter the symbolic. The exception that proves the rule is that there is one who is not subject to the phallus: in unconscious fantasy, there is an uncastrated man who supports the illusion that someone has it all. The feminine side is conditioned by two contradictory statements in the negative: There is no speaking being who is not subject to the phallus, and not-all speaking beings are subject to the phallus. Here there is no exception to the rule (there is no Mother who escapes castration and no primal horde of women). In the absence of this exception, Lacan makes his claim that there is no such thing as a Woman (i.e., the universal woman), because in her essence she is notall—there is no group of ‘all women’. ‘All men’ get to belong to a set of men, whereas ‘woman’ is radically singular, not an example of a class but an exception, producing an infinite series of particular women into which each woman enters one by one.Without a sovereign Woman who guarantees the status ‘woman’, women are the very passage of signifiers—the name for the hole that the Real makes in the symbolic. To signify the exception to the phallic signifier (not-all) is to be, in Lacan’s terms, ‘indeterminate’. Those who align themselves with the masculine console themselves about the loss of full jouissance by chasing the objet petit a on the feminine side. On the feminine side, there is a small amount of extra pleasure in knowing that this is ‘not-all’, that there is something that is ‘Other’ to the phallus. Bruce Fink writes that women,‘while “coupled” on the one hand, to the phallus, are also inextricably “tripled” to what points to a lack or hole in the signifying order’ (Fink 1991: 76). Post-structuralist feminists who engage with Lacan’s account of sexuation have taken issue with the coding of femininity as the name for the impossibility of representation. This mires her in the Real, constitutes her as both lack and excess, the limit of the phallic signifier and the failure of that limit.They have questioned Lacan’s rearticulation of Freud’s assertion that ‘men’ are related to the symbolic (to speaking, signifying, and taking part in culture), whereas ‘women’ are related to the impossible, the unspeakable, and the traumatic. In particular, the critique lambasts the absence of theorization of the maternal-feminine, including the relation between femininity, the body, and language and the structural position of the mother in culture, while some feminists have also worked to disentangle maternity from femininity at the same time.They raise the question of how women can ‘speak’ their objection to the feminine position as prescribed by what Irigaray terms phallogocentrism (Irigaray 1985a) without being heard as either hysterical (i.e., unable to resolve the question of whether one is a man or a woman) or psychotic (the name for the subject that forecloses on the law of the father). Although many psychoanalytic feminists hold to the core psychoanalytic insight that the human subject is divided and that the Lacanian syncope ‘therefore I am where I do not think’ (Lacan 1966) describes the non-identity of the subject, they analyze 113

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the function of the feminine as the double, or indeed triple, lack that allows the binary masculine/ feminine to suture culture’s own reproduction. While some focus on the body and its inchoate fluids, pulses, and rhythms to theorize both writing and speaking, others question the Lacanian ‘law of the father’ that is presented as immutable and that only ever features in the masculine. Luce Irigaray’s innovation is to recast the question of difference through an analysis of the binary masculine/feminine that she claims only ever turns out to have one term—the masculine (Irigaray 1985a). She writes ‘that the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual’ (Irigaray 1985b: 28). For Irigaray, Freud participates in this process of what she calls ‘sexual indifference’, modeling femininity as a deviation from masculinity, the Other to the Same (Irigaray 1985a: 101–103). What Freud can’t see—his blind spot—is the specificity of the mother-daughter relation. This occlusion performs a kind of matricide that other feminist writers also take up,9 because the law of the father is premised on the suppression of the maternal body and because its meanings and the path to femininity are posited as occurring through Oedipus, leaving the maternal function quite literally meaningless. Psychoanalysis needs the figure of the mother, but the meaning of her loss is suppressed in culture, so no mourning can occur, and the maternal origin of life remains buried. This produces an asymmetry in which the father’s name is memorialized and the mother’s body is suppressed, while propping up the cultural fantasy of a reciprocal and complementary relation between the sexes. In this sense, the binary masculine/feminine covers over an archaic relation between women that Irigaray seeks to articulate as the feminine proper. The exploitation of women is not just at the level of the social but also the very condition for the social to take place. To reclaim the feminine means demonstrating that it paradoxically shows up as excessive to the symbolic, in fact that it is the name for that which the symbolic cannot contain. Not only is Irigaray’s project deconstructive, but it has also entailed many tangible activities that have attempted to reinvigorate mother-daughter relations at the level of the social and attempted to promote her revised understanding of sexual difference in the political realm, including her work within the European Parliament to bring about a sexed definition of citizenship. For women to become both citizens and subjects, there must be an intervention at the level of both the symbolic and the imaginary that disrupts the transmission of power between men coded in the Oedipus complex. For Irigaray, this entails the development of a new lexicon that maintains a connection between speech and the body and that reinstates a relation between love and the law. In her own writing, Irigaray adopts a mimetic strategy, writing to stage her own exile from language, while nevertheless speaking, and in doing so attempting to transform what it means to be a sexed subject. She does not aim at equality with men, as this simply replicates the logic of the ‘one and the many’ that she sees as de Beauvoir’s trap. Instead, through the figure of morphology, she articulates a subject who is always already two, opposing the notion of the ‘one’ of masculine identity to which the feminine is added as an ‘other’. For Irigaray ‘being two’ is a way to reframe the ontological assumption of an auto-affective, unitary masculine subject bound to his ‘other’ that occludes human multiplicity and can only ever add up to one. Relations between men and women would be transformed, in her view, if all human subjects were understood as already self-differentiating, ‘being-two’. Julia Kristeva’s project differs significantly from that of Irigaray. Their difference hinges on their views about whether the Oedipus complex can be theoretically overcome so that feminine genealogies can function as meaning-making aspects of culture (broadly Irigaray’s view) or whether, as Kristeva argues, there is no getting around Oedipus. Where Irigaray retrieves the pre-oedipal mother-daughter relation as a site for instigating feminine genealogies that have been repressed in culture, Kristeva follows Freud in positing that each subject must commit a 114

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‘necessary matricide’, a psychic separation with the mother, supported by a new figure of a ‘loving father’ (Freud’s ‘father of individual prehistory’ (Kristeva 1987)) as a condition of subjectivity. In this sense, Kristeva has been accused of conservatism in which she reinstates a familiar heterosexual couple before Oedipus that sets up the conditions for entry into the symbolic. Others have read Kristeva’s father of individual prehistory as in fact maternal love, a move that seeks to rescue Kristeva’s work from an otherwise heterosexist bent (Oliver 1993). Kristeva’s overall project is an ethical one (Oliver 1993). As a psychoanalyst, feminist, and mother (as someone, in other words, who positions herself at the border, margin or outer limit of the symbolic) Kristeva develops the notion of the ‘subject-in-process/on-trial’ (Kristeva 1975: 103), a subject in formation through various practices or discourses that break down identity. These are ethical in their very nature because they force a reconsideration of the relations between self and other that can allow for difference, rather than being premised on recognition of sameness. Kristeva’s privileged practices are poetry, psychoanalysis, and maternity, all of which allow the possibility of heterogeneity or the multiplicity of the drive to emerge. They both accept the symbolic law and enact the transgression of this law, shaking it up, disturbing it, and allowing the possibility of its reconfiguration. In her famous paper, ‘Women’s Time’ (Kristeva 1981), Kristeva also argues that feminism as a practice should be doing the same thing, instead of getting waylaid with fighting for equality or repudiating the law altogether. Kristeva’s privileged practices deal with the subject’s constant battle with symbolic collapse by releasing the drives into the symbolic, but without threatening to destroy it. Her argument is that we must have access to heterogeneity, otherwise, the symbolic becomes stagnant and thus there is no possibility for change or in fact for signification; but heterogeneity overwhelming breaks up the symbolic and leaves us with only psychosis or borderline states. The drive within language registers at the level of what Kristeva terms the semiotic—the affective and material elements of language, namely its tone, rhythm, and force. These are internal to language and therefore crucial in the signifying process, yet Kristeva situates the semiotic before Lacan’s imaginary, before the ego, while the not-yet subject is still in an undifferentiated relation with the maternal body. Kristeva calls this aspect of subjectivity ‘pre-thetic’, before both the imaginary and the symbolic dimensions of psychosocial life. She therefore supplements Lacan’s metapsychology with a pre-symbolic maternal-infant relation that continues to break into language through the inchoateness of poetry, psychoanalysis, and maternity, even as the symbolic commits ‘structural violence’ against these practices. Where Irigaray focuses on ‘being two’, Kristeva retains the model of ‘being two in one’ as a figure for the instability of identity. Maternity, including the bodily experience of pregnancy, exemplifies this model. For Kristeva, maternity exists at the border between the social and the biological regeneration of the species, an ambivalent principle ‘bound to the species, on the one hand, and on the other [stemming] from an identity catastrophe that causes the Name to topple over into the unnameable that one imagines as femininity, non-language or body’ (Kristeva 1977: 161–162). The ambivalent principle that maternity embodies concerns the borders of the social contract and what we imagine occurs at its edges where we are confronted with the limits of language—where language gives way to the body, biology, and the regeneration of the species. The maternal body, according to Kristeva, by its very ‘nature’, problematizes the symbolic, and through allowing an identification with the fantasy of the phallic mother, maternity is what allows the symbolic to exist: ‘She warrants that everything is, and that it is representable’ (Kristeva 1975: 302, emphasis in the original). The mother is ‘phallic’ to the extent that her desire for the phallus is the only way we can imagine within the symbolic that ‘the speaker is capable of reaching the Mother, and thus, of unsettling its own limits’ (Kristeva 1975: 305). She is how we represent to ourselves the nature-culture threshold, the limits to language, the point at which biology 115

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is instilled into ‘the very body of a symbolizing subject’ (Kristeva 1975: 305).The maternal body is related to as a thoroughfare or threshold where nature confronts culture. If no one were in that filter, then we would be born out of a void. This must be defended against in fantasy, as it presents a permanent threat to the stability of the subject, so the fantasy of the ‘phallic’ mother, the ‘someone’ at the threshold is maintained to ward off such a threat. Maternal identity is therefore always under threat and divided. Neither subject nor object, the maternal body is the literal embodiment of the split subject, the subject that is both same and other. Given that the maternal body problematizes and disturbs the very notions of identities and difference in a similar way to poetry and psychoanalysis, it gives rise to a new ethics. This Kristeva describes as herethics: at once heretical, feminine, and ethical (Kristeva 1977: 185). It is an ethics that challenges the autonomous subject, as it is founded on the indeterminacy of subject and object in pregnancy. The divided mother sets up her obligations to the other as obligations both to the self and to the child and the species. The love for a child is love for the self but also a willingness to give oneself up (Oliver 1998: 73). The mother knows that there is something that goes beyond herself (something Kristeva terms natural) but also that this alterity is not to be found in the Other of the symbolic but instead within herself. The mother sets up these obligations to the Other through love rather than through the law (Kristeva 1987). The mother’s love for her child is a love for herself (a necessary form of narcissism) and a love for the mother’s own mother (a resurfacing of primary identification with the Imaginary Father) (Kristeva 1987: 26). The new kind of love that the mother creates in her ethics therefore does not require a third term. It is essentially a self-love through identification with her own mother’s love. Kristeva therefore believes that the birth of a child constitutes access for the mother to the Other but that the mother ‘knows’ better than to think of the Other as autonomous. This is what the masculine symbolic needs to believe to maintain a gap between signifier and signified to produce signification. The mother knows that the phallus is a fake and that the ‘true other’, what is off limits, is within her. In an important subsequent theoretical development that is in dialogue with both Irigaray and Kristeva, Judith Butler has offered a powerful critique of how gender (as the ritualized, socially produced, and performed norms of masculinity and femininity) and sex (as the equally constrained embodied materialities of maleness and femaleness) both operate within psychoanalytic theory. Butler shows how power conditions and produces intelligible bodies that then come to be thought of as ‘before’ signification. In Bodies That Matter (1993), ‘ “sex” becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access’ (Butler 1993: 5). In response to Kristeva’s positing of a maternal semiotic before paternal law, she argues that the semiotic and Lacan’s imaginary are effects of the Symbolic rather than a psychosocial realm operating prior to it. For Butler, there is no imaginary maternal body or primary unsignified ‘matter’ outside of gender. She shows how sex emerges, in fact, as a phantasized surface rather than a material corporeality, as performative as gender rather than the primary inchoate ‘stuff ’ out of which gender performance takes shape. In asking what is the work that is done to ‘materialize the body’s sex, to materialize the sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative’ (Butler 1993: 2), she also reminds us that psychoanalytic theory remains wedded to a heterosexist model that forecloses, in a melancholic fashion, an unmourned same-sex desire at the level of both psychic and social life.

Thinking Difference Differently: Ettinger and Benjamin These strands of feminist theorizing that not only critique the Freudian/Lacanian account of sexual difference but also produce new psychoanalytic feminist genealogies of gender and sexuality without embracing an essentializing position on primary femininity are further supplemented 116

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by the painter and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger. Ettinger seeks to move beyond the paternal/ maternal binary that structures oedipal theory in order to overcome the signification of the feminine in negative terms. Her project seeks to think feminine difference in positive terms. To do so, Ettinger attends to the final stage of intrauterine life, which she draws on for the figure that she terms the matrixial, a neologism that associates the notion of the matrix with that of the maternal. She states that the matrix is modeled on dimensions of the prenatal state, which are culturally foreclosed, occluded, or repressed and which correspond to a feminine dimension of the symbolic order that deals with the asymmetrical, plural, and fragmented aspects of subjectivity (Ettinger 1992). By referring to intrauterine life, Ettinger draws out the potential of a model that has at least two subjective elements in play: phallic subjectivity split by the castration mechanism, rejecting its abject, and mourning its m/Other; and what she terms transsubjectivity, which is not pre-phallic or pre-oedipal but instead accompanies phallic subjectivity as a supplemental element of human existence (Ettinger 2006). What is particular to the late intrauterine period (roughly the last few months of pregnancy) and why it can function as a model for transsubjectivity, is the emerging relationship between a not-yet infant and a not-yet mother. Ettinger calls this the matrixial borderspace, where the emerging I of the infant in relation to what is not quite yet its non-I, the mother, ‘co-emerge and co-fade’ in a process she calls borderlinking. Intrauterine exchange between the not-yet infant and the not-yet mother is the space of encounters between two partial objects that lay down a primordial capacity for being together without merger and yet without catastrophic separation. This capacity is retained as transsubjectivity in adult life. The matrixial is therefore a principle of severality (at least two) that supplements the phallic processes of separation and is the basis for ethical encounter. This principle is what Ettinger will then call sexual difference, in that it is a form of difference that is inscribed in the feminine (it is specific to gestation within a maternal body), but it is not about establishing how we are different from the other. Instead it is difference that is established in a state of with-ness (another neologism referring to both witnessing and being with). Subjectivity that is established in a state of with-ness rather than castration is the feminine itself—the aspect of being with others that all birthed human subjects carry with them (both male and female), which is distinct from merger or symbiosis.This locates the matrixial as the condition for sexual difference that refuses binary logic. This refusal is echoed in further work that insists that difference cannot be premised on just two terms. Judith Butler, for instance, writes that difference disrupts the coherence of any postulation of identity, including the gender binary, rather than the gender binary constituting how difference can be understood (Butler 2004: 203). The question she raises is whether the framework of sexual difference can move beyond the binary toward a multiplicity of differences. For instance, what is female masculinity, or butch desire? Can there be sexual difference within homosexuality that is not fully described as masculine and feminine (Butler 2012)? Jessica Benjamin also raises the question of thinking difference differently and offers an overinclusive model of gender development to rework the narrowness of oedipal thinking in psychoanalytic theory (Benjamin 1995). Benjamin takes issue with the traditional dichotomizing notion of the father as the primary symbol of reality and maturity and the mother as offering a pull toward fantasy and narcissism. Her suggestion is twofold. First, for Benjamin, the father can, and frequently does, offer a loving identificatory figure to the young child, as well as the Oedipal ‘no’. Boys and girls both identify with this loving father, just as they do with the powerful and loving mother. Second, Oedipus need not entail repudiation of the other figure. Rather, children make multiple or polymorphous identifications with figures who offer them things of value, thus creating the opportunity for more varied, less oppositional identity positions. There is no reason why the limitations on desire that characterize the Oedipus situation should effectively 117

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end the developmental story. Rather, Benjamin (1998) claims that there could be a more mature, post-oedipal state of mind in which the various elements of identification are brought together in a creative and non-threatening tension. It is only through the achievement of this kind of integrative complementarity that the idealization-denigration split so characteristic of oedipal thinking can be overcome, hence making it possible for gender, and identities in general, to become more complex and open to the impact of others.

The Law, the Norm, and Other Taboos Finally, there is now considerable pressure on both feminism and psychoanalysis to acknowledge not just difference in its positive sense but other laws or prohibitions and their operation in psychic and social life. These might include the cultural prohibition on homosexuality, as Judith Butler has argued, that operates as an unacknowledged ‘law’ against desire of sameness that underpins the very formation of masculine and feminine subjects. Butler addresses how gender operates in Freud’s account of the development of the ego through the incorporation of lost and unmourned identifications. If, for Freud, femininity and masculinity are precariously achieved through an equally precarious heterosexuality, then this accomplishment is mandated on the abandonment of homosexual attachments that are incorporated as unmourned losses (Butler 1995: 168), a process that is mirrored in culture more generally. She points out that the oedipal conflict presumes that heterosexual desire has already been accomplished and that the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual has already been enforced: ‘Thus, heterosexuality is produced not only through the prohibition on incest, but prior to that, by enforcing the prohibition on homosexuality’ (Butler 1995: 168). Furthermore, for Butler, the prohibition against homosexuality works in tandem with another prohibition—the law that governs miscegenation—to ensure the reproduction of racialized versions of the human species (Butler 1993). Sexuality and sexual difference cannot be simply disarticulated from other modes of power that converge on the subject, and normative heterosexuality is constituted as much through the regulation of a racially ‘pure’ reproduction as it is by the exclusion of same-sex desire. As Jane Flax has argued, subjects are inducted into specific symbolic orders, not into universal ones. In the context of the United States today, for instance, the subject is produced not only through the father’s no and the phallic interjection of sexual difference but also through the Law’s demand for racial interpellation (Flax 2004: 915).To theorize entrance into the symbolic without specifying its raced and heterosexed demands, Flax argues, simply ‘repeats the repressions that permit the confounding of inevitability and power and generate the appearance of universality’ (Flax 2004: 911). Similar arguments can be made about the cultural prohibition against transgender that sutures the hetero of sexuality through the naturalized and ontologized binary categories of man and woman, rather than a more expansive notion of difference, as Susan Stryker has argued (Stryker 2008). Acknowledging these multiple forms of prohibition means understanding how sexual difference, racial difference, and differences of sexuality are formed and constituted through one another at psychic and social levels, a point revealed only when feminism and psychoanalysis become porous to insights generated by critical race scholars and those working in queer and trans studies and activism.

Conclusion One of the main stories that psychoanalysis tells itself is that in order to emerge as subjects and to function in the world as autonomous individuals who are capable of relating to others and accepting a degree of reality, we need to have tolerated a series of separations, and have accepted 118

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a series of losses, both actual and fantasmatic, which relate in some way to an originary loss of the maternal body. According to this line of thought, without psychically separating from the maternal body, there can be no sociality, language, reproduction, culture, and, perhaps most importantly, sexual difference. It is with the capacity to accept that we cannot be or have everything that we supposedly line up along psychically gendered lines, regardless of our anatomy. As we have seen, while one strand of feminist theorizing has challenged the way the feminine, as psychic structure, still consists of a double lack (e.g., de Beauvoir 1949; Mitchell 1974; Gallop 1982; Brennan 1992; Rose 1986), another strand has challenged the law of castration itself, questioning its universality and whether it is the only law at work in the production of psychosexual difference (Irigaray 1985a; Kristeva 1987; Butler 1990; Jacobs 2007; Spillers 1996; Stryker 2017). Psychoanalytic feminism has called for an account of the emergence of subjectivity ‘otherwise’ than a fundamental separation from the maternal body instigated by the paternal law, without denying that separation may be an integral part of psychic maturation. If we operate within only a phallic order, we are constantly in danger of mistaking ‘what is’ for the production of ‘what is’ by a phallic law that instigates itself as law through its own enunciation, as Butler has argued (Butler 1993). As we’ve seen, phallic law (the law of castration, the law that insists on separation from the maternal body) creates itself as law through a social process of iteration and by creating the originary ‘material’ maternal body that the male subject must separate from (Butler 1993). Thinking ‘otherwise’ to this law does not do away with the law, the phallus, separation, castration, or the speaking subject; it does not return us to the ‘lawlessness’ of the maternal body but instead allows alternative paradigms or ways of thinking to emerge in coexistence with this law. This leads to a mutual enriching of psychoanalytic theory and feminism and to an augmented psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference that feminism has both criticized and relied on.

Notes 1. See The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Rottenberg 2018) and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Banet-Weiser 2018) for analyses of the relation between feminism and neoliberalism. 2. A number of publications appeared from the mid 1970s through to the 2000s that debated the relation between psychoanalysis and feminism. See Juliet Mitchell’s seminal work Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1974), Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell’s edited volume Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (1982), Nancy Chodorow’s Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Teresa Brennan’s edited volume Between Feminism & Psychoanalysis (1989), Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen’s edited volume Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997), Dana Birksted-Breen’s The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity (1993), Shelley Saguaro’s Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader (2000), and Leticia Glocer Fiorini and Graciela Abelin-Sas Rose’s edited volume On Freud’s “Femininity” (2010). 3. See Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach’s classic work Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach (1982) as an example of this approach. 4. See the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Heidi Mirza, and Layli Phillips Maparyan as examples of this tradition of black feminist thought. 5. This tradition, broadly understood, would take in the work of early psychoanalysts such as Karen Horney, those associated with the British School such as Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Hanna Segal, Michael Feldman, Ronald Britton, John Steiner, Betty Joseph; contemporary psychoanalysis such as Rosine Perelberg, and Joan Raphael-Leff; and relational psychoanalysis in the US context such as Jessica Benjamin,Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, Adrienne Harris, Katheline Pogue White, Dorothy Holmes, Beverly Stoute, and many others. 6. This is a move that Jean Laplanche was to contest and reverse in much of his work. 7. Ernest Jones, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and Helene Deutsch were all involved in the early debates about castration. Later, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Johan van Ophuijsen, Karl

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References Abel, E., Christian, B. and Moglen, H., (eds.) (1997) Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Berkeley: University of California Press. Abraham, K. (1922) ‘Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex’, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 3, 1–29. Bambara, T.C. (ed.) (1970) The Black Woman: An Anthology, New York: Washington Square Press. Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Benjamin, J. (1995) ‘Sameness and Difference:Toward an “Overinclusive” Model of Gender Development’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 15(1), 125–142. Benjamin, J. (1998) Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Brennan, T. (ed.) (1989) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Brennan, T. (1992) The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity, New York, Routledge. Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1895) ‘Studies on Hysteria, (1893–1895)’, in vol. 2, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols., Strachey, J. et al. (trans.), Strachey, J. (ed.), London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis (1974). Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge, 1–23. Butler, J. (1995) ‘Melancholy Gender- Refused Identification’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5(2), 165–180. Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2012) ‘Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism’, Differences, 23(2), 1–19. Chodorow, N.J. (1989) Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Bristol: Polity Press. Collins, P.H. (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, London and New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, K.W. (2015) On Intersectionality:The Essential Writings of Kimberle Crenshaw, New York: The New Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex, Parshley, H.M. (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Devereux, C. (2014) ‘Hysteria, Feminism and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave’, English Studies in Canada, 40(1), 19–45. Eichenbaum, L. and Orbach, S. (1982) Outside in . . . and Inside Out: Women’s Psychology: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Ettinger, B. (1992) ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences, 4(3), 176–208. Ettinger, B. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fink, B. (1991) ‘ “There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”: Existence and the Formulas of Sexuation’, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 5, 59–85. Flax, J. (2004) ‘What is the Subject? Review Essay on Psychoanalysis and Feminism in Postcolonial Time’, Signs, 29(3), 905–923. Freud, S. (1900) ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in Standard Edition, vol. 4 & 5. Freud, S. (1905a) ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in Standard Edition, vol. 7. Freud, S. (1905b) ‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, in Standard Edition, vol. 7. Freud, S. (1923) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in Standard Edition, vol. 17. Freud, S. (1931) ‘Female Sexuality’, in Standard Edition, vol. 21. Freud, S. (1933) ‘Femininity’, in Standard Edition, vol. 22. Gallop, J. (1982) The Daughter’s Seduction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gallup, J. (1992) Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Glocer Fiorini, L. and Abelin-Sas Rose, G. (eds.) (2010) On Freud’s ‘Femininity’, London: Karnac Books.

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Psychoanalytic Feminism Grigg, R., Heqc, D. and Smith, C. (eds.) (1999) Female Sexuality:The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies, London: Rebus Press. hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Boston, MA: South End Press. Horney, K. (1924) ‘On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women’, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 5, 50–56. Horney, K. (1926) ‘Flight from Womanhood’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7, 324–339. Irigaray, L. (1985a) Speculum of the Other Woman, Gill, C.G. (trans.), New York: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985b) ‘Cosi fan tutti’, in This Sex Which Is Not One, Porter, C. and Burke, C. (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jacobs, A. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother, New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, E. (1927) ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 8, 459–472. Jones, E. (1933) ‘The Phallic Phase’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 14, 1–33. Klein, M. (1924) ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 167–180. Klein, M. (1928) ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 167–180. Kristeva, J. (1975) Desire in Language, Gora, T., Jardine, A. and Roudiez, L.S. (trans.) reprinted in Oliver, K. (ed.) The Portable Kristeva, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Kristeva, J. (1977) ‘Stabat Mater’, in Moi, T. (ed.) The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Roudiez, Leon S. (ed.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Kristeva, J. (1981) ‘Women’s Time’, Signs, 7(1), 13–35. Kristeva, J. (1987) ‘Freud and Love:Treatment and its Discontents’, in Tales of Love, Roudiez, L. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1956) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, Grigg, R. (trans.), London: Routledge, 1993. Lacan, J. (1958) ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’, in Mitchell, J. and Rose, J. (eds.) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1982. Lacan, J. (1966) ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’, Sheridan, Alan (trans.), in Jacques Lacan, Écrits—A Selection, London: Tavistock, 1977, 146–176. Lacan, J. (1972–73) The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Fink, B. (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998. Lorde, A., (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley: The Crossing Press. Mirza, H.S. (1997) Black British Feminism: A Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women, New York:Vintage. Mitchell, J. (1982) ‘Introduction I’, in Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline (eds.) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole Freudienne, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Mitchell, J. (2004) Siblings: Sex and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press. Oliver, K. (1993) ‘Introduction: Julia Kristeva’s Outlaw Ethics’, in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, New York: Routledge. Oliver, K. (1998) Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London and New York,Verso. Rottenberg, C. (2018) The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Saguaro, S. (2000) Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spillers, H.J. (1996) ‘ “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Race’, Critical Inquiry, 22, 710–734. Stryker, S. (2008) Transgender History, Berkeley: Seal Press. Stryker, S. (2017) ‘Transgender and Psychoanalysis’, in Giffney, N. and Watson, E. (eds.) Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, New York: Punctum Books, 419–426.

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9 CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES Alessia Contu

This chapter addresses some of the connections between psychoanalysis and critical studies of management and organization, especially those that come under the umbrella of critical management studies (CMS). CMS might be unfamiliar to readers of this handbook. For such readers, the fact that management studies might be ‘critical’ as in critical of management and of contemporary forms and processes of working and organizing, might be surprising.Yet CMS is an academic phenomenon originating from within the business schools, which mobilizes critical theories to study and counter the pernicious effects that contemporary forms of management and business have on our societies. Business schools are an US phenomenon spearheaded and supported by a solid network of wealthy foundations with their powerful ‘liberal’ Western ideas and values (e.g., Srinivas 2012), designed to legitimize management as a profession.Yet no one is sure of what business schools teach exactly, since it is disputable that they teach how to become a manager in the same way as a medical school teaches how to become a doctor. As Khurana (2010) suggests, things have not gone to plan, especially with the rise and hegemonization of economics in management studies, which has sealed symbolically the power of management to specific subjects—that is, shareholders, CEOs, and senior executives. But things might have actually gone exactly to plan since the Business School has become a capitalist institution with a global reach; and business education, especially the MBA, is a valuable market commodity. After all, opportunism, greed, and self-interest are the values, and they describe the conduct of the homo economicus, one of the main fictions that business schools have not only helped to reproduce uncritically but also legitimated with mathematical aplomb and glorified with the promise of a prosperous society for all. Business school academics, together with consultants and think tanks, produce knowledge, teaching, and practices that have cemented the neoliberal ideology built around opportunism, profit maximization, shareholder value, and calculations on efficiency gains (Contu 2018b). With Gramsci, the suggestion is that business school academics are organic to the status quo, doing the bidding of big business shoehorning the formulae, models, and subjectivities for values, processes, and procedures that deliver and maintain the current neoliberal hegemony (ibid.). Nevertheless, some management scholars study the work organization (henceforth organization) as a sociopolitical as well as an economic phenomenon. 122

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The definition and the intent of CMS available on the website of the CMS Division of the North American (my adjective) Academy of Management, the largest (more than 18,000 members) management association, follow: Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation. Driven by a shared desire to change this situation, we aim in our research, teaching, and practice to develop critical interpretations of management and society and to generate radical alternatives. (http://aom.org/Content.aspx?id=237#cms, emphasis added) There are also other CMS organizations, platforms, and events: the International Critical Management Conference, a number of summer schools and consortia, and Vida, one that counters discrimination, sexism, and racism by putting into practice intersectional feminism and critical theory. CMS is political in as far as it problematizes its object of study, the organization. Organizations are not proposed, like in its hegemonic articulation delineated earlier, as a ‘neutral’ terrain where rationally established norms, values, and contracts for (economic) efficiency find their natural expression. Rather, the organization is questioned as too often such rational neutrality is found to be the instrument through which a specific suture of the social order is reproduced that engenders historically situated structures of exploitation and oppression. CMS is also political in that it aims to generate radical alternatives to the problematic structural features named in its mission statement: profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and the ecological irresponsibility that organizations too often reproduce. The symbolic matrix of this naming articulates what historically is situated into radical progressive politics of workers’, feminist, ecological, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist/-colonial struggles. The emancipatory intent of CMS has been declared since its organized inception (e.g., Alvesson and Willmott 1992). But this is not entirely trouble-free (Faria 2014).Yet linking this shared desire to the politics of this critical knowledge to develop critical interpretation and to generate radical alternatives is significant since the function of desire has an important role to play in politics, political actions, and political subjectivities. Psychoanalysis directly concerns itself with desire, and given its history in shaping modernity, it is already present in the discourse of this ‘shared’ desire (Parker 2010). This is not unproblematic, since CMS has been written up as a specific academic discipline, which focuses on researching power dynamics, inequality, resistance, and alternatives to the neoliberal order. This work offers sophisticated critical interpretations but not so much in terms of generating radical alternatives. Has psychoanalysis helped with the critical political aim of generating radical alternatives and, if so, with what political and ethical consequences? To address these questions in the next pages, I discuss contributions that have mobilized psychoanalysis and are critical of the traditional managerial and economist neoliberal status quo. I consider what has been used of psychoanalysis and as psychoanalysis and the multiple contributions and approaches. I examine the politics, ethical responsibilities, and subjectivities of some of these arenas that mobilize psychoanalysis to interpret and radically change organizations.

Critical Management Studies With Psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis and CMS are not natural bedfellows, since the critical edge of psychoanalysis is highly debatable. CMS, like psychoanalysis, is not one thing.There are different understandings of 123

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what it means to develop critical studies of management and organization. Many are doubtful of psychoanalysis as a source of critical knowledge.The core labor process theorists find psychoanalyticoriented concepts too individualistic and micro (e.g., Johnston 2000); the Foucauldians find it too embroiled in technologies of biopower (e.g., Knights 1990); feminists scholars have highlighted that psychoanalysis is too often imbued in phallocentric assumptions that perpetuate patriarchal and heteronormative relations (e.g., Kenny 2009); and other scholars have highlighted that psychoanalysis is too complicit in colonialism and racism (e.g., Frosh 2013). In many ways, it is unsurprising that even a text that elucidates CMS’s contribution to management scholarship in the past 30 years, like Alvesson et al. (2008), does not dedicate a chapter to psychoanalysis. This is in spite of, as Jana Costas noted, the many references found in that CMS-edited collection to psychoanalytic concepts, which have not been ‘unimportant to the study of leadership, resistance, power, emotions and so forth’ (Costas 2010: 791). There is no smooth incorporation of psychoanalysis within CMS but instead diverse suggestions and positions. Since the concern here is politics, two positions are discussed in this chapter to investigate how critical work inspired by psychoanalysis relates to the production of critical interpretations and building radical alternatives. The first is mobilized by a notion of the unconscious as an interior, underlying psychic domain characterized by content and processes that impinge on individual conscious rationality and emotions that can have organizational and individual effects of anxiety and pain. The knowledge of psychoanalysis linked to the apparatus of the ‘psychoanalyzing organizations’ approach (Gabriel and Carr 2002) is used for clinical organizational interventions. These have an emancipatory goal: to reduce suffering and enhance autonomy and freedom. The second is a position that addresses an irreducible power and antagonism based on a constitutive impossibility at the heart of social—and organizational—reality.The unconscious is one of the names that has made it possible to address such impossibility, and its constant reminders. The unconscious is not a depth, an obscure repository, or a domain of instincts that disturb our rationality and our organizational productivity, calling for its effects to be domesticated and normalized. The unconscious impinges on self-reflexive identity, of a subject fully present to itself. But it also encroaches on the place that guarantees it—that is, the Other, the socio-symbolic network that is posited as the intelligible, consistent social order where one is positioned (e.g., society, the economy, organization, civilization). What will be discussed here are some of the consequences that this unconscious mobilizes for rethinking ideologiekritik: to develop ‘critical interpretations of management and society’ and ‘to generate radical alternatives’ as in the remit of CMS. In the conclusion, I also consider how the political and ethical effects of this view of the unconscious deepen the possibility of generating radical alternatives. These effects, I argue, are also the conditions of possibility for recomposing a type of political work for CMS as an organization that insists on and produces an intellectual activist praxis that is militant in co-constituting and re-signifying existing struggles.

Organizations ‘on the Couch’ Historical Traces The psychoanalyzing organization approach has a long history (Gabriel 1999; Gabriel and Carr 2002) that importantly traces back to the early 1940s at one of the earliest encounters between studies of organization and management and psychoanalysis. This encounter can be found in the constitution of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) and its fruitful relations 124

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with the British army, government, businesses, and trade unions and their US business and academic cousins (see Trist and Murray 1990 for an official historiography). The history of the Tavistock is captivating. Jacques Lacan, as Nobus (2016) indicated, became fascinated and inspired by Bion and colleagues’ work at the Tavistock Clinic on group dynamics, flat hierarchies and leaderless groups. He was not the only one. Organizational and management scholars have also been inspired by the Tavistock Clinic and have continued this work in the field of organizational design and management. Often forgotten is also an important coincidence: the apparatus that sustained the Tavistock was the same that supported the development of the business schools. The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the philanthropic organizations that supported business schools, also provided untied funds to TIHR’s work. The Marshal Plan also funded its research. Such historical rebooting stresses how the TIHR was instrumental in the invention of organizational development (OD), the ‘umbrella term for a specific set of social-psychological/psychoanalytic praxes’ (Burnes and Cooke 2013: 771) that has influenced the human relations school in organization and management theory and with it organizational consulting for almost a century. Key notions that have literally made management and organizations include the informal side of organizations and resistance to change; the notion that unconscious needs and desires affect organizational performance and that unconscious processes and dynamics are important for creativity but can also increase human suffering; the significance of autonomous work groups; and their unconscious group dynamics, relevant to develop motivation and commitment. These signifiers variously articulated movements as diverse as OD consulting interventions, the quality of work life movement, the corporate culture movement, and the many post-bureaucratic designs that have partially characterized the world of work from the late 1970s onward and that many have questioned in CMS. In the 1980s, authors involved in psychoanalytically inspired management and organization studies constituted a new organization, the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Studies of Organizations (ISPO). This field remains diverse. But whatever their differences between these psychoanalytic informed scholars and practitioners, they have all striven over the last 60 years to link psychic phenomena, organizational dynamics and actions contexts in a way that avoids what they consider to be the conceptual and phenomenological reduction inherent to neo-behaviorist approaches. (Arnaud 2012: 1122)

Politics and Ethics Admittedly, this work is often dismissed as apolitical (Fotaki et al. 2012). Yet it has a relevant critical political component since it denaturalizes the taken-for-granted notions of organization as a realm governed solely (or ultimately) by means-ends rationality (Kets de Vries 1991). Such critical political significance has been emphasized by James Krants, a founding member and president of ISPO between 2007 and 2009. In the foreword to the ISPO 2009 collection, for example, he reminds us that ‘our current economic crisis underscores the urgency of understanding irrationalities in social and organizational life’ (Krants, qtd. in Sievers, 2009: xiii). Freudian psychoanalysis, he adds, is exactly the knowledge that allows scholars to dismantle ‘the myths of the rational manager, rational consumer and rational markets’ and their ‘devastating effects’ (Krants, qtd. in Sievers 2009: xiii–xiv). Many such psychoanalytically oriented scholars have shaped CMS by contributing streams, symposia, and professional development workshops at the CMS Division of the AOM, and at international CMS conferences. 125

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A key aspect of some of this work is to go beyond hermeneutic and explanatory value to offer actual alternatives to the traditional neo-behaviorist, rationalist, and economist approaches to management and organizing (Kets de Vries 2003: 7).This approach is not just academic—that is, confined to research for producing new knowledge in articles, books, conferences, and related teaching. It is also clinical—that is, it puts organizations (and the individuals and groups in it) ‘on the couch’ to treat unhealthy organizational behavior and maladjustments. With an analogy between the individual cure and the organizational cure, the ‘organizational’ couch is akin to a therapeutic intervention in which the cure emerges as the containment and elimination of dysfunctions in decision-making, leader-follower relations and group relations that often generate human suffering in organizations. One cannot be insensitive to the good established here. The humanist bent toward human dignity, flourishing, and respect for autonomy and agency is, for anyone who is involved in the practice of management and/or works with others, an invigorating balm against the traditional bureaucratic, top-down, rationalist management approach and the authoritarian, narcissistic tendencies often found in contemporary organizations. Facilitating good working relations, where people can work efficiently and effectively together is important. Depending on the situation, it can make the difference between life and death or, more mundanely, between a miserable working life and an agreeable working life. These interventions encourage caring for the here and now of the work at hand and for one another—a way of working that supports reflexivity and empowerment with attention to autonomy and self-determination. It also encourages less hierarchical organizational decisions and solutions. This work, which originated in the Tavistock Institute, and which was also embedded and embodied in its working practices and structures, favors more democratic models than the traditional top-down organizational approaches. This is because it seeks to develop participation in many aspects of work processes, design, and decisionmaking. Its methods and concepts can and are used in ways that have politically emancipatory effects. Pursuing goodness and having good intentions, of course, does not guarantee a cure for suffering and an evil-free, malady-free organization. It is also because of Freud that we know why this is the case. The question then becomes, can one forget this key insight? After all, this psychoanalytically inspired work is not a technique to interpret organizations qua texts; instead, it focuses ‘on how such texts in organizations might be ameliorated’ (Carr in Gabriel 1999: 256). Misappropriating Lacan’s crude comment on the discourse of the master, the issue might be how such relations, and the social bonds they establish, could be ‘un peu moins con’ (Lacan 1972: 35). But psychoanalysis is also about never forgetting that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. When this happens and a constant problematization is amiss, the politics of amelioration ends up encrusting an ethics of adaptation (Parker 2010). Organizationally, this is identified as an ethics of maintenance (Contu 2014), where goodness is decided from the outset and pursued in ways that are all but ‘psychoanalytically’ ethical. This occurs in as far as this apparatus forgets the persistence and insistence of desire, offering little options to interrogate and thematize how the disrupting unconscious at work has implications not only for epistemology (i.e., psychoanalysis offers us better explanations) but also for ontology and the ethico-political. While important and well meaning, often these interventions are agnostic on what in this arena is called the ‘environment’ of the organization that is ‘on the couch’. Organizational and individual suffering are due to unconscious motifs that specific organizational, personal, and interpersonal dynamics exacerbate, but rarely are they addressed as ‘instruments’ of specific socioeconomic oppression and exploitation, making up what passes for ‘civilization’. 126

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Lest we forget, to ameliorate human relations at work by eliminating/containing disturbances helps the organizational machine to do what it does—that is, offer a service/product and make money. In such concrete articulation, psychoanalysis is the expert knowledge (as in the bonds of the university discourse identified by Jacques Lacan) that acts on specific others (the organization, the workers, and their conscious and unconscious dynamics), to make sure that they keep on functioning effectively and productively.The question of desire is barred from those working subjects who are ‘on the couch’, since the opportunities of what is possible and impossible in those relations are established/contained by what is deemed an amelioration—that is, what is functional to the continuation of work cleansed from maladjustments of unhealthy organizational behavior. Arguably, the subject of desire, with its disruptive force (and its ‘symptoms’) keeps on fueling the expert knowledge, which continues to maintain its position in offering its explanations and organizational solutions. Such functional structural arrangement to improve the ‘what is’ is evident in the Tavistock’s official historiography, where psychoanalysis is ‘the most advanced psychological knowledge’ that allows for a ‘social engagement for social science’ (Trist and Murray 1990). To do what? ‘To continue in peace the work begun under war condition’, which was that of supporting the British way of life, since ‘by 1948 the British economy was in serious trouble. The pound had been devalued, productivity was low and there was a scarcity of capital for investment in new technology’ (ibid.). The amelioration, functional to the social order—that is, the British nation dealing with its declining empire—was there from the outset, as this knowledge was supposed to ‘secure improved productivity through better use of human resources’ (ibid.). This was (also) accomplished by producing research (and methods and interventions) funded by the British government with ‘the aim of identifying means of improving cooperation between management and labor and also between levels of management’ and ‘organizational innovations that could raise productivity’ and pioneer ‘a new form of post-graduate education for field workers in applied social research’ (ibid.). Pacifying the relations of production, cleansing conflict, and making sure that the labor process is productive (of surplus) were the asserted fundamentals of this knowledge. As Long (in De Vries 1991: 28–35) reminded us a while back with reference to such original interventions of the Tavistock, with more or less didactic and directed ways, this is what psychoanalytically oriented work that puts organizations ‘on the couch’ still does. What is too often forgotten is exactly what this work is and does: what it produces and reproduces and why. These issues are central to both Marxism and psychoanalysis, since they both make possible to think an ineludible contradiction, a distortion that returns in the form of a symptom. But this psychoanalysis is mobilized as a therapy that aims to contain, if not to cure, the symptom so that work can continue and be expended in the right direction—increasing productivity to serve a social order where conflict is present but domesticated (Contu 2018b). In this apparatus, the analyst/consultant, by virtue of the knowledge he or she possesses, is central to the process of elucidation, deliberation, and decisions regarding the amelioration of those who are in the position of the other: the organizations, the workers. They are the object of this knowledge. For all the emancipatory intent and attention to workers’ participation, the exchange relations at stake still tend to imply/reproduce the ‘text’ of hierarchical and subordinate relations. In other words, who is the subject of the demand to be on the couch? Are the conditions of the clinical psychoanalytic setting ever possible in contemporary capitalist organizations? Crucially, one needs to return to the following key question: what options are there for those ‘on the couch’ to re-signify individually and collectively their own positions in unexpected 127

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ways? Given the ethics of adaptation and a politics directed to cleansing away conflict in the labor process, making it more productive, such openings, if possible, are at best tricky. Organizational analysts, especially those informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, have been explicit: desire as singular and subjective might in its content go against the desiderata of those who are in charge (Arnaud and Vanheule 2013: 1669). These authors hint to the fact that another way is possible, one that does not reproduce the social bond highlighted thus far. How does one move beyond a warning? What changes are needed to move beyond the managerialist paternalism per interposta persona that is reproduced in this bond? Importantly, the authoritarian and dogmatic truth of this technocratic bond is foreclosed since what acts is proposed as a democratic, liberating knowledge that produces workers’ subjectivity as characterized by individual autonomy, and need for empowerment in and ownership of, their labor process.

The Unconscious at Work Not All Putting organizations ‘on the couch’ is not the only option, since other versions of psychoanalysis have inspired a critical engagement with organizations questioning the ethics of adaptation that ‘serves the technocracy with the liberal enterprise at its core’ (Lacan 2007: 730). By all means, Lacan was not unique in the insistence on psychoanalysis as a critical practice. Psychoanalysis has a hermeneutical valence, evident in the so-called psychoanalytical or socio-analytical perspective, to provide better understandings of organizations and organizational phenomena (Gabriel 2016). Its value is ‘to disclose the buried root of meanings’ and/or ‘[extend] and [adapt] psychoanalytic concepts developed in the study of individual persons to groups and larger systems’ and also ‘to gain a more complicated and complete insight into what happens in organizations’ (Sievers et al. 2006: 172–173). This is sometimes associated with a critique of capitalism and the affective relations it relies on. For example, Sievers (2012) draws on Klein’s writings on the infant’s greed, Winnicott’s manic defenses, and the notion that Sievers himself developed of the psychotic organization, to address the destructive impact of capitalist greed.

The Ontological and Political Consequences of the Unconscious Other critical work is not positioned by a knowledge of the unconscious that directly acts as a positive apparatus of concepts/tools to be applied to the organizational and/or social dimension but rather builds on the consequences this has. This is because, as Zupančič (2016) puts it, the interesting lesson of psychoanalysis is ontological and performative: the unconscious as failed, limited, as the excess in our systematic meaningful constructions. The unconscious, then, is the origin of power as a social phenomenon that allows us to reinvigorate a sociohistorical critique, ideologiekritik, which focuses on how power in all its complex ways also reproduces relations of inequality, exploitation, and oppression. The valence of the unconscious, then, is not only epistemological—that is, it gives us a better picture of organizational complexity by ‘expanding our bandwidth of consciousness’ (Sievers et al. 2006: 172–173). It also has ontological consequences associated with ethico-political implications made especially obvious in the work of Jacques Lacan. Although not politically militant and radical (Roudinesco 2014), Jacques Lacan was extremely critical of the ethics of adaptation at the service of market ideology and all the objectification implied in the notion of human relations to which psychoanalysis has often been reduced (Lacan 128

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2007: 204). He was also weary of the subject supposed to know inscribed in the university discourse. Lacan’s work theoretically, organizationally, and clinically always upheld psychoanalysis as a critical practice, namely one that is not at the service of the market or any other master or body of knowledge, since it insists on a responsibility that is not at the service of goods. These insights have been variously articulated by political theorists and philosophers such as, for example, Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Frederik Jameson, and, especially significant for business schools scholars, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, Ian Parker, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Jason Glynos. This work, sometimes identified with a ‘Lacanian Left’ (Stavrakakis 2007) or a ‘social theory of hegemony’ (Butler et al. 2000), considers post-oedipal psychoanalysis and its consequences for social and political life. The following are some of its key elements: an insistence on a nonpsychological unconscious characterized by extimité, thus being radically Other and yet fully intimate; an ineluctable Real as limit of signification—a lack (and excess) that always returns; a subject that is alienated and separated in language; a reality that is based on the materiality of the signifier and its differential chain, and that acquires a consistency through fantasy, with a component of distortion, prohibition, and misrecognition; and an enjoyment that is always caught and organized in it. These psychoanalytic insights when looked at from a sociopolitical and philosophical angle register a negative ontology; an ineluctable antagonism and primacy of the political; an imbrication between universal and particular, contingency and necessity, affect and signification; and the concomitant discursive, hegemonic, and ideological character of the ‘what is’ and our positions in it—our way of life.

The Fiction of Critical Management Studies on Control and Resistance at Work This (mostly) Lacanian-inspired critical work has disturbed the narratives positioning some of the ‘truths’ of management and organization studies, including ‘critical’ ones about ideology, social construction, subjectivity, and power relations. It refocuses (not sure how successfully) CMS scholars on Marxist and leftist influences, especially on the questions of the politics of (re) production (and, crucially, more broadly), and the workings of ideology in engendering social reproduction and social change as actualized in and through work and organizational relations (and beyond). This work does not settle for the mostly Anglophone middle-range theorizing of the postBraverman ‘core’ labor process theory (LPT) that indeed shared an attention toward political economy where production is understood as a contested terrain—a key domain for social reproduction and change.The narrative goes as follows.While severing relations with Marxist politics and political theorizing, LPT continued to concentrate on finding (and studying) resistance and misbehavior at work, as if this has a value that is political in and of itself. However, it hardly mobilizes this knowledge toward its claimed radical intent, which is as Thompson (1990: 122) put it early on, ‘a socialist politics of production that is workers-directed’. LPT focuses on the control imperative: how it is achieved by managers and contested by workers. LPT, as Thompson put it, does not fully address the subjective factors of production, what was named the ‘missing subject’ in the debate that ensued from the late 1980s onward in Anglophone, business school– based critical studies of management and organization. LPT does not account for ‘the black hole between capitalist/patriarchal structure and individual action’ (Thompson 1990: 114)—that is, the connections between the minutiae of work and the bigger picture, since empirical, ethnographic studies operate with a working subject that is coerced and/or duped by a powerfully efficient and effective managerial ideology, which 129

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is cynically resistant to it, or busy in games that end up forwarding capitalist heteropatriarchal oppressions. As the story, again in Anglophone critical management academia, goes (see Jones 2008), the so called post-structuralists elaborated this ‘missing subject’ to explain how obedience, compliance, and buy-in to diverse managerial and other practices operate in delivering more and more sophisticated forms of control, going beyond the unsatisfactory notions (i.e., coercion, alienated false consciousness, or cynical resistance) that had thus far been used to explain it. These post-structuralist theorizations take to heart the linguistic turn and mash up the string of the ‘decentered subject’ with Foucauldian, Goffmanesque, and social constructionist themes that abandon the notion of ideology and ideologiekritik to directly analyze how power relations work through discursive constructions of reality where the ‘subject’ is established by social discursive technologies—for example, corporate culture, teamwork, and other complex discursive opportunities, such as certain forms of masculinity—thereby crafting specific (working) selves. The ‘subject’ is vanquished, read as a structural location, which opens to charges of a new determinism—a textual one (Jones 2008). This is because discourses are given as all encompassing.They fully suture the subject as ‘subject position’. Other post-structuralists instead posed the subject as an unspecified substratum plagued by an existential insecurity and anxiety that propels it to identifications in discourses. In most of this post-structuralist production, the ideological, ideology, and the political always return, but one is unsure of what these actually mean, and how they are integrated in the apparatus of discursive constructions, identifications, and microphysics of power. Overall, these contributions struggle to account for how multiple discourses and identifications are organized in specific ways, and why certain identifications (as many studies show) are more successful than others. Importantly it remains unclear how despite the opportunities offered by discursive pluralism and openness, on the whole such discourses and identifications tend to be functional to the organizational system. These contributions also struggle to account for why these identifications ‘stick’, even in the face of deep contradictions, ambiguities and suffering. At its best, this corpus shows in practice, in the experiences of concrete working practices and their domains, the complex, deadly embrace of resistance and consent in which work gets done in contemporary organizations, both in the public sectors and in the private sector. The psychoanalytically inspired (mostly Lacanian-inspired) critical studies of organizations addressed some of these unresolved theoretical issues.The starting point of these line of research is, for reasons identified earlier, one of negative ontology and radical negativity. The study of organizations is therefore always already situated (like our knowledge of it) in the ideological domain in which the hegemonic battle for social reproduction or change of contemporary sedimented and intersecting power relations (capitalist, patriarchal, anti-black, etc.) is played up. The questions are how such reproduction (or change) is achieved, and with what political and ethical consequences and opportunities. By rearticulating the working of ideology and insisting on a nonpsychological/existential notion of the subject, as subject of the unconscious, these studies address the effects of the Real as limit of signification. They show how master signifiers, for example, entrepreneurship (Jones and Spicer 2005), leadership (Costas and Taheri 2012), performance (Hoedemaekers and Keegan 2010), and learning (Driver 2010) are punctuated by nodal points in specific ways that characterize the terrain of the organizational Other (including its legitimate knowledge) and suture liberal workplaces and their ways of working and organizing. Such nodal points, while stabilizing discursive arrangements, are also shown to be not-all.They are also lacking, dislocated and conflicted, since they are always infected by leftovers that never sum up to but rather disturb the semblance of wholeness: its clarity, promise, and intelligibility. This brings to the fore the 130

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illusory fixity of any subjective and objective closure; since, as these studies suggest, not only the subject is decentered and lacking but also the Other is (e.g. Driver 2009b; Jones and Spicer 2005), which is why one can actually speak of identification and its force. This line of research has also detailed the effects of the Real on the key theme of subjectivity at work. Studies show how subjects are structurally caught in imaginary and symbolic misrecognition in identifications, which by producing alienation engender a separation and with it obedience and consent at work, thereby favoring socioeconomic reproduction (Roberts 2005; Stavrakakis 2008). But also, as some have indicated (e.g., Driver 2009a, 2009b; Hoedemaekers 2010), there are spaces for potential re-signification. Such studies also thematize the significance of disidentification and interpassivity. Liberal capitalist ideology operates beyond the traditional space of ‘duping’ narrative of false consciousness, of ‘they know not what they do’. Instead, it creates rather an enlightened cynical one: ‘they know but nevertheless still do it’ (e.g., Fleming and Spicer 2003). Cynical distancing and other ‘breathing spaces’ offer the illusion of a break from the official ideology (e.g., of Human Resource Management, of innovation and continuous optimization, of bureaucratic rational order). They thereby maintain its efficiency and efficacy, providing support and continuity to the very organizational and social order that they transgress (e.g., Contu 2008; Fay 2008; Vidaillet and Gamot 2015). This work also addresses the political significance of fantasy, the economy of enjoyment that it delivers with specific transgressions, the desire it stages to account for the enduring compliance in liberal workplaces, and the embrace between resistance and control (Bicknell and Liefooghe 2010; Bloom and Cederstrom 2008; Contu 2008; Contu and Willmott 2006; Glynos 2010). This psychoanalytically inspired ideologiekritik has therefore focused on explaining the minutiae of how labor becomes labor power expended in productive ways that directly (as in studies of for-profit businesses) and indirectly (think of studies of higher education in the UK) forward and reproduce neoliberal capitalist accumulation with subjectivities that fatally feed off capitalist drive for new products, new ideas, and new markets.This type of scholarship, while theoretically and methodologically fully compatible, has yet to address intersectionality and the interlocking ways that systems of oppression operate (Collins and Bilge 2016), namely the complex political intersections of how power relations suture capitalist with racial, colonial, patriarchal, or heteronormative relations at work. Admittedly, some of these studies have shown the gendered character of working narratives and how notions of masculinity, such as the one furnished in the hero fantasy, organize specific transgressions that are caught in the social reproduction of capitalist bureaucratic organization (e.g., Contu and Willmott 2006). But overall, intersectional feminist politics has not been much of a concern. Kate Kenny and Sheena Vachhani, mobilizing Butler’s and Irigary’s critiques, denounced the phallocentrism staining psychoanalysis (including Lacan’s) that reduces freedom and opportunities by fixing gender roles with stereotypes and set expectations. This work has mobilized a reinterpretation of psychoanalytic concepts such as the feminine imaginary or the Lacanian discourse of the hysteric to inscribe radical alternatives of organizing (e.g.,Vachhani 2012; Fotaki and Harding 2012). The critical Lacanian-inspired ideologiekritik has also hardly engaged with the colonial, racist, and imperialist discourses and their associated enjoyment, in which contemporary management and organizational practices and knowledge perpetuate discrimination, inferiorization, and exploitation. Psychoanalysis has been questioned because some of its concepts draw on and advance colonialist ideology (Frosh 2013). And yet the value of psychoanalysis to rethinking colonial reproduction and oppression has been made clear early on by Franz Fanon, who is hardly ever cited. Some organizational scholars have started exploring these potentials, mobilizing concepts such as othering, Kleinian splitting, and envy (e.g., Prasad 2014). For example, Ulus (2015) has examined the persistency of white privilege as a valuable commodity that opens 131

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doors for business and the reproduction of colonial practices of work. Lately, Ulus (2018) has also enlisted the notion of white fantasy to denounce neoliberal feminism. But the Lacanianinspired ideologiekritik has yet to deliver.

Conclusion This chapter has examined some of the connections between CMS, psychoanalysis, and political work. It has focused on how psychoanalysis has been mobilized to offer critical interpretations that question organizations and the role of organizing and managing in reproducing exploitative work relations. It has also raised the issue, as in the mission statement of CMS, of whether this work has helped in generating radical alternatives to the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility. A long-standing tradition of psychoanalytic studies has been highly engaged in improving organizations by putting them ‘on the couch’, delivering a form of an organizational clinic. This work risks the danger of reproducing the discourse of the university, since as Lacanian organizational analysts have argued, it tends to foreclose the subversive and critical opportunities of desire. As detailed earlier, this work is often caught in an uncritical ethics of adaptation. Psychoanalysis has been adopted also for its epistemological and hermeneutical valence as in the work of the psychoanalytical or socio-analytical perspective. This approach maintains the unconscious as a depth that influences and shapes our conscious reality. It has provided critical openings in questioning, for example, the role of emotions in hierarchical and capitalist organizations and also questioning racialized and colonial practices. Some organizational scholars, influenced by Marxist political economy, built on the political, ontological, ethical, and epistemological consequences of the unconscious as discourse of the Other to propose a sociohistorical critical work—a new articulation of an ideologiekritik. The contribution has shown how processes of working, organizing, and learning forward and reproduce modes of subjectivity that are invested and caught in the grip of neoliberal capitalism characterized by the injunction to enjoy the ever-more optimized accumulation of money, experiences, goods, hits, hacks, and so on—thereby accounting for its continued hegemony in the face of its growing dislocation, deep suffering, and returning traumas. However, this work has exhibited a disturbing silence on the complex ways that the logic of capitalist accumulation and its surplus, which coinciding with the libidinal economy at play, intersect with white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ableism. It is time to get real with intersectional politics, with these bits of otherness that are excluded and that still support a specific type of mostly white, European, English-speaking academic work, academic identity, and scholarship that has delivered critical interpretations that have been important but partial and can do more to engage with radical alternatives.

Getting Real With Intersectional Politics Significantly, as Roberts (2005) indicated, these psychoanalytically informed studies are to ‘allow for clearer sight of the conditions for effective resistance’—but resistance to what? To the economic and social injustices and the forms of oppression perpetuated in organizations. In many ways then this work articulates the very aim of CMS: going beyond interpretation and instead forwarding radical alternatives. However, these contributions included the aforementioned ideologiekritik inspired by Lacan and co. have mostly elaborated a traditional academic praxis, producing journal articles, books, and teaching that have tended to be mostly (if not exclusively) self-referential. Critical work is important because it produces new sources of inscription and 132

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new modes of thought. But such modes of thoughts, options, and possibilities need to be made available. They need to enter the field of discursivity. They need to be involved in broader conversations, discussions, and activities to open up new possibilities. They need the instruments of political work: organization, coalitions, strategy, and so on which, ironically, are in themselves key elements of what organizational scholars study. Yet not much work has been dedicated to the study, elaboration and constitution of radical organizational alternatives. Critical work, in its practices and results, needs to be politicized, to become part of political endeavors as it is the case in the intellectual activism of feminist, race, and postcolonial scholars who ‘walk the talk’ of their critiques (Collins 2013; Davis 2016). This is what would allow CMS to move beyond the ‘traps of empty theorizing that remained unconnected to lived organizational experience’ (Mir and Mir 2013: 19). CMS as an innovation in business schools should not be dismissed. In several ways, CMS has been productive and liberating for many, including some students, faculty, and others. It has engendered the creation of spaces of dialogue and for differences that challenge the business, management, and organizational orthodoxy to have (some) citizenship in academia. But more can be done to move this beyond traditional notions of academia, where critical scholarship reproduces neoliberal academia with critical debates in academic journals that are offered for theoretical consumption to like-minded consumers. CMS as a signifier that stabilizes those who claim to do work that is critical and that aims to generate radical alternatives, however, has some potential to be a supportive organization that can facilitate such intellectual activism. There are some examples of it, such as Vida (Contu 2019). To be clear, the point here is not to call for more reflexivity. This has too often operated as some kind of panacea in our critical work, a way of cleansing our conscience for our inability to systematically discuss, advocate for, and participate in building the conditions for effective resistance, accountability, and actual change that go in the direction of social, economic, and epistemic justice. The point to consider is the full, radical assumption of the implications that our work as academics has: its diffractive character and its consequences, including those we do not know of. Does psychoanalysis help us with this radical political work in building alternatives going beyond empty theorizing, and without falling back into the university discourse and the ethics and politics of adaptation that, as we have seen, tend to mark the psychoanalyzing organization approach? Arnaud and Villaidet (2017: 8) tell us how organizational scholars have mobilized Lacanian insights to produce a philosophy of intervention that is contrary to the engineers of the soul with their ethics of adaptation and maintenance. They have suggested the possibility of ways out of the ideological grip and the repetition of empty speech. By focusing on the contradictions, rest, and failure of imaginary and symbolic identification and confronting the lack of being, analysts, including those who engage in organizational coaching, support the production of full speech that allows subjects to face their singular desire: re-signifying themselves. Fotaki and Harding (2012: 165) have suggested the adoption of the discourse of the hysteric ‘in exposing business school objectives and ideologies to the light of day, this reversed discourse, that of the hysteric, prevents business schools from contributing to forces that damage and destroy’. These are important and join other, non-psychoanalytic theorizations of critical performativity, as a way to theorize the political potential of critical management studies in the delivery of radical alternatives (e.g., Cabantous et al. 2016). These efforts are to be elaborated, experimented with, and studied in depth. They are all promising. My direction at present is to focus on the political and on politics, especially the radical progressive politics of black feminist leftist academics that have developed intellectual activism (Collins 2013; Davis 2016). 133

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This offers a source of inscription that enhances critical interpretations with progressive political engagement. The aim is clear: to build radical alternatives with others by engaging in coalition politics. This means to circulate new signifiers and new sources of inscription for a specific type of academic subjectivity for business school academics. This is a political subjectivity. This subjectivity stays critical of the status quo (including therefore the acceptance of academic work merely linked to the production of books, journal articles, conference papers, etc.). It also constantly returns, in the core research questions one works with but importantly in every instance of one’s academic practices, to the questions of solidarity, equality, democracy, and freedom; and to the struggles that empty these words. It also insists on the demands for equality, solidarity, and justice, on how these are posed today; and how one faces them and responds to them concretely every day. There is already plenty of work and experiences as well as suggestions for a political academic praxis that move beyond the traditional view of academic subjectivity to become a political agent that works with others to identify, elaborate, circulate, and build progressive thoughts/ intelligibility and their practices. This political academic praxis is one that keeps permanent critique alive, and it is also affirmative and organizational. This means to take responsibility for naming, theorizing, and building with others alternatives and counter-hegemonic forms of organizations and organizing—arguably the primary domain of our intellectual concern as business school academics. Such an intellectual activism and political collective work in business schools (Contu 2018a; Contu 2019) requires facing difficult choices that have ethical and political consequences in as far as they address justice claims and demands. They call on us to make decisions on the specific type of social change one is forwarding, advocating for, or silencing. Many have done much in building such praxis and its subjectivity and experiences, also in academia, for political work that generates organizational alternatives forwarding solidarity, equity, and freedom. Plenty of work is to be done, and critical management theorists in business schools have much to offer to the praxis of intellectual activism. Lacanian psychoanalysis is the terrain that convincingly allows us to account for why such praxis (and its political subjectivity) is possible. Its other lesson is clearly that one can never bracket out or forget that this is also always impossible. One works constantly in a terrain that is structurally lacking, infected with surpluses and reminders of antagonism. Fundamentally, and this is another lesson, the decisions we face everyday, when subjects come to the fore, are never pure.They always involve exclusions.They (retroactively) generate consequences that are impossible to foresee and that cannot just simply/easily and conveniently be attributed to the Other. One is always fully responsible.

References and Further Readings Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (2008) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (eds.) (1992) Critical Management Studies, Newbury Park, London: Sage. Arnaud, G. (2012) ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Organization Studies and Management: An Overview’, Organization Studies, 33(9), 1121–1135. Arnaud, J. and Vanheule, S. (2013) ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Management Research: On the Possibilities and Limits of Convergence’, Management Decisions, 51(8), 1664–1677. Arnaud, J. and Villaidet, B. (2017) ‘Clinical and Critical: The Lacanian Contribution to Management and Organization Studies’, Organization, July 27 Online first. Bicknell, M. and Liefooghe, A. (2010) ‘Enjoy Your Stress! Using Lacan to Enrich Transactional Models of Stress’, Organization, 17, 317–330. Bloom, P. and Cedestrom, C. (2009) ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ Fantasy in the Age of Market Rationality’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22(2), 159–180.

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Critical Management Studies Burnes, B. and Cooke, B. (2013) ‘The Tavistock’s 1945 Invention of Organization Development’, Business History, 55(5), 768–789. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony and Universality, London: Sage. Cabantous, L., Gond, J.P., Harding, N. and Learmonth, M. (2016) ‘Critical Essay: Reconsidering Critical Performativity’, Human Relations, 69(2), 197–213. Collins, P. (2013) On Intellectual Activism, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality, London: Wiley & Sons. Contu, A. (2008) ‘Decaf Resistance: Misbehaviour, Desire and Cynicism in Liberal Workplaces’, Communication Management Quarterly, 21(3), 364–379. Contu, A. (2014) ‘Rationality and Relationality in the Process of Whistleblowing’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(4), 393–406. Contu, A. (2018a) ‘The Point is to Change it’, Organization, 25(2), 282–293. Contu, A. (2018b) ‘Conflict and Organization Studies’, Organization Studies, April 7 Online First. Contu, A. (2019) ‘Answering the Crisis With Intellectual Activism: Making A Difference As Business Schools Scholars’, Human Relations, April 22, online. Contu, A., Driver, M. and Jones, C. (2010) ‘Jacques Lacan With Organization Studies’, Organization, 17(3), 307–315. Contu, A. and Willmott, H. (2006) ‘Studying Practice: Situating Talking About Machine’, Organization Studies, 27(12), 1769–1762. Costas, J. (2010) ‘Unveiling the Masks: Critical Management Studies’, Book Review: Alvesson, M., Bridgman,T. and Willmott, H. (eds.) (2009) ‘The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies’, Organization, 17(6), 789–792. Costas, J. and Taheri, A. (2012) ‘ “The Return of the Primal Father”, in Postmodernity? A Lacanian Analysis of Authentic Leadership’, Organization Studies, 33(9), 1195–1216. Davis, A. (2016) Freedom Is A Constant Struggle, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Driver, M. (2009a) ‘Encountering the Arugula Leaf: The Failure of the Imaginary and its Implications for Research on Identity in Organizations’, Organization, 16, 487–504. Driver, M. (2009b) ‘Struggling with Lack: A Lacanian Perspective on Organizational Identity’, Organization Studies, 30(1), 55–72. Driver, M. (2010) ‘Learning as Lack: Individual Learning in Organizations as an Empowering Encounter With Failed Imaginary Constructions of the Self ’, Management Learning, 41(5), 561–574. Faria, A. (2014) ‘Border Thinking in Action’, in Malin, V., Murphy, J. and Siltaoja, M. (eds.) Getting Things Done Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, Bingley: Emerald Group of Publishing, 77–300. Fay, E. (2008) ‘Derision and Management’, Organization, 15(6), 831–850. Fleming, P. and Spicer, A. (2003), ‘Working at a Cynical Distance’, Organization, 10(1), 157–179. Fotaki, M. and Harding, N. (2012) ‘Lacan and Sexual Difference in Organization and Management Theory: Towards a Hysterical Academy?’, Organization, 20(2), 153–172. Fotaki, M., Long, S. and Schwartz, H. (2012) ‘What Can Psychoanalysis Offer Organization Studies Today? Taking Stock of Current Development and Thinking about Future Directions’, Organization Studies, 33(9), 1105–1120. Frosh, P. (2013) ‘Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33(3), 141–154. Gabriel,Y. (2016) ‘Psychoanalysis and the Study of Organization’, in Mir et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Gabriel,Y. (ed.) (1999) Organizations in Depth:The Psychoanalysis of Organizations, London: Sage. Gabriel, Y. and Carr, A. (2002) ‘Organizations, Management and Psychoanalysis: An Overview’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(5), 348–365. Glynos, J. (2010) ‘Lacan at Work’, in Cederstrom, C. and Hoedemaekers, C. (eds.) Lacan and Organization, San Francisco, CA: MayFly, 13–58. Collins P. H. (2013) On Intellectual Activism, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Collins P. H. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality, London: Wiley & Sons. Hoedemaekers, C. (2010) ‘Not Even a Semblance: Exploring the Interruption of Identification with Lacan’, Organization, 17, 379–393. Hoedemaekers, C. and Keegan, A. (2010) ‘Performance Pinned Down: Studying Subjectivity and the Language of Performance’, Organization Studies, 31(8), 1021–1044. Johnston, R. (2000) ‘Hidden Capital’, in Barry, J. et al (eds.) Management and Organization: A Critical Text, London: Thomson Learning.

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Alessia Contu Jones, C. (2008) ‘Poststructuralism’, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman,T. and Willmott, H. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, C. and Spicer, A. (2005) ‘The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship’, Organization, 12(2), 223–246. Kenny, K. (2009) ‘Heeding the Stains: Lacan and Organizational Change’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22(2), 214–228. Kets de Vries, M. (1991) Organizations on the Couch, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kets de Vries, M. (2003) Organizations on the Couch: A Clinical Perspective on Organizational Dynamics, INSEAD Working Paper Series 92/ENT. Khurana, R. (2010) From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Knights, D. (1990) ‘Subjectivity, Power and the Labour Process’, in Knights, D. and Willmott, H (eds.) Labour Process Theory, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacan, J. (1972) ‘Du Discours Psychanalytique’, in Lacan in Italia 1953–1978 En Italie Lacan, Milan: La Salamandra, 27–39. Lacan, J. (2007) Ecrits,The First Complete Edition in English, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Mir, R. and Mir, A. (2013) ‘The Colony Writes Back: Organization as an Early Champion of Non-Western Organizational Theory’, Organization, 20(1), 91–101. Nobus, D. (2016) ‘Esprit de corps,Work Transference and Dissolution: Lacan as an Organisational Theorist’, Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 34(4), 355–378. Parker, I. (2010) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, Hove: Routledge. Prasad, A. (2014) ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: And Other Psychoanalytic Lessons from Crossing a Neocolonial Border’, Human Relations, 67(2), 233–257. Roberts, J. (2005) ‘The Power of the “Imaginary’, in Disciplinary Processes’, Organization, 12(5), 619–642. Roudinesco, E. (2014) Lacan: In Spite of Everything, London:Verso Books. Sievers, B. (ed.) (2009) Psychoanalytic Studies of Organizations, London: Routledge. Sievers, B. (2012) ‘Socio-analytic Reflections on Capitalist Greed’, Organisational & Social Dynamics, 12(1), 44–69. Sievers, B., Long, S. and Lawrence, G. (2006) ‘Power and Politics’, Human Relations, 59(2), 171–173. Srinivas, N. (2012) ‘Epistemic and Performative Quests for Authentic Management in India’, Organization, 19(2), 145–158. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stavrakakis,Y. (2008) ‘Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment’, Organization Studies, 29(7), 1037–1059. Thompson, P. (1990) ‘Crawling from the Wreckage: The Labour Process and the Politics of Production’, in Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (eds.) Labour Process Theory, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 95–124. Trist, E. and Murray, H. (1990) ‘The Social Engagement of Social Science A Tavistock Ontology. The Formative Years’, www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/tavis1/tavis1.html. Ulus, E. (2015) ‘Workplace Emotions in Postcolonial Spaces: Enduring Legacies, Ambivalence, and Subversion’, Organization, 22, 890–908. Ulus, E. (2018) ‘White Fantasy, White Betrayals: On Neoliberal ‘Feminism’ in the US Presidential Election Process’, Ephemera, 18(1), 163–181. Vachhani, S.J. (2012) ‘The Subordination of the Feminine? Developing a Critical Feminist Approach to the Psychoanalysis of Organizations’, Organization Studies, 33(9), 1237–1255. Vidaillet, B. and Gamot, G. (2015) ‘Working and Resisting When One Workplace is Under Threat of Being Shut Down: A Lacanian Perspective’, Organization Studies, 36(9), 987–1011. Zupančič, A. (2016) ‘Biopolitics, Sexuality and the Unconscious’, Paragraph, 39(1), 49–64.

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PART III

Concepts

10 SUPEREGO AND THE LAW Todd McGowan

Today, the impact of the superego, one of the important conceptual innovations developed in Freud’s work, is visible everywhere in the political universe. It prompts subjects to defend their nation against immigrants, insist on ethnic purity, and promote the dominance of their religious beliefs by convincing them that they have not done their duty in these areas. To make sense of these manifestations of the superego, this chapter maps out the relationship between superego and law. It argues that the superego is not what we typically think it is: it doesn’t drive people to obey the law but to transgress it. The transgressions that it encourages are those of reactionary politics. The superego provides the enjoyment that is the backbone of reactionary efforts, an enjoyment that links subjects back with the imaginary primal father who enjoyed without restraint. The essay concludes with a vision of the emancipatory project that centers on the struggle against the power of the superego.

Law and Superego The commonsensical understanding of the superego views it as an internal version of the external law. Whereas the law constrains the subject through the threat of external punishment, the superego does so through an internal disciplining, like the pangs of conscience. This is not just a position taken up by those unfamiliar with psychoanalysis but by Sigmund Freud himself. In his 1924 essay ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, Freud explicitly links the superego’s commands to the law. He writes, ‘in undertaking the repression, the ego is at bottom following the commands of its superego—commands which, in their turn, originate from influences in the external world that have found representation in the super-ego’ (Freud 1961a: 150). Here, just a few years after he develops the concept of the superego, Freud envisions it as a parallel agency to the external law. Based on this understanding, we might theorize the superego as a necessary rampart against the subject’s antisocial tendencies. Without the superego, it seems as if the subject would unleash its unchecked desire whenever the law isn’t looking. As a result, some theorists of morality and many psychoanalysts put a great deal of stock in the development of a healthy superego. This is the position of Anna Freud, who claims, as both a moralist and a psychoanalyst, that ‘true morality begins when the internalized criticism, now embodied in the standard exacted by the superego, coincides with the ego’s perception of its own fault’ (Freud 1966: 119). From this perspective, the superego creates moral beings who 139

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do not require external laws to make them socially responsible. For instance, the law prohibits smoking in an office building, but the superego stands guard over the subjects alone in the bathroom of this building where no authority could see them. Thanks to the superego, the building’s bathrooms don’t require smoke detectors to police potentially wayward subjects. Thus, it contributes to stable and harmonious social relations and prevents people from incurring the risk of secondhand smoke. But perhaps this understanding of the superego takes an approach to it that is too sanguine. Perhaps this approach has the effect of misleading us as to how the superego functions in the psyche and in relation to the social order. Rather than creating a more moral subject and more harmonious social relations, we can find evidence for the opposite—the way that the superego drives the subject toward criminality and constantly underwrites our social coexistence with an unrestrained violence.When the superego works to bring us together, it does so not by eliminating our violent desires but through rituals of barbaric sacrifice. Police beatings, military torture, and lynching parties are all monuments to the superego’s form of social coexistence. The superego’s association with morality is a ruse that hides its role in licensing the subject to jettison the symbolic law for the sake of a hopeless quest for an impossible satisfaction. The symbolic law has an inherently ambiguous status. One the one hand, it functions ideologically by prohibiting an ultimate satisfaction that is impossible anyway. As a result of their subjection to the law, subjects invest themselves in the fantasy of a satisfaction that they will never attain. On the other hand, the law makes life together possible.The superego plays on this ambiguity in the law and prompts an investment in the impossible satisfaction that the law prohibits. This is the source of its link to violence and destructiveness. The superego supplements the law, not by providing an internal correlate to the law’s external injunction but by giving subjects a psychic attachment to the law. Without the superego, we would remain indifferent to the law. It would have no ability to affect us psychically. But this form of attachment doesn’t prompt us to obey the law. Instead, it leads us to transgress the law and even to commit atrocities that the law itself proscribes, for the sake of an ultimate satisfaction. The link between the superego and violence stems from the constant pressure that the superego places on the subject to live up to an impossible ideal. The superego commands us to access the enjoyment that the law contains and yet obscures. This enjoyment is the source of our attachment to the law even though the law explicitly offers only constraints on our enjoyment: don’t drive too fast, don’t use cocaine, don’t murder, and so on. Within each prohibition, however, there lies an implicit contention that the law restricts us from fully enjoying ourselves. This is what the superego accesses in the law and activates, which is why Jacques Lacan states that ‘Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!’ (Lacan 1998: 3). When Lacan identifies the superego with the imperative to enjoy, he seems far removed from Freud, who associates the superego with the internalized law. Although Lacan does not announce that he is abandoning Freud’s conception of the superego, it is clear that he is submitting this conception to a major modification. But in a sense, Lacan’s conceptualization remains within Freud’s orbit.The imperative to enjoy is intimately attached to the law. The superego corresponds to the fantasy that the law enacts of an absolute enjoyment that it interdicts. As a result, the superego represents the point at which the law becomes oppressive. As Immanuel Kant shows, the law is in itself not a force of oppression. Rather than barring the subject from an unlimited enjoyment, it actually constrains the subject into freedom. According to Kant, the law is the site of freedom because it frees us from our natural being. The fact that we give ourselves the law indicates that we have the ability to deviate from our natural inclinations. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant famously states that the subject recognizes ‘that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom 140

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within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him’ (Kant 1996: 163–164). The law frees the subject because it confronts the subject with an imperative that demands that the subject act in a way at odds with its own inclinations. The law’s articulation of constraint functions paradoxically as an index of the freedom it unleashes. If the law, as Kant contends, is the site of our freedom, the superego marks the point where we lose this freedom.Through the superego, the free subject becomes nothing but an instrument that enjoys its conformity. The superego demands the betrayal of one’s freedom, but it offers the enjoyment of the law’s underside as the compensation for this betrayal. Through its access to the underside of the law, the subject enthralled to the superego can fantasize an enjoyment that would otherwise be unimaginable. The genius of the superego is that it is based on the necessary role that the law plays in the subject’s enjoyment. Rather than just discarding the law and attempting to access an absolute enjoyment directly, the agency of the superego takes the role that the law plays in constituting this impossible enjoyment into account. This is why the adherent of the superego is closer to the ultimate enjoyment than the most profligate libertine. The libertine ends up floundering in ennui without the support of the law, while the superegoic subject remains energized by the law in its transgressions. The superego transgresses the law, not in the name of criminality but through the law itself, which enables it to access the enjoyment that exists only through the law’s interdiction. The appeal of the superego lies in the proximity that it gives us to this impossible enjoyment. The superego thus indicates the subject’s unconscious retreat from the freedom that the law gives to the subject. But the consequences of the superego extend much further. The effect of the superego is deleterious not just for the subject itself but for the society in which the subject exists. Superegoic pressure is the primary motivating force for reactionary politics. It leads subjects to attempt to destroy those who, they believe, stand in the way of their access to an unrestrained enjoyment—an enjoyment often associated with the nation, an ethnic group, or religion (or all three at once, as is the case with white nationalism in the United States). The superego is a mortal threat not only to individual subjects but to the society that it purports to uphold. But the superego is a weak tyrant. Even though the enjoyment that the superego promises constitutes a formidable appeal, this appeal is ultimately empty. The superego never delivers on its promises because it cannot. The enjoyment that it promises doesn’t exist. This is the point at which psychoanalytic politics can intervene and undermine our attachment to the superego. Of course, it is impossible to eliminate the superego altogether—just as it is impossible to eliminate the law—but we can stop nourishing the superego by revealing its ultimate bankruptcy for the subject. One gives more and more to the superego for the sake of a diminishing return on one’s investment. The identification of the superego in social relations and the struggle against its ideological effects is one of the central terrains for psychoanalytic politics. Understanding how the superego functions begins with divorcing the superego from morality. When we think about the superego, we inevitably go astray if we imagine that it represents the path to a more moral subjectivity.

Superego and Enjoyment The superego doesn’t prompt subjects to obey the law but pushes them in the direction of a certain transgression, a transgression that promises to access what the law itself prohibits. It is the result of the subject’s investment in what the law prohibits rather than in the law itself. This is why we should not mistake the superego for conscience or for the Kantian moral law. One can appease conscience by adhering to it, whereas one can never obey enough to satisfy the imperatives of the superego. 141

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When Freud first conceives the superego in The Ego and the Id, he associates it with enjoyment rather than with moral probity.This is what Freud is getting at when he locates the source of the superego in the id. According to Freud, ‘the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is’ (Freud 1961b: 49). The superego forms through the subject’s attempt to satisfy itself while obfuscating this satisfaction. The superego emerges out of the subject’s investment in an impossible enjoyment that it associates with what it has lost. The law itself offers no pathway to this enjoyment. If we obey the law, at best we are left alone to live out our lives. There is no reward of enjoyment promised to us. The superego, in contrast, promises a boundless enjoyment in exchange for obedience, but the catch is that we can never be obedient enough to satisfy its demands. When enjoyment becomes a responsibility, one becomes constantly aware of one’s failure to enjoy oneself fully enough.The superego never enables the subject to do enough to satisfy it. One keeps going and going without end and never reaches the point of fully obeying the superegoic imperative. The superego’s imperative, no matter how much one gives in to it, always demands more.The superego demands a level of obedience that constantly recedes as the subject approaches it. One never reaches the goal that the superego sets, because the only function of the goal is to be missed. Dieting—especially when informed by the dictates of food and nutrition industries— displays the logic of the superego elegantly. Attempting to control my weight and eat healthily seems simple enough. But in fact, I never arrive at the ideal diet that I just maintain. Following the suggestions of health and nutrition experts leads to an unending search for the perfect diet. First, I cut out saturated fat to reduce the risk of heart problems and colon cancer.Then I reduce sugar to avoid diabetes, which runs in my family. After that, I try to avoid gluten because I have a sensitivity to it. Subsequently, my doctor advises me to eliminate dairy products. But then my protein levels begin to sag, so I must add an additional protein source, likely one that contains saturated fat, which brings me back to my initial problem. No matter how far I take this odyssey, I never reach an end point. The diet as such obeys the logic of the superego, a logic that never relents in its injunction to the subject. Although the superego deceives the subject through its promise of an ultimate reward of unlimited enjoyment, it nonetheless does offer the subject some recompense for its obedience. Superegoic acts require a renunciation on the part of the subject.This renunciation is the source of the enjoyment that the superego actually supplies. In the case of dieting, I never achieve the perfect body that I am able to enjoy, but I am able to enjoy the renunciation of various foods during the course of my diet. Or if I obey the superego and join in an act of bullying, I can enjoy sacrificing my own moral sense in doing so.The satisfactions of attempting to heed the superego are limited, but they are real. Although we imagine that the superego restricts subjects from acceding to the whims of their id and wantonly committing all sorts of heinous injustices, it is the superego that is responsible for all of what have become known as crimes against humanity. Rather than restricting the potential criminality of the subject, the superego licenses criminal excesses in the name of obedience to its imperative. Crime is most often the result the superego’s dominance, not its abeyance. The great cinematic depiction of how obedience to the superego corresponds to vicious criminality occurs in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).The most obvious interpretation of the film sees it as a chronicle of the gradual corruption of the pure son by the violence inherent in his family. At the beginning of the film, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is the only son of Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) not involved in organized crime. He has served in the

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military and is preparing for a legitimate career, unlike his brothers Sonny (James Caan) and Fredo (John Cazale), who have accepted a life of crime. But after the attempted murder of his father, Michael enters into criminality in the most dramatic way—by murdering a police officer in a restaurant. As the film moves on, Michael proves much more ruthless than either his father or his two brothers. He appears to be a radically different subject than the one who began outside the family business. But the key to the film resides in the radical consistency of Michael’s character. Throughout the film, he heeds the call of the superego, which drives him to a series of barbaric actions. Due to his unrelenting brutality, it is tempting to view Michael as an amoral figure, someone who can kill a close relation or lie with impunity to his spouse while swearing to tell her the truth. Michael does not concern himself with the law, but he is thoroughly invested in the imperative of the superego. If one uses the superego as a gauge of the subject’s morality, Michael would be overly moral rather than amoral. He is violent out of an excess of superegoic morality. It is the conspicuousness of the superego rather than its absence that renders him such a risible character. He betrays himself entirely to the superego and unleashes its violence on all around him. The superegoic imperative that governs Michael’s existence is the protection of the family, just as it is protection of the nation when he is a soldier. His first criminal act—the murder of the police officer—occurs in response to the attack on his father, which rouses his superego. Michael will go to any length to fulfill this imperative, even if it leads, ironically, to the destruction of the family. Eventually, he has his brother-in-law killed (and in the sequel to the film, his brother Fredo) as part of the effort to protect the family.The superego provides Michael with a justification for betraying those closest to him, in the name of protecting the family. Michael’s actions indeed show how the superego licenses ruthlessness in the subject and permits the subject to act in ways that violate not only the law but also the subject’s own morality. The film concludes with one of the most famous crosscutting sequences in the history of cinema. As Michael participates as the godfather in the christening of his nephew, his executioners carry out a series of assassinations of rival gang leaders. Coppola cuts from the priest performing the ceremony in Latin to the mobsters preparing for their hits and then from Michael renouncing Satan to shots of the four hits going on simultaneously. Although many interpret the crosscutting here as indicative of Michael’s hypocrisy, it actually shows how Michael’s commitment to protecting the family extends into licit and illicit rituals. In both cases, Michael obeys the superegoic imperative, no matter what laws he must violate. Even when he is at his most violent, Michael Corleone is trying to follow the dictates of the superego. The dominance of the superego does not typically produce subjects like Michael Corleone. If it did, society would not be livable. But he represents the end point of the superego’s logic. Although the superego has an original connection with the law, it leads the subject to transgress the law in ways that seem not only justifiable but morally necessary. The superego licenses brutality in the name of morality. It enables subjects to believe in the necessity of their transgressions while still enjoying the experience of guilt for what they do.

Superego and Primal Father Almost a decade before Freud first theorizes the superego in The Ego and the Id, he provides the basic matrix of its structure in the speculative fourth section of Totem and Taboo. In this discussion, Freud imagines a pre-social primal horde in which a father figure has free access to all women in the group. The social impulse emerges when the sons murder the father to access the women for themselves, but the formation of society necessitates the prohibition of the primal

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father’s position. The toppling of the primal father means that no one can have his privilege, even though the sons topple him to gain this privilege. All subjects must content themselves with a partial satisfaction—not all women but one woman. Society depends, according to Freud, on the banishment of the primal father and his unlimited satisfaction, a satisfaction not conducive to social existence. The point of Freud’s invention is not to describe how society actually formed but to theorize its psychic preconditions. In the background of every symbolic law that interdicts unlimited enjoyment (like the prohibition of incest), there lies the imaginary figure of the primal father. Although this figure is imaginary—there never was a leader of a primal horde that really had unlimited access to the group’s women—it nonetheless provides the perfect image of the background form that emerges whenever we formulate a symbolic law.The primal father is the echo of the symbolic law that appears to anticipate it. This figure manifests itself in the ferociousness of the superego. The superego is not the result of the symbolic law’s inability to tame the voracity of the primal father but rather the effect of the symbolic law’s prohibition. In a sense, one could say that the symbolic prohibits the primal father into existence. Through the act of limiting the subject’s satisfaction, the law necessarily produces the image of an unlimited satisfaction that is accessible only through the vehicle of prohibition. There is no direct access to the position of the primal father, because this figure is only imaginary.The subject cannot simply try to cast aside the symbolic law and live free, because this freedom would be free of satisfaction altogether. As a result, it must seek the primal father’s satisfaction through the agency of the superego. Through adhering to the superego, the subject comes closest to the imaginary unlimited satisfaction of the primal father.This is why the superego is such a seductive agency. It offers the subject the lure of a satisfaction that the subject cannot obtain. The more the subject attempts to cede its own desire in order to access the unlimited satisfaction of the superego, the more it finds itself falling short. The fundamental principle of the superego is that it constantly demands more from the subject. In this sense, the superego is far more exigent than the symbolic law. As Slavoj Žižek puts it in The Metastases of Enjoyment, superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts on the subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave it up. Our sacrificing to the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt. For that reason our debt to the superego is unredeemable: the more we pay it off, the more we owe. Superego is like the extortioner slowly bleeding us to death—the more he gets, the stronger his hold on us. (Žižek 1994: 68) When confronted with an extortionist, it is tempting to pay a little to avoid the worst. But the superego is an extortionist who never relents. When one pays a little, it always comes back demanding more and more. Melanie Klein formulates this same demanding structure from the opposite perspective. According to Klein, the earliest form of the superego is maternal. This maternal superego, as she sees it, is even more exigent than the paternal version, which develops later. Although she doesn’t root the maternal superego in the figure of the primal father, she does nonetheless locate it in another imaginary figure of unlimited satisfaction: the mother. Like the primal father, the image of the mother is one of completed satisfaction, which is why it confronts the subject with an impossible demand.

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The danger of the superego lies precisely in its insatiability.This contrasts it with the law. It is possible to comply with the law. I can obey speed limits, avoid trafficking narcotics, and decide not to kidnap anyone. My obedience doesn’t ensure that the law will leave me alone, especially if I am someone often targeted by the police, like a young black man. But nonetheless, obedience is at least a possibility. What’s more, my obedience to the law does not produce a desire in me to obey even more completely. When I drive under the speed limit, I do not experience an imperative to drive continually further and further below the speed limit, to the point where I am hardly moving at all. The law prohibits but doesn’t demand an ever-increasing obedience. That task falls to the superego, which is the law’s underside. Unlike the law, the superego demands more and more from the subject. The subject who experiences the superegoic injunction never believes that it is doing enough to achieve the enjoyment that the superego promises. The subject’s sacrifices to it are never sufficient, which leads to ever greater sacrifices, like Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) hacking Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to death in the shower in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960). It is not enough to upbraid himself for desiring her. He must constantly go further and eliminate the source of the temptation altogether. As we hear Norman Bates upbraid himself in the voice of his mother, it is clear that the maternal superego completely dominates him and leads him to murder. In this way, the great insight of Psycho is that it lays bare the barbaric violence of the superego in its unadulterated form. Bates is not a murderer because he lacks a superego but rather because he has given himself over to it almost entirely. The irony that Freud’s concept of the superego exposes is that the agency of supposed morality within the psyche is actually the source of our most murderous impulses.This is why understanding how the superego functions requires moving beyond Freud’s initial definition to Lacan’s modification.

Superego and Surveillance Both the superego and the law survey the subject. In fact, constant surveillance of the subject defines the superego: it vigilantly monitors all the subject’s desires in order to detect the slightest deviation. In the case of the law, the surveying function is not always apparent, though this has changed in recent times. Increasingly in contemporary society, subjects find themselves under surveillance whenever they enter into public spaces and often within private ones. But even in the epochs before widespread video and audio surveillance, the law itself necessarily entailed some form of surveying those subjected to it. This is what Jacques Rancière refers to as the policing function of the law. There is no law, for Rancière, without the police. According to Rancière, ‘This “natural” logic, a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, pins bodies to “their” places and allocates the private and the public to distinct “parts”—this is the order of the police’ (Rancière 2010: 139). The order of the police observes the subject and ensures that it remains in its place. That is, the law’s surveillance maintains the propriety of place. This logic doesn’t wait for the invention of wiretapping but exists as soon as the law emerges. Although both the superego and the law survey subjects, they do so in fundamentally different ways. The difference between the surveillance that the law perpetuates and that of the superego is that the law’s surveillance, no matter how ubiquitous it becomes, cannot become all-seeing. This is because the law’s surveillance emanates from a regime of visibility. It searches for what it can see and exists under the delusion that it can see everything. Paradoxically, its ability to see everywhere is the source of its blindness. The more that the law can see, the more it can miss. The subject can always deceive the law. The problem with the law’s surveillance is that

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it cannot see what hides in plain sight. Because the law’s surveillance sees everything, it cannot see its own desire and how that desire shapes what it sees. This is the great lesson of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’. In this story, a conniving minister steals an incriminating letter written to a royal personage, who is intent on hiding it from her spouse (presumably to conceal her infidelity). The minister plans on using the letter to blackmail the royal woman, so she hires the prefect of police to retrieve it. The prefect spends days conducting a minute search of the minister’s dwelling. He and his officers search with a thoroughness that appears to equal that of modern surveillance: they open all packages and books, examine chair legs with microscopes, remove all the carpet, and so on. But they cannot find the letter. When the prefect relates his failure to his friend and amateur detective Monsieur Dupin, Dupin surmises where the investigation failed. He believes that the police searched as well as their police powers enabled them to search. He claims, ‘Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it’ (Poe 1845). The problem with the police search—and the limit of police power—is that its desire orients how it sees, but its search cannot take this desire into account. Dupin visits the minister and finds the letter without conducting a thorough search because he anticipates that the minister will have hidden the letter in plain sight. By prominently displaying it on a pasteboard in the middle of his residence, the minister created the appearance that the letter was simply part of the background rather than an obtruding figure. The police miss the letter because they are looking for what is hidden, and this leaves them unable to see the desire that lies exposed on the surface. Poe’s story shows the limit of the police and the law that would survey us. Its surveillance can become total, but when it does, it necessarily misses what is most important, which is why one can always hide from it. As long as one knows the desire of the law, one can always hide by exposing precisely what the law expects to see, as the minister does in ‘The Purloined Letter’. Things are entirely different with the superego. The superego not only sees everything that the subject does but also knows the desire informing these actions.The superego does not have the blindness to its own desire that characterizes the law. Its focus is the desire of the subject and how this desire manifests itself.The superego’s authority is thus far more thoroughgoing. When it comes to the superego, there is nowhere to hide. Another famous story by Poe, ‘William Wilson’, reveals the extent of the superego’s surveillance. In this sense, it serves as a counterpoint to ‘The Purloined Letter’. In ‘William Wilson’, the narrator recounts his life story, focusing on his relationship with a figure who seems to be his twin. Although they don’t meet until the narrator attends boarding school, they share the same name and were born on the same day. This twin constantly prods and torments the narrator, though the narrator cannot break from him.The doppelganger of William Wilson is Poe’s image of the superego. This double accompanies the narrator everywhere and seems to have no other aim than to thwart his plans. The narrator’s description of his doppelganger provides a paradigmatic account of how the superego works. The other William Wilson always follows the narrator. He is just like the narrator, except he lacks the narrator’s faults. Most important, the double is almost invulnerable. According to the narrator, he . . . has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, . . . a weakness in the faucial or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper. (Poe 1842)

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Wilson’s description evokes both the absence of weakness in the superego and the form that the superego takes for the subject. The superego is the soft voice that whispers to the subject the secret failures that only it sees. What William Wilson describes as the superego’s sole weakness is actually a manifestation of its strength. It speaks softly in order to torment the subject alone. The double haunts the narrator and interrogates all his actions. There is nowhere that the narrator can find respite from this double, just like the subject in relation to the superego’s surveillance. At the end of the story, the tormenting of the superego pushes the narrator to his breaking point. In a violent outburst, he kills this double, but in doing so, he finds that he has actually killed himself. One cannot destroy the superego without destroying oneself. Its surveillance is unending. The contrast between the law’s version of surveillance and the superego’s reveals the danger lurking in the superego. As fears about increasing legal surveillance multiply, the much more ominous threat of superegoic surveillance goes unremarked. But this form of surveillance is the real threat to the subject. Not only does it eliminate the subject’s freedom in a way that the law’s surveillance does not, but it also drives the subject to brutal transgressions of the law that serve a reactionary political project.

Superego and Politics The great advantage of reactionary political movements consists in their investment in the superego rather than the law. The emancipatory project, in contrast, must eschew the superego to the extent that it can since this agency is the emblem of unfreedom that this project struggles against. Although reactionaries often present themselves as the proponents of law and order (like Richard Nixon) or Zucht und Ordnung (like Nazism), their fundamental concern is not with the law but with its superegoic underside. While invoking the necessity of law and order, reactionary and conservative leaders always demand specific transgressions of the law that constitute its superegoic underside. This is apparent in the fact that calls for law and order always entail an exception. What Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception is simply the site where superegoic violence is permitted free rein (Agamben 2005). The absence of law in the state of exception—in the concentration camp, for instance (Agamben 1998)—unleashes the superego in its most ferocious form. Camp guards abuse and kill prisoners not through an abandonment of morality but as a result of their adherence to the superego.The concentration camp is a horror because too much morality in the form of the superego suffuses it. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933 Germany, Ernst Röhm’s SA (Sturmabteilung) was their superegoic underside that did the extralegal activities necessary to cement Nazi power. Initially, the SA did the party’s dirty work: beating up Jews, disrupting opposing political rallies, and killing communists. The SA was the superegoic side of Nazi rule, whereas the SS (Schutzstaffel) aligned itself more with the law as such. But the liquidation of the leadership of the SA on the Night of Long Knives in the summer of 1934 did not bring about the elimination of the superegoic dimension of Nazi power. Instead, the superego ceases to manifest itself openly in Nazi rule and becomes part of the SS. The SA’s open displays of brutality give way to the secret machinations of the SS. These open displays threaten to arouse opposition, which is why Hitler had to eradicate the SA and integrate its superegoic functioning into the SS. The role that the superego plays in the SS becomes apparent when one examines its relationship to the law.

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Heinrich Himmler’s famous speech in Posen on 4 October 1943 to a group of SS officers reveals the importance of the superego for the perpetuators of the Final Solution. Himmler applauds the men for their ability to remain upright moral beings in the midst of mass extermination. He states, Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and—with the exception of human weaknesses—to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. (Himmler 1943) The Nazis who are participating in the extermination are moral subjects, according to Himmler. They follow the imperative of the superego, even when it puts them at odds with the law. Their glory lies in their ability to break the law without losing touch with morality. In the next, much less well-known paragraph of his speech, Himmler insists on the morality of what the Nazis are doing. This creates the perverse situation in which the Nazis can kill the Jews but are absolutely prohibited to steal from them. That would be an immoral act. Himmler claims, ‘We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything’ (Himmler 1943). Here we see the logic of the superego in its fullest expression: to protect one’s people, one must commit incredible atrocities. However, no matter how horribly one acts, one never leaves the field of morality. Himmler exposes perfectly how the superego functions in politics. It directs subjects to do what they know violates the law in the name of a higher morality. Because the superego enjoins them to transgress the law for a higher cause, it creates enjoyment for them through the burden of guilt that it offers. The strength that Himmler praises is the strength to live with the guilt of the superego and to benefit from the license that it gives the subject to transgress the law. Although not every reactionary movement mirrors Nazism and not every conservative leader is Himmler, there is nonetheless a clear link between Himmler’s appeal and all reactionary movements. The key to the establishment of reactionary authority lies in its turn to the superego—its ability to trigger enjoyment through obedience, which is precisely what the law itself does not allow.Through the superegoic imperative, one can promise followers unrestrained enjoyment while assuring them that one is restoring law and order. The logic of the superego makes this paradoxical politics realizable.

Conclusion Against this reactionary harnessing of superegoic enjoyment, an emancipatory project finds itself in a precarious position. Although we typically think of emancipatory politics as oppositional, it must rather invest itself in the law. When we understand the relationship between the law and the superego, the political choice seems clear: we should opt for the law and abandon the superego.The difficulty with this choice lies in the inseparability of the superego from the law. If one opts for the law, the superego is always included in the bargain. This is because law without superego would be a law without any subjective investment. In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek makes just this point:

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the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis is precisely that there is no Law without superego—the superego is the obscene stain which is structurally unavoidable, it is the shadowy supplement to the “pure” symbolic Law which provides its necessary phantasmic support. (Žižek 1998: 241) If public law always includes its superegoic supplement, then the investment in the law seems like acquiescing from the beginning. One cannot simply insist on the law in opposition to the superego without reinforcing the strength of the superego and its violence. But everything depends on the approach that one takes to the law. It is possible to suffocate the superegoic underside of the law by emphasizing the necessity of the law’s lack of sense. The law’s radicality, its ability to uproot the subject, lies in its absence of sense. There is no ultimate meaning to the law: it doesn’t restrain innate violent tendencies or create community or eliminate antisocial desires. All that the law does is issue a nonsensical command to the subject that lifts the subject out of its natural being. The superego represents the attempt to make sense of the law, to give it a meaning that it doesn’t have. This is why superegoic pressure is unending. Because there is no final signifier to define the senseless signifier of the law, there is no end to the superegoic quest. On the other hand, identifying with the law’s nonsense represents an end in itself. It involves the recognition that our attachment to the law is the path to a future absolute enjoyment but the source of current partial enjoyment. The only way to have the law without the burden of its superegoic underside is to accept the law as nonsensical. Grasping the law as nonsensical involves stripping away the promise of satisfaction that comes with obedience. As long as we conceive obedience to the law as capitulation to an external force for the sake of some future reward, we succumb at some point to the appeal of the superego, which plays on this promise of future reward. If the law is nonsensical, obedience to it brings the subject nothing at all. There is no reason for the subject’s obedience and no reward for it. The law plays a structuring role, but it is an empty point in the structure. Only by recognizing this empty nonsense of the law can we move beyond the superego’s appeal. This is, paradoxically, the path of the project of emancipation.

References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1961a) ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, London: Hogarth, 148–153. Coppola, F. (1972) The Godfather, Los Angeles: Paramount Studios. Freud, S. (1961a) ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, London: Hogarth, 149–153. Freud, S. (1961b) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, London: Hogarth, 3–66. Freud, A. (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed., Madison: International Universities Press. Himmler, H. (1943) ‘Posen Speech’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Himmler_Posen_Speech_-_ Extermination_of_the_Jews_excerpt,_Oct_4,_1943.ogg. Hitchcock, A. (1960) Psycho, United States: Universal Studios. Kant, I. (1996) ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, in Practical Philosophy, Gregor, Mary J. (trans. and ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 13–271. Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972–1973, Fink, Bruce (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

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11 (LIBERAL) NARCISSISM Robert Samuels

Importantly, Freud developed his concept of narcissism to deal with two different problems.The first was that he wanted to explain how the unity of the ego comes into being, and the second was that he needed to account for the transition from autoerotism to object choice (from the stimulation of one’s own body to the eroticization of the body of the other). In terms of the first goal, his text ‘On Narcissism’ argues that the sense of having a unified self is not evident at the start of life and is developed only later on, when the subject identifies with what Freud calls ‘a projection onto a surface’ (Freud 1963: 26). Although Freud never really explains what this projection entails, it appears to be a necessary process for the constitution of a unified ego. It is not until Lacan’s later discussions of the mirror stage that we receive a theory to support Freud’s insight. What Lacan introduces is a concept that is both empirical and theoretical since he tends to explain his idea through actual examples of human and animal behavior. Of course, the central schema that inspired Freud and psychoanalytic imagery is that just as Narcissus stared into the water and fell in love with his own reflection, humans gain a sense of ego unity and self-love when at a certain age, between 12 and 18 months, they identify with their own image in a reflected surface (Lacan 2001: 2). The idea here is that the image they see in the mirror is a gestalt in the sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the pieces since this ideal form allows the individual for the first time to see its body as a coherent container without any lacks at a time when the subject is still uncoordinated. After recognizing itself in the mirror, the subject is then able to internalize a virtual body map, and this process helps to establish a sense of bodily control and coordination, which allows the child begin to walk and see itself as a separate being. Lacan stresses that the internalization of this external image means that our basic sense of self is inherently alienated and ideal (Lacan 1977: 2). After all, when we try to look at our body without a mirror, we see only fragments, and so we need an external representation to give us an internal sense of unity. For Lacan, the mirror stage represents the foundation of the Imaginary order, and it is the mirrored ego that becomes the basis for the subject’s narcissism. As Freud argued, one learns to love oneself before one begins to love an external object, and narcissism provides the key to this transition from autoerotism to object choice (Freud 1963: 59). While Freud stresses that one invests libidinally in one’s own body, Lacan helps us to see that this body is actually an Imaginary and defensive structure. Not only does the ideal container of the body serve to separate the inner world from the outer world, but its virtual wholeness conflicts with the actual 151

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dis-coordination of the Real body. In explaining this issue, Lacan stresses that the human being is born premature, and unlike most other animals who can walk and act in a coordinated way soon after birth, humans go through a long period of helplessness and physical dependency on others (Lacan 1977: 4). To this structure of narcissism, Lacan adds the role of the ego ideal as the agency determining how the subject wants its ideal ego to be seen. In his further development of the mirror stage, Lacan adds that often a parent will be holding the child up to the mirror, and the child will first look at its own reflection and then look back at its parent in an effort to see the adult verifying the subject’s externalized self-image (Lacan 1988: 141–142). Lacan stresses that the narcissist desires to have the Other approve of the subject’s ideal ego, and this forms a double level of alienation because the ideal ego is based on identifying with an external image, and this ideal other has to be verified by an external authority. When Lacan asks who is speaking and to whom are they speaking in analysis, he is indicating that due to the alienating structure of the ideal ego and the ego ideal, people often experience themselves as an other desiring the recognition of the Other. In fact, Lacan renames the ego ideal the I of the Other [I(A)] to stress how the linguistic marker of selfhood represents an ideal position internalized from the external realm of the discourse of the Other. As Hegel wrote, the ‘I’ represents my most personal identity, but everyone else also says ‘I’, and so it is both universal and particular (Hegel 1998: 62). Moreover, the ‘I’ as the ego ideal represents the initial connection between the Imaginary realm of narcissism and the Symbolic realm of language and culture. As Freud argued, the ego ideal is determined by the internalization of cultural ideals, and it is the role of the superego to judge the distance between the ego ideal and the ego (Freud 1962). Shame, guilt, and anxiety are thus generated when one fails to live up to one’s own internalized standards. Importantly, for Lacan, the ego is primarily a defensive structure and that one will defend one’s body of knowledge in the same way that one defends the integrity of one’s body (Lacan 1977: 5). In what he calls paranoid knowledge, Lacan develops the idea that when someone challenges or questions our ideas, we respond in a visceral way because our relation to objects and the world around them is shaped by the defensive structure of narcissism. If we now think of narcissism as a political structure, it is important to realize how the Imaginary logic helps to structure what can be called the liberal obsessional culture of narcissism. Just as Freud noted in the Rat Man case that the obsessional neurotic wants to repress and project any sense of hostility in order to have the ideal ego verified by the ego ideal, liberals want to see themselves as being all-good, and so they have to repress and project any sense of badness onto others. Moreover, just as the obsessional engages in rituals of purification, like excessive hand washing, liberals have a great need to have others recognize their acts of goodness and kindness. This critique of liberal narcissism relates to Lacan’s notion that the therapist who seeks to promote the good for his or her patient may in fact be forcing the patient to identify with the analyst’s own ideal and ego ideal. This critique of therapeutic narcissism is connected to the rejection of empathy as a key to the analytic process. While liberal theorists like Richard Rorty argue that empathy is the key to social progress and the understanding of the Other, Lacan argues that underlying this liberal desire to do good is an imposition of one’s own beliefs and desires onto the other (Lacan 1977: 13). There is thus something narcissistic and colonizing about liberal empathy, and just as Bill Clinton liked to say ‘I feel your pain’, we can find in contemporary liberal ideology the same form of paranoid knowledge: I know what is best for you because I understand you and feel what you feel. Another key aspect of liberal obsessional narcissism is the investment in neoliberal meritocracy. Since liberals want their ideal ego to be recognized by the ego ideal, meritocracy 152

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represents the perfect system for the idealization of the self to be affirmed by an idealized social other. Meritocracy is supposed to reward people for their talent and education, and so its very structure has to do with the ego being verified by the social Other. In turn, anyone who does not receive this idealized recognition is considered to be inferior and not worthy of a rewarded life. Although liberals often make gestures toward helping out the people who have failed in the meritocratic race, there is often an underlying dismissal of the ‘uneducated’. In fact, Donald Trump picked up on this dynamic, and he openly said he was courting the votes of the uneducated and the people who have been left behind and stigmatized by liberal politics. Importantly, obsessional narcissists also need to avoid any criticism from their superego or external Others so that they can continue to see themselves as good and pure. One effect of this structure is that liberal politicians have a hard time acknowledging the negative effects of their policies. For instance, the long history of developmental aid has shown that liberal good intentions often ignore local needs and fail to correct failed programs.

(Neo)liberal Narcissism Although we often think of neoliberalism as a conservative political movement based on the privatization of public institutions, the downsizing of the welfare state, and the celebration of the deregulated free market, there is also a liberal form of neoliberalism centered on educational meritocracy and the rejection of any real alternatives to the current capitalist system. Thus, instead of trying to fight poverty and inequality, the liberal class turns toward education as the central mechanism to resolve economic and social problems. However, in the face of evidence that education actually increases inequality and decreases social mobility, the liberal class represses this failure of meritocracy and focuses on making sure that their own children outcompete others in the meritocratic race.1 As Freud argued in relation to narcissism, parents see their child as an idealized representation of their own lost narcissism, and so the educational success of the child represents proof of the parents’ own ability to attain the cultural ideal. A great example of how obsessional narcissism works in our current culture is the website Facebook, which allows people to post pictures and descriptions of their lives or interesting current events, and the main option given to the audience is to push a ‘like’ button. Here we see how the externalized self (the ideal ego) is verified by the ideal Other (the ego ideal). In this structure, what the narcissist does not want is to have his or her self-image rejected or criticized. For both Lacan and Kohut, this need for the Other to approve of the narcissistic self stems from the way that parents affirm or reject the child’s displays of grandiosity. Kohut argues that if the parent does not recognize the child, the child will continually seek recognition throughout life. However, if a parent does nothing but applaud the child’s exhibitionism, the child will also seek approval in an obsessional way. Kohut insists that the parent must maintain the optimal level of frustration and recognition (Kohut 2009: 197). For Lacan, one of the central tasks of the analyst is to handle the patient’s demand for recognition and understanding. Although the analyst is trained not to respond to the demands of the patient, a lack of response can produce so much anxiety that the analysis no longer functions. The analyst then must find a way to both not feed the narcissistic transference and not allow for too much anxiety to emerge. For Lacan, the main method for the analyst to handle the demand by the patient to be the one who knows is through interpretation. However, instead of seeing interpretation as the analyst providing meaning and new knowledge for the patient, analytic interpretation must aim to open up more free associations (Lacan: 1998: 244–260). The main function of the analyst is therefore to promote free association and to suspend the narcissistic demands for satisfaction, idealization, and identification. 153

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As Thomas Frank argues in his Listen, Liberal, the liberal class is now dominated by an educational elite of experts who believe that they are the ones who know (Frank 2016). In many ways, liberals are blinded by their good intentions, and as Lacan argues, beneath every act of charity, we can often find hidden narcissistic aggression. Not only do people want to feel good about themselves by showing how they are helping others, but they often unconsciously look down on the people they are aiding. A key then to understanding the narcissism of liberalism is to understand that public displays of good intentions may be harboring unconscious hostility. Moreover, it is hard to point out the shortcoming of these intentions and actions because the need to be seen as good serves to reject any criticism of the self. Ultimately, in our age of global capitalism, it is the destructive nature of greed and short-term self-interest that is often veiled by good intentions. For example, in higher education, there are many liberal professors who present themselves as being morally progressive by promoting diversity and human rights, yet they are also highly concerned about their own careers and their need to be part of elite institutions.The result of this combined investment in progressive ideals and competitive careerism is that they often repress their role in maintaining an exploitive labor system and an antidemocratic admissions structure (Hedges 2011). As a faculty union president, I have had the opportunity to work with many ‘liberal’ professors who became quite aggressive when they were confronted with the reality of the exploitive labor system that supports their work. Since narcissistic progressive faculty want to believe that they are good people doing good work, they do not want to deal with issues like the exploitation of part-time faculty and graduate students. They also often do not want to confront the use of SAT scores in college admissions, which reward wealthy students with merit scholarships and access to elite institutions. Moreover, even when liberal professors and institutions question the value of college ranking systems, each school tries to outcompete other schools to become the most elite. In turn, elite liberal professors rely on college rankings to verify their status and compete in the market for better pay and more prestige. These faculty members are torn between their need to see themselves as being part of a morally good enterprise and their desire to outcompete others in the meritocratic race. According to Frank (2016), this narcissistic investment in higher education meritocracy is one of the main causes for the failure of the liberal class to confront issues of labor and inequality. Since liberal politicians believe that the best way for people to get ahead in society and improve the economy is through higher education, they do not look at how higher education actually enhances inequality and decreases social mobility.They also tend to not focus on the other main causes of poverty, such as the loss of unions, the use of part-time workers, and the globalization of labor. Due to the liberal class avoiding seeking radical alternatives to the current economic systems, as it avoids helping the working class, the right is able to attract disaffected workers and create an alliance between wealthy elites and the victims of neoliberal capitalist globalization.

The Poverty of Liberalism Because liberals at the top of the social system are often successful products of meritocracy, they believe that the system works and is fair; however, as Frank attests, this belief can be sustained only if they turn their back on workers and the middle class: When it comes to tackling the ‘defining challenge of our time’, however, many of our modern Democratic leaders falter. They acknowledge that inequality is rampant and awful, but they cannot find the conviction or imagination to do what is necessary to reverse it. Instead they offer the same high-minded demurrals and policy platitudes 154

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they’ve been offering since the 1980s. They remind us that there’s nothing anyone can do about globalization or technology. They promise charter schools, and job training, and student loans, but other than that—well, they’ve got nothing. (Frank 2016: 19) Frank argues here that narcissistic Democrats have had a hard time dealing with inequality as they often see education as the solution to every economic problem. From this perspective, liberals are blinded by their own investment in meritocracy, but what Frank does not fully examine is, how can they still feel good about themselves and their policies when they in fact have the effect of increasing inequality and poverty? From a psychoanalytic perspective, we have seen that the theory of obsessional narcissism can aid us in our effort to understand why well-intentioned people are blind to the destructive effects of their actions. On one level, there is the fear of criticism and the need to be seen by ideal others as being morally good. However, on a deeper level, there is the unconscious hostility toward others that has to be constantly repressed to preserve a positive self-image. It turns out that liberals not only want to promote a more just world, but they also want to outcompete others in the capitalist contest for social power. Neoliberal narcissistic liberalism, then, is structured by a contradiction that combines democratic equality and capitalist competition: according to this ideology, everyone should have an equal opportunity to outcompete everyone else.Yet, the problem with this system is that the winners of the contest continually rewrite the rules so that they guarantee that they will continue to win, and they help to produce a class of losers, who often become the targets of their unconscious scorn. We can consider that underlying the pathology of liberal obsessional narcissism is a sense of guilt that has to be constantly shouted down by acts of conspicuous moral righteousness. Since liberals know at some level that they are part of a destructive system but still want to outcompete others in the system, they have to repress their guilt and replace it with evidence of their goodness. For example, liberals like to display their morality by driving hybrid cars and carrying organic cotton shopping bags that show their concern for the environment (Lander 2008). Likewise, large corporations like to advertise how diverse they are and how green they have become. Not only do these companies want to attract customers who desire to combine consumerism with political activism, but these companies also want to hide their own guilt behind a veil of goodness. Of course, one could say that I am simply following the right that attacks liberals for being hypocritical in their explicit acts of goodness (Brooks 2010). However, it is important to stress that while the right sees only hypocrisy, I see contradictions and unconscious motivations. Following Frank, this analysis seeks to answer the question of why the liberal class has failed to confront poverty and inequality: What ails the Democrats? So bravely forthright on cultural issues, their leaders fold when confronted with matters of basic economic democracy. Why? What is it about this set of issues that transforms Democrats into vacillating softies, convinced that the big social question is beyond their control? (Frank 2016: 15) For Chris Hedges in his Death of the Liberal Class, the answer is clear (Hedges 2011): liberals have sold out by focusing on their own careers and turning universities, unions, media outlets, and the Democratic party into mechanisms for personal advancement. Even though I also argue that this focus on personal gain is a big part of the problem, we also need to return to the psychoanalytic 155

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concept of obsessional narcissism to explain what allows people the ability to disregard how their actions contribute to the problems they bemoan. The narcissistic liberal personality is then trapped in a vicious cycle in which each effort to convince oneself that one is good results in guilt over one’s unconscious desires. For instance, the more a company tries to whitewash its destructive effects on the environment or its exploitation of workers, the more its board members feel guilty. Since the good self has to be split off from the bad self, there is no way to recognize the essential ambivalence and complexity of our capitalist existence and meritocratic elitism. From a psychoanalytic perspective, people have to confront their own complicity in the system and bring together the good and bad aspects of their personality, but the obsessional narcissist functions by constantly trying to separate the good self-image from the awareness of guilt, hostility, and immoral desire. Narcissistic liberal politicians therefore have a difficult time recognizing their role in the destructive aspects of meritocratic capitalism, because they cannot tolerate the negative self-image that is generated by their complicity with the system. In this context, educational meritocracy represents an unmitigated good that helps to shield the self from seeing one’s role in producing and maintaining inequality. Within the pathology of liberal obsessional narcissism, we discover that underneath all of the meritocratic ideals, there is a deep-seated hostility for those who exist outside the realm of professional credentialing. According to Frank, liberal meritocracy is based on constituting an idealized in-group and relegating all others to a debased and neglected status: Which is to say, a social order supported by test scores and advanced degrees and defended by the many professional associations that have been set up over the years to define correct practice, enforce professional ethics, and wage war on the unlicensed. (Frank 2016: 17) Liberal meritocracy therefore not only feeds the self-idealization and self-protection of the winners of the talent and education competition but also produces a disavowed hostility toward all of the losers of professional meritocracy. For instance, in higher education, tenured professors are rewarded for conforming to the expected professional standards, but the majority of faculty, who are never eligible for tenure, are devalued and excluded from professional concern or benefits. This focus on professional standards and licensing has played a major role in psychoanalysis and is at the center of Lacan’s critique of American psychoanalysis and American culture. Lacan argues that immigrant analysts escaping Europe during World War II were motivated to assimilate to the American way of life and solidify their profession by standardizing psychoanalysis and ultimately submitting it to psychiatry and the medical profession (Lacan 1977: 27, 27, 306–307). Lacan posits that this focus on assimilation showed up in the analytic practice where ego psychologists argued that patients should identify with the conflict-free, reality-testing ego of their analysts.Therefore, just as the analysts were identifying with American culture, so too were they motivating their patients to identify with them. Psychoanalysis then became a discourse of obsessional narcissistic conformity and normalization, so the practice itself participated in the repression of unconscious hostility and desire. Moreover, the credentialed analysts attacked the other analysts for not being part of the same professional standards. They also excluded Lacan for not following the standard model of treatment and diagnosis and eventually kicked him out of the International Psychoanalytic Association. For Frank, professionals and professional organizations represent the essential social structures of neoliberal meritocracy: Professionals are the people who know what ails us and who dispense valuable diagnoses. Professionals predict the weather. They organize our financial deals and determine 156

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the rules of engagement. They design our cities and draw the traffic patterns through which the rest of us travel. Professionals know when someone is guilty of a moral or criminal misdeed and they also know precisely what form of retribution that culpability should take. (Frank 2016: 22) Here we see how knowledge and professional monopolies collude to promote the narcissism of the meritocracy and the exclusiveness of liberal elitism; meanwhile, the liberal class plays the role of the superego, which judges the ability of the ideal ego to live up to the cultural standards of the ego ideal. Because the narcissistic liberal professional class shames anyone who fails to attain the meritocratic ideal, the liberal class itself turns into a structure of conformity and exclusion: Although we are the subjects of all these diagnoses and prescriptions, the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers (and, of course, their clients). They listen mainly to one another. The professions are autonomous; they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise. (Frank 2016: 23) Liberal professionals then participate in a mirroring system of Imaginary narcissistic discourse where they have to listen only to each other and not to people they consider to be beneath them or outside of their professional circles. Frank argues that professional meritocracy ideally works if the experts remain disinterested and not driven by personal profit or power: The professions are supposed to be disinterested occupations or even ‘social trustees’; unlike other elements of society, they are not supposed to be motivated by profit or greed. This is why we still find advertising by lawyers and doctors somewhat offputting, and why Americans were once shocked to learn that radio personalities took money to play records they didn’t genuinely like: professionals are supposed to answer to a spirit more noble than personal gain. With the rise of the postindustrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. (Frank 2016: 23) Frank represents here the core ideal of modern science and professional ethics, which is that truth is supposed to be pursued regardless of self-interest, and it is therefore necessary to constitute a separation between the professions and capitalism. However, in our current neoliberal meritocracy, science and capitalism are being combined as education, medicine, and law become a source for increased personal profit. As the exchange value replaces all other values in neoliberal culture, the professions lose their objectivity, neutrality, and universality and therefore undermine public trust.

The Culture of Liberal Narcissism The theory of (neo)liberal narcissism articulated here can be compared to Christopher Lasch’s influential book The Culture of Narcissism. This work was written in 1979, at the start of the neoliberal period, and seeks to apply the concept of narcissism to American society; however, this book is also a critique of therapy and the notion that liberals have retreated from politics 157

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to focus on their own self-development. In fact, his first main point is that the contemporary culture has replaced religion with therapy: ‘People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security’ (Lasch 1991: 7). Paradoxically, Lasch couples this turn to the narcissistic self with the loss of both the private life and the public life in contemporary culture (Lasch 1991: 9). He argues that the isolated narcissist has surrendered most of his or her skills and knowledge to experts, bureaucratic agencies, and corporations (Lasch 1991: 9–10). For instance, he posits that even families have become reliant on outside certified experts to raise their children (Lasch 1991: 10). The importance of this insight for liberal obsessional narcissism should be clear: as people outsource their most basic functions to experts, the liberal elite becomes invested in becoming the trusted elites, but they themselves become dependent on having their ideal ego verified by the ego ideal of meritocratic scrutiny. In other words, one of the central contradictions of narcissism is the idea that the more one focuses on one’s self, the more one becomes dependent on the recognition of others. Lasch affirms that ‘the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience’ (Lasch 1991: 10). He then adds that the apparent freedom of the modern individual from traditional restraints results in an underlying sense of insecurity that has to be compensated by seeing ‘the grandiose self reflected in the attention of others’ (Lasch 1991: 10).Thus, while Freud focuses on the unconscious hostility of the obsessional and the narcissistic need for an ideal ego to be verified by the ideal Other, Lasch highlights the insecurity of the liberated individual. From this perspective, it is not that the liberal narcissist has to repress and project his or her own aggression to maintain an ideal ego verified by an ego ideal; rather, the ideal ego and ego ideal hide and compensate for the underlying sense of nothingness and aloneness. Lasch compares contemporary narcissists to ‘animals whose instincts have withered in captivity’ (Lasch 1991: 11), because one of the leading symptoms is a sense of boredom and the inability to feel. According to this conception of narcissism, the ego defenses have been built up to such an extent that all real emotions have been blocked.The emptiness of the narcissistic subject then comes from the need to purify the good ideal ego by removing any strong sense of hostility, which would call into question the moral superiority of the self. As I have been stressing in relation to liberal narcissism, the ego ideal has to repress the superego because as Freud insists, the superego makes the subject feel guilty for not living up to the ego ideal, and yet the superego also gains its power from the primitive id.2 The compulsive guilt of the liberal conscience, then, has to be constantly shouted down by acts and thoughts of moral purification. Lasch’s insightful analysis of the contemporary narcissistic personality reveals a splitting of the subject: ‘Outwardly bland, submissive, and sociable, they seethe with an inner anger for which a dense, overpopulated, bureaucratic society can devise few legitimate outlets’ (Lasch 1991: 11). What Lasch fails to anticipate in this passage is the role that popular media has played in giving liberal narcissists a safe space to project their rage. On one level, we find the compliant obsessional who conforms to the other through exhaustive work, and on another level, the hostility toward others is denied and projected. Lasch adds that all of the older models of the superego— fathers, teachers, and preachers—have been called into question, so the social conscience is undermined (Lasch 1991: 11). In fact, he follows many other American therapists and theorists by arguing that the new model of the superego is based on the pre-oedipal mother, who terrorizes the subject with irrational demands and punishments; moreover, the source of this punishing maternal superego is the projection of the subject’s own rage onto the mother (Lasch 1991: 38). The paradox that Lasch returns to is that as society becomes more permissive: the superego becomes more unconscious and punitive (Lasch 1991: 12). The idea here is that when cultural authority figures lose their credibility, the superego becomes defined by the primitive fantasies 158

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of the child who experiences rage in relation to the inability of the parents to satisfy all of the child’s needs (Lasch 1991: 12 n. 1). In terms of contemporary politics, we can use Lasch’s descriptions of the narcissistic personality to understand why the new liberal class is so riddled with guilt and shame: due to their need to avoid ambivalence and moral ambiguity, evil has to be repressed and projected. Often the targets of these projections are the same minority subjects that the liberal class says it wants to help, and here we see one way that altruism can turn into exploitation. For instance, not only are people of color celebrated by liberal narcissists for their cultural and athletic accomplishments, but this idealization hides an aggressive objectification and debasement of the Other. It should be no surprise then that someone like Bill Clinton could position himself to be the hero of African Americans while he demonized them through welfare reform and enhanced drug sentencing. Lasch attacks therapeutic culture for enabling the liberal narcissist by focusing on the patient’s immediate emotional needs and not some broader social meaning like ‘submission to a higher loyalty’ (Lasch 1991: 13). In many ways, Lasch’s criticism of liberal narcissism sounds like a traditional conservative lament against the godless libertarians, but he also attacks the radicals of the 1960s for moving away from progressive politics by turning their focus onto self-help and personal development (Lasch 1991: 14). In his criticism of the former 1960s radical Jerry Rubin, for example, he traces the movement from revolutionary politics to an obsession with self-help (Lasch 1991: 15–18). From Lasch’s critical perspective, Rubin, and so many other former leftists, used therapy to focus on their narcissistic desire to have their own fantasies and identities affirmed by society and themselves (Lasch 1991: 15). In short, Lasch highlights the transition from political hysterics to liberal obsessional narcissists. This cultural and psychological history helps us to expand the common understanding of narcissism. Ultimately, Lasch positions narcissism as a defense against a loss of social trust, a fear of aging and death, and a pervasive sense of insecurity. In other words, for Lasch, the culture of narcissism is the culture of the neoliberal United States, which is spreading throughout the world. As capitalism extends its disruptive forces into all aspects of human experience, the retreat to the idealized self appears to be the preferred pathology, and yet as Lasch stresses, the self is dependent on an imagined Other. The dependency of the ideal ego on the ego ideal forces the narcissist to constantly compete with others to gain attention and recognition, and for Lasch, this structure ties the personal to the political. In other words, narcissism is a social pathology because it links up the desiring subject to the verifying Other. Moreover, Lasch insists that the central problem of the culture of narcissism is not simply this focus on the self; rather, the main issue is that the personal and private realms are under siege due to the destabilizing nature of (neoliberal) capitalism (Lasch 1991: 30). He posits that deep and sustained loving relations are undermined by a competition of all against all, and in this context, the turn to therapy and self-development functions to hide the true social causes of suffering (Lasch 1991: 30). Liberal narcissism, then, entails the privatization of public failure. Importantly, for Lasch, the concept of a narcissistic personality disorder should not be confused with a general conception of human selfishness: he stresses that this pathology has a specific cultural and historical context and has more to do with a defense against aggression than a focus on the self (Lasch 1991: 32). Lasch stresses the paradoxical combination of living vicariously through others and fearing all forms of dependency as he seeks to compare and contrast Freud’s original notion of neurotic narcissism from the more contemporary conception of the narcissistic personality disorder (Lasch 1991: 33). This distinction is necessary because many post-Freudians have argued that narcissists do not fit Freud’s conception of hysteria and 159

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obsessional neurosis, and one of their main arguments is that people suffering from narcissistic personality disorders cannot be analyzed, because they cannot tolerate any perceived criticism or any level of regression (Lasch 1991: 37). However, the theory of obsessional narcissism presented here counters that Freud’s conception of obsessional neurosis does explain the post-Freudian diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, and furthermore, a focus on the pathology of contemporary liberalism helps to elucidate the importance of Freud’s original theory to current diagnostic definitions. Although many contemporary therapists and theorists believe that Freud’s model of sexual repression is no longer viable in a culture of permissive expression and liberated desire, Lasch highlights how these post-Freudians fail to understand Freud’s basic insights regarding human subjectivity, and yet Lasch also wants to point to a shift in the nature of capitalism from Freud’s age to the 1970s to show how ‘[e]very age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology’ (Lasch 1991: 41). From this perspective, Freud’s structures of neurosis reflected industrial capitalism’s focus on ‘acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality’ (Lasch 1991: 41). While obsessional neurotics engaged in acts of purification, like hand washing, what we find with narcissistic personality disorders is that the physical symptoms have been translated into social manifestations: instead of washing his hands, the liberal broadcasts his good deeds. Furthermore, Lasch points out that in the new structure of capitalism, the narcissist’s ability to manipulate interpersonal relations and engage in superficial relationships is rewarded (Lasch 1991: 44). Narcissism here represents a successful adaptation to neoliberal capitalism, but it leaves the subject feeling empty and alone. It is as if when one conforms to a superficial culture, one feels superficial and therefore void of meaning and purpose. The emptiness of the narcissist is combined with the anxiety and shame of not living up to one’s internalized cultural ideals, so obsessional guilt is turned into narcissistic insecurity and repressed self-doubt. Ultimately, for Lasch, a cultural fear of death and aging drives narcissism. The New World simply fears getting old, so the past and the future have to be denied as one seeks pleasure in the present. From a political perspective, this denial of death by liberal narcissists means that there is no way to learn from the past or save the future. Obsessional liberal narcissism in the age of neoliberalism means that one freely chooses one’s alienation and subjection to the dominant meritocracy.

Conclusion Although Freud’s initial theories of narcissism focused on explaining self-love and the unity of the ego, we have seen how this theory can be expanded to help us to explain the psychology of neoliberal liberalism. Since the narcissistic subject seeks to have the ideal ego recognized by the ego ideal, one has to try to escape from all criticism as one seeks to receive validation from others. In this desire to escape from guilt and shame, one superficially complies to social dictates in an obsessional manner. From a political perspective, this theory of narcissism allows us to explain why it is so hard for liberal politicians to learn from their mistakes and why they place such an emphasis on looking good in the eyes of others. The theory of narcissism also provides deep insight to the liberal focus on educational meritocracy. One reason why our culture is so obsessed by ranking and rating everything is that we need a way for our ego ideal to verify our ideal ego. In the Imaginary structure of narcissism, the ideal ‘I’ is equivalent to the ideal ‘eye’, and in this formation, one experiences life through the imagined expectations of others. Psychoanalysis therefore teaches us that the narcissistic focus on the self is really a focus on how we think others think about us.

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Notes 1 . For more on education, inequality, and meritocracy, see my Educating Inequality (Samuels 2017). 2. As Lacan insists, Freud does not always effectively differentiate between the ego ideal and the superego, which is itself a symptom of obsessional neurosis.

References Brooks, D. (2010) Bobos in Paradise, New York: Simon and Schuster. Frank, T. (2016) Listen, Liberal: Or,What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, New York: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1962) The Ego and the Id, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Freud, S. (1963) ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in General Psychological Theory, New York: Macmillan. Hedges, C. (2011) Death of the Liberal Class, New York:Vintage Books. Hegel, G.W.F. (1998) Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kohut, H. (2009) How Does Analysis Cure? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacan, J. (1988) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, New York:W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,Vol. 1, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2001) Écrits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lander, C. (2008) Stuff White People Like, New York: Random House. Lasch, C. (1991) The Culture of Narcissism, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Samuels, R. (2017) Educating Inequality: Beyond the Political Myths of Higher Education and the Job Market, New York: Routledge.

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12 AFFECT AND EMOTION Candida Yates

The emotive, polarized nature of contemporary politics is now widely recognized and reflects what is termed the affective turn in political studies (Demertzis 2013; Lillekar 2014; Richards 2007, 2018;Thompson and Hoggett 2012;Yates 2015). Psychoanalytic theory has much to contribute to this emerging field of study. Whether one is discussing the UK decision to leave the European Union or the love or loathing of politicians such as Donald Trump, psychoanalytic accounts of affect and emotion are especially useful because they can shed light on the powerful and seemingly irrational feelings that are experienced in such political contexts. The emotionalization of contemporary politics is linked to a number of factors, including the mediatization of politics and the rise of new methods of political communication that stir up the emotions and enable their expression through social media and interactive media platforms. Such developments tap into the socioeconomic forces of globalization, war, the displacement of people and the emotional experience of precarity that has emerged as a consequence of such developments (Standing 2011). The loss of faith in the political narratives that once shaped collective identities within national and global contexts has created fear and uncertainty and a distrust of the other. In Western democracies, the growth of emotive single-issue identity politics has also contributed to the emotionalization of the contemporary political scene and coincides with what some have termed therapeutic culture (Richards 2007), where the erosion of the boundaries between personal and public experience has led to the increasingly personalized, emotive style and content of political culture today. The growth of a celebrity-oriented, promotional style of political culture has also played a role in this process, contributing to the personalization of politics and its leaders, helping to shape the experience of political citizenship in affective terms (Yates 2015). The emotional dynamics of Western political culture are present in the populist style and content of party politics and its related campaigns, such as in the UK referendum on membership of the European Union in 2016 (referred to as Brexit) or Donald Trump’s emotional rallying call to ‘make America great again’ during the 2016 US presidential election. The emotive nationalist populism of those two campaigns and their aftermath echo a wider shift in democratic political systems in Europe that were evident in election campaigns in the Netherlands and Hungary in 2016 and France in 2017,1 where populist right-wing candidates mobilized support through highly emotive campaigns that fed fears about immigration and the loss of national identity.2 162

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This chapter explores the complexity of the relationship between politics, affect and emotion through an analysis that draws on different psychoanalytic perspectives to examine the affective dynamics of Brexit in the United Kingdom and the rise of Donald Trump and his appeal in the United States, where the emotive language of love, hate, and desire was, in various ways, used to court the electorate. While political sociology (Salmela and Von Scheve 2014) and political cognitive psychology (Lillekar 2014) address the significance of emotion in political campaigns and in the political field more widely, a psychoanalytic reading of affect and politics focuses on the hidden psychical forces that drive the mobilization of affect in campaigns such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump. It enables the researcher to explore the layers of feeling that may influence the support for a political position or politician such as Donald Trump, by providing a lens through which to examine the context of that support through the analysis of unconscious desires, fantasies and affects that emerge as a response to the losses of identity in the late modern world. The chapter begins by clarifying the terms of the discussion in an introduction to the meanings of emotion and affect when applied to the field of politics, and it then applies the ideas of Jacques Lacan to the affective political terrain of nationalism and the 2016 UK referendum to leave the European Union. The chapter then turns to object relations theory by applying the ideas of Melanie Klein to examine the affective, gendered dynamics of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US presidential election campaign; the ideas of Donald Woods Winnicott (1971) and Christopher Bollas (1987) are then discussed in relation to the appeal of Donald Trump as a psychosocial object of attachment for his followers.

Psychoanalytic Understandings of Emotion and Affect The relationship between politics, affect, and emotion is both complex and contested, and the two terms—affect and emotion—are sometimes used interchangeably to denote conscious and unconscious states of feeling. Nonetheless, from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is generally agreed that while emotions are rooted in social and historical discourse and ideas, they always carry with them traces of conflict that are shaped by the dynamic forces of the unconscious (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008; Thompson and Hoggett 2012). Freud (1915) linked the concept of affect to his notion of repression, which he argued was also bound up with the hidden desires and conflicts of the Oedipus complex. It is sometimes said that people experience unconscious emotions, and yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is the forbidden idea (as in the desire to murder one’s father), that is repressed, not the experience of affect itself.Thus, the anger or rivalrous feeling once connected with a wish to murder one’s father becomes displaced and linked to the experience of anger toward something or someone else—such as the anger felt toward one’s boss or to a political leader. While emotions are linked to unconscious processes, it is the idea and not the feeling of affect that is repressed. As Lacan (2007: 189) argued, ‘affect through the fact of displacement is effectively displaced, unidentified, broken off from its roots—it eludes us’. In this chapter, then, the unconscious aspects of emotional experience are defined as affect, which for Lacan (1977) is bound up with the workings of desire and the law of the father; for Melanie Klein (1957), in the powerful ambivalent feelings and phantasies that are stirred up in relation to early infantile fantasies of the mother; and for Winnicott (1971), who also foregrounded the significance of the mother, the experience of love and sometimes hate that creates a potential space for hope, trust, and meaningful communication with others. While these three psychoanalytic perspectives on affect draw on different traditions,3 they nonetheless share a psychoanalytic concern with unconscious affective processes that find symbolic expression through the subject’s relationship to real and imagined others. 163

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Freud (1921, 1930) and subsequent psychoanalytic writers remind us that the psychodynamics of affect extend beyond the experience of the individual to that of the group and society, so that the processes of affect play a role in shaping the ideas, norms, and discourses of politics, culture, and society at different moments in history. As Freud (1921: 95) argued, ‘the contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely’. Thus, a key aspect of the approach taken here is that psychoanalytic understandings of politics interweave with those from the sphere of culture, politics, and society. With that psychosocial orientation in mind, it is important to pay attention to the social, cultural, and unconscious levels of affective politics throughout the course of the discussion.

Politics, Affect, and Desire in the UK Referendum Campaign Fueled by the forces of social media and late modern methods of political communication, emotions play a significant role in shaping the dynamics of late modern political culture (Demertzis 2013; Lillekar 2014). Freud (1921) argued that such emotional group processes are bound up with the experience of narcissistic identification, both with other members of the group and through the idealization of the leader as the symbolic father. Freud traced these desires and identifications back to the Oedipus complex, and the fantasy father is key to Freud’s thinking in this respect. Freud’s emphasis on the significance of narcissism and also the father in shaping subjectivity and group experience is also foregrounded in Lacan’s theory of the affective subject—albeit in symbolic form through language and systems of representation. Derek Hook (2011) deploys Lacanian theory to examine the relationship between affect and identification in nationalist political contexts.4 Hook’s methodology is useful for a political analysis of affect because he escapes the potential ahistorical universalism of a psychoanalytic approach that essentializes it as a libidinal force divorced from the realm of ideas and discourse in which it operates. Instead, he mobilizes a psychosocial reading of affect that sees it as functioning in and across different levels of political experience that include excessive libidinal affect on the one hand and the inherited symbolic structures of history, culture, and society on the other. Lacan identified three registers of the psyche and experience: first, the libidinal level of the Real; second, the level of the Imaginary, which is associated with the narcissistic identifications of the mirror phase; and, third, the Symbolic mode of identification, which is linked to the patriarchal structures of history, culture, and society and to one’s place in the social order (Lacan 1977). Like Lacan, Hook emphasizes the interaction of these three registers and applies them to affective modes of political identification, using nationalism as a focus to examine how these identifications operate. A good example of such affective processes at work in a nationalist context could be seen in the 2016 UK Brexit campaign, when the day after the vote to leave the European Union in June of that year, the former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader, Nigel Farage, announced portentously to the assembled press that ‘The dawn is breaking on an independent United Kingdom’ (Williams 2016). In that speech, Nigel Farage mobilized the emotional discourse of populism to say that this was a ‘victory’ for ‘the real people, for the ordinary people, for the decent people’ (Williams 2016). Here, the affective dimensions of Nigel Farage’s speech intersect with sociocultural discourses and historical prejudices about Europe that are condensed through the trope of the ‘plucky Englishmen’ rising up against the mythical foe of Europe. One can see the processes of the unconscious at work in this instance because while Nigel Farage’s words express a desire for national unity against the other of Europe, that desire also resonates unconsciously with an imaginary desire for unity with the other (which, paradoxically, could be 164

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the same other as Europe)—a desire that is linked to the identification with the ego ideal of the mirror phase (Lacan 1977: 1–8). In other words, the imaginary desire for the other (which could be the imagined community of the UK or, as indicated, Europe) is also bound up with feelings of rivalry and aggression toward the other who threatens to disturb the fantasy of unity with the ego ideal (ibid.). Robert Samuels (2016) argues that the duality between self and other that operates unconsciously in the register of the imaginary is often powerfully present in the current forces of right-wing nationalist politics. He says that against a contemporary political backdrop of fear, risk, and economic uncertainty, the unpredictable and aggressive forces of the imaginary operate and shape group identity. As we have seen, these unconscious forces were present in UKIP’s campaign to leave the European Union and Nigel Farage’s disavowal of the anger and symbolic violence of his own campaign to leave the European Union provide a further instance of how affect shapes the language of political culture and the fantasies that circulate within it. For example, in Nigel Farage’s 2016 speech after the UK referendum, he said that they had won the vote to leave the European Union without ‘a single bullet being fired’ (Williams 2016). This claim ignored the fact that Jo Cox, the pro-Remain Labour MP (member of parliament) for the constituency of Bately and Spen, was murdered by a member of an extreme right-wing nationalist party called Britain First and that this murder occurred on the day that Farage unveiled a UKIP campaign poster that was widely condemned by MPs and by the public as inciting racial hatred (Stone 2016).The poster, which some have likened to images of Nazi propaganda, depicts a long, winding queue of what seems to be mainly non-white migrants and refugees with the words: ‘Breaking point: the EU has failed us all’ (Stewart and Mason 2016). The affective dynamics of politics that I have discussed were manifest in that UKIP poster and were acted out through the murder of Jo Cox. The patriotic platitudes of UKIP and its flag-waving call for national unity combined with an aggressive and rivalrous renunciation of difference, as symbolized in the image of the foreign asylum seeker who is represented in that poster and in other promotional material as the other and as threatening the identity of Britain and its citizens. In such imagery, the implied collapse of state boundaries elides with anxieties about the loss of psychic boundaries through the merging of the self with an omnipotent other. The UKIP discourse of Brexit was also gendered in its emotional appeal, tapping into the identification with the fantasy of the father and a return to a traditional order of paternal inheritance. As with other UK male politicians, such as Boris Johnson, who campaigned to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage’s seductive brand of traditional, retrosexual English masculinity was for some a significant factor in appealing to voters and getting his message across. As a progressive, pro-European female MP and mother, Jo Cox represented the very opposite, and her femininity was a marked cultural signifier of difference in that respect. For many of her constituents and colleagues, she was widely admired as applying an empathetic approach to her work as an MP (BBC News 2016). Her public persona foregrounded her cultural and political identity as a woman and politician whose passionate advocacy of vulnerable groups both in her constituency and in Syria marked her out as different from what Irigaray termed the same of a masculinized public political sphere that remains patriarchal in terms of its tone, attitude, and gender balance (Irigaray 1995).

Politics and Affect: Object Relations Perspectives The affective forces of right-wing nationalist politics with its deployment of emotive populist tropes (as in the UKIP Brexit campaign) are often driven by the dynamics of envy, rivalry, and narcissism, and object relations psychoanalysis provides a useful analytical framework to explore 165

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such processes. From an object relations perspective, the development of subjectivity is bound up with the emotional experience of relating to objects, and its theories have been applied to the sphere of politics and emotion in the United Kingdom and the United States (Hoggett 2015; Layton 2006; Richards 2007, 2018; Yates 2015, 2018). From this standpoint, the ego is shaped from birth by the excesses of unconscious fantasy, and the experience of affect is always bound up with relationships to real and imagined objects of both the mind and the environment. As the name implies, object relations theory is concerned with the relational dynamics of subjectivity, and while those such as Melanie Klein (1946) focus on the instinctual roots of fantasy and its relationship to the embodied experience of affect, others such as Donald Winnicott (1971), foreground the interactive nature of relating to the object and the mother as the first psychosocial object. As I discuss, the ideas of both Klein and Winnicott can be used to examine the affective dynamics of politics in the 21st century.

Phantasies of the Phallic Mother in Political Culture The conscious and unconscious envy of women in the public political sphere can be explored using the ideas of Melanie Klein (1946, 1957). Her theories of affect and the unconscious emphasize the embodied and often destructive nature of emotional experience and phantasy that are present from birth.5 For Klein and others influenced by her work (Segal 1988), affective experience has its roots in phantasies of the mother in the first months of life. Klein argued that infants are born into the world with a capacity for envy, which is linked to life and death drives. The feelings of envy that she describes are related to the helpless dependency of the infant, who begins life in what she terms the paranoid-schizoid position, where reality is viewed through a split world of idealized good and bad objects. The infant protects itself by developing defense mechanisms that include splitting, projection, and projective identification (expelling unwanted anxieties onto the other and then responding to those projections) and envious attacks on the maternal object, who is the source of life and food (but who also has the power to take it away). Gradually, however, the paranoid-schizoid mode of processing experience gives way to the depressive position, where the child learns to manage paranoid anxiety and cope with the loss of omnipotence and manage the complexity of emotional ambivalence. However, the states of mind associated with the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions continue to influence how the subject relates to the world (Klein 1957). Klein’s ideas are evocative when applied to the discourse and culture of politics in an era of right-wing populism where, for example, anxieties about the boundaries of the nation-state also resonate with mental states of citizens and the boundaries of the mind (Richards 2018). One can develop the application of these ideas to examine the unwanted feelings that are projected onto the despised and abject other and also the splitting of countries and ethnic groups into categories of good and bad. There are numerous examples in which one can arguably see such processes at work that are not exclusive to the phenomena of right-wing nationalism and the exploitation of populist sentiment and expression. Nonetheless, one can argue that the concept of projection as discussed by Klein and others resonates powerfully when applied to images of the UKIP Brexit campaign and the paranoid-schizoid mood that surfaced and that continued to find expression subsequently in Brexit negotiations and in related media commentary. In that media environment, opposing views about the exit from Europe were split into ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ positions, and the sections press labeled opponents of the government stance as ‘traitors’ (Morris 2017). The psychoanalytic conceptual framework of Klein, with its emphasis on the phantasy of the omnipotent mother, is highly evocative when applied to the affective, gendered identifications 166

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that are mobilized in relation to political leaders in different contexts. Just as Lacan’s theory of the symbolic father can be used to examine the unconscious phallic appeal of male leaders such as Donald Trump, a Kleinian perspective can be helpful when exploring phantasies of the female leader as an overbearing, persecutory, or withholding mother. To escape charges of essentialism, such an approach needs to be interwoven with attention to the historical and sociopolitical specificities of time and place. Nonetheless, this mode of analysis is useful when discussing cultural anxieties about female politicians who are demonized as risky, overemotional, or somehow unnatural because they are not emotional enough—as in the case of Hillary Clinton, who has been variously criticized for being hard, nasty, calculating, inhuman, and cold (Bordo 2016). As is well documented, while male politicians such as Bill Clinton,Tony Blair, and Vladamir Putin can shed tears in public and also show a ‘softer’ or ‘human’ side by identifying themselves as fathers and family men (Yates 2012), women have a different psychopolitical and cultural settlement with the public and must be wary of using those strategies in case they appear too vulnerable and prone to risk (Evans 2009). The 2016 US election provided a good example of the gendered division of emotion within the public arena of political culture. As Thompson and Yates (2016) argue, there was a marked contrast in the ‘embodied attributes and emotions’ that were ascribed to each candidate. In particular, they note that while Donald Trump was in fact the older candidate with respiratory problems (for example, wheezing in his public debates) and showing a poor recall for facts (Graham 2016), it was Clinton’s age and physical frailty that dominated press reports of her throughout the election. Against a well-documented backdrop of social uncertainty and risk (Beck 1992; Bauman 2000), it was as if the political body of the electorate managed their fears of fragmentation by projecting them onto ‘the image of corrupt and abject political body’ of Clinton herself, whose body became a focus for cultural anxieties about late modernity and social change (Thompson and Yates 2016). The construction of Clinton as cold and devoid of human warmth and emotion reinforced an impression of her as being untrustworthy and false, as in Trump’s ugly name for her: ‘crooked Hillary’. The representation of Clinton as an unfeeling political crook who merely reproduced the old neoliberal order contrasted both with the apparent authenticity of fellow Democrat politician Bernie Sanders left-of-center populist appeal and with the image of Donald Trump’s emotionally charged address to the left behind voters who looked to him to save them from a bleak future of social and economic precarity. The left behind voter was a term used by political scientists Ford and Goodwin (2014) to describe the demographic grouping who supported UKIP and other right-wing parties, who felt ignored by the government and resented globalization and whose cultural values were deemed old-fashioned and even distasteful by those in power. The debate about the left behinds can be framed economically in terms of those who have not benefited from neoliberalism (Goodwin and Heath 2016; Inglehart and Norris 2016), and in the United States the debate is often framed in terms of race (Coates 2017). Some have also noted the significance of the cultural and educational divide between these groups and the power and privilege of those who in popular discourse are referred to in pejorative terms as the metropolitan elite (Goodhart 2017).6 There is a close analogy between the UK left behind group of citizens and those in the United States. Both groups helped to fuel the populist protest that in the United Kingdom swayed the Brexit vote and that in the United States helped to bring Donald Trump in to power (Hochschild 2016). Donald Trump used the term left behind in his campaigns and in his inauguration speech in relation to what he said were ‘the millions and millions of workers left behind’ (Telegraph Video 2017). The concept of being left behind is an affectively powerful one that connotes being left out,7 unloved, dropped, and ignored by those political leaders who are 167

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meant to take care of you. The perception by large groups of people in the United Kingdom in relation to Brexit and by Donald Trump supporters in the United States of being ignored by mainstream parties and governments was and is not without foundation, and it rests on a complex mix of factors related to material inequality and anxieties about cultural difference. And yet the excessive affective force of hatred and vitriol that was and continues to be directed at Hillary Clinton as a member of the elite also brings to mind the affective phantasies of the monstrous maternal body discussed by Klein with reference to the paranoid-schizoid position. Here, one can argue that Clinton’s positioning as a member of the elite taps into an envious phantasy of the corrupt political body reproducing itself at the expense of the electorate and keeping all the political goodness to itself. Clinton’s femininity seems to reinforce this perverse image of mechanical reproduction in an age of promotional politics, a phantasy image that is represented as both unnatural and yet also as somehow inevitable. From this perspective, one could say that Clinton’s status as the wife of former president Bill Clinton contributes to an envious phantasy of exclusion from the all-powerful oedipal couple who are both preoccupied with themselves ‘and their kind’ and who seem to care little for those economically and culturally left behind (Hochschild 2016). The widespread rumor that Hillary Clinton sanctioned and therefore ‘enabled’ her husband’s sexual infidelity (Twohey 2016) not only reinforces a phantasy of her ruthless phallic femininity but also evokes the unconscious scenario of the omnipotent ‘combined parent’ discussed by Klein in her exploration of infantile helplessness and paranoid-schizoid states of mind (Segal 1988: 108–109).

Shame, the Good Parent, and Fantasies of Attachment In contrast to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump was able to project a political persona that for his followers was both exciting and affirming. As a glamorous, high-profile entrepreneur in the United States who has been in the public eye since the 1980s, he consolidated his status as a celebrity businessman on the US version of the reality show The Apprentice (2004–2015). His identity as an icon of popular television indicates the extent to which celebrity culture and politics are now closely imbricated, and the myth of his competence stemmed from his performance as the strong and decisive leader on that show (Yates 2018). Richard Sennett (1977) argued that the development of personality-driven politics is also linked to the emergence of secular charisma, where the residual envy or ressentiment of voters in relation to powerful politicians in social-democratic societies is warded off by focusing on the personality and image of politicians rather than substantial political issues and policies.8 This description is pertinent when applied to the affective appeal of Donald Trump at a time when in the lead-up to his election victory in 2016, the dynamics of nationalist populism, and ressentiment converged with that of celebrity politics. Donald Trump showed his dexterity as a politician by deflecting onto Clinton the populist anger that was felt toward the establishment of which he (given his wealth and connections) was and is also a part. Using the playful words that are reminiscent of 1950s Hollywood B movies, Donald Trump deflected voters’ anger onto what he likes to call ‘the Swamp’ of ‘Washington insiders’, a phrase which—like ‘build the wall’, or with reference to Hilary Clinton, ‘lock her up!’—he and his followers like to chant in the manner of a school playground game, where the anger is used as a form of bonding as any potential ressentiment aimed at him, and his privilege is, in effect, gathered up and projected elsewhere. During his election campaign, Donald Trump’s appeal as a leader was achieved in part through his glamour as a television personality and through a form of faux intimacy that he created as he offered himself up as an object of attachment for his supporters. Alongside the ritual chanting games at his rallies, his success was also linked to the passionate declarations of love and empathy 168

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that he seemed to have for those citizens who normally feel despised and unloved by establishment politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who referred to them as ‘a basket of deplorables’.9 As Donald Trump said in his 2017 inauguration speech: ‘Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body. And I will never ever let you down’ (Telegraph Video 2017). Donald Trump’s skill has arguably been to tap into a vein of shame among those citizens who cannot provide for their families and who reject or feel left behind by the forces of modernity, globalization, and the values of social liberalism. The discourse of shame and the fantasies that circulate in relation to it have been a recurrent motif in late modern politics in a number of contexts,10 and they have also been articulated in relation to both Brexit and to the rise of Donald Trump. In both contexts, shame has played a role in stigmatizing groups such as welfare and benefit claimants and refugees, all of whom are defined as abject and who are made to carry that shame on behalf of others. Object relations psychoanalysis traces feelings of shame back to an early infantile stage of development, when the young child fails to be mirrored by its parent, and this failure creates a narcissistic wound that provides the basis for the ontology of shame in later life (Mollon 2002). This experience, which is linked to a failure of attachment, also resonates when applied to those citizens who feel rejected and misrecognized by the governing classes (Yates 2018). Such a scenario provides a context for the appeal of Donald Trump for his supporters because despite his macho authoritarian persona, he nonetheless presents himself as an object for those seeking to identify with the image of the leader as a strong, caring, and empathetic provider. The idea of nation as a transitional object is apt in this context. For Winnicott (1971), the latter is the infant’s first ‘not-me’ object, and its use helps the infant to move from his or her primary identification with the maternal object into a world of external objects. In so doing, it helps to bridge the divide that opens up when the infant perceives and begins to understand the outside world. One can argue that Donald Trump uses a nostalgic idea of nation in the form of a consoling transitional object that functions in a regressive fashion to manage the losses of identity that are also bound up with the object of the ‘American dream’ that cannot be mourned or let go (Yates 2018). This argument can be extended through the application of Christopher Bollas’s (1987) theory of the transformational object. Bollas develops Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object to explore the world of object relating and its role in shaping subjectivity. Bollas describes an earlier, more primary object relation for the infant, which he calls the transformational object. In pre-verbal experience, the adaptation of the maternal figure to the infant’s needs transforms the infant’s experience from pain or anxiety to comfort and safety.This experience of the infant that is provided by the mother becomes unconsciously internalized as a transformational object. Winnicott (1960) said that at times of uncertainty and change, the outside world is experienced as an impingement. For many, Donald Trump seems to offer a secondary shield against that sense of impingement, which, to further extend the language of Winnicott, contributes to a national ‘false self ’ (1971) that functions as a defense against the imagined enemy that Trump himself creates. The avoidance of vulnerability through a public rhetoric of power is a recurring theme of contemporary politics more generally. When Donald Trump promises to restore the nation to some notion of its former glory, he seems to offer himself as a transformational object, and yet this would be a distortion of the process that Bollas (1987) described (albeit in the context of child development). In the case of the latter, the experience of transformation is brought about by the mother’s adaptation to the needs and anxieties of her infant. Donald Trump’s version is not adaptation but rather a defensive triumph over vulnerability and the fantasies of dangerous femininity associated with the risk of the unreliable mother—as indicated in the discussion of 169

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Hillary Clinton in this chapter. In this way, his promise of transformation is essentially underpinned by control, and at the level of fantasy, its collective appeal seems to operate culturally as a form of manic defense against the unknown.

Conclusion This chapter has used the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and others, such as Bollas, to examine the affective processes of two nationalist populist political campaigns that used the language of emotion to appeal to those sections of the public who feel alienated and left behind by the social, cultural, and economic forces of globalization in the late modern age. As we have seen, the emotions that are galvanized in those contexts also tap into deeper psychic structures and drivers of affect that are related to the dynamics of desire, rivalry, envy, love, and loss. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, a significant factor in the affective dynamics of contemporary political culture is the mediatization of politics and the role played by popular culture in helping to shape the emotional dynamics of political citizenship today. One can argue that the structures of subjectivity, popular culture, and politics are closely interwoven and the cultural glue or cement that links them are the feelings and emotions that shape subjectivity at any one time (Yates 2015). The political events that I have discussed (of Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States) provide good examples of that process at work, because they were both shaped by the cultural forces of political culture in a media age. Citizens invest emotionally in political formations and also in the forms of common sense that emerge at different historical periods, which is an idea that draws on Raymond Williams’s (1977: 132) notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ as ‘thought as felt, and feeling as thought’. Thus, political culture provides the spaces in which cultural, political, and emotional aspects of experience come together and are continually shaped and symbolized. The symbols and signs created in that domain become a focus in the struggle for power, meaning, and identity. In this way, the affective structures of culture and identity are not external to the political sphere but very much part of it. As this chapter has shown, psychoanalysis provides a rich, conceptual and theoretical apparatus that allows us to capture the psychosocial and cultural mechanisms that produce the structures of feeling that shape the affective dynamics of political culture and its campaigns in the contemporary late modern era. Applying theories of the unconscious allows one to go beyond the socioeconomic and sociocultural accounts of the emotionalization of politics and it enables us to instead confront the powerful psychodynamic currents and investments that underpin that process. Such an approach contributes to the emerging field of psychopolitical studies, which is a timely move given the complex and emotive nature of political culture today.

Notes 1. Populism is a contested term (Canovan 1999), but historian Michael Kazin (1998: 1) defines populism as ‘a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilise the former against the latter’. The emotional dimensions of populism and its relationship to processes of affect and unconscious fantasy are discussed in this chapter. 2. The leaders of these right-wing campaigns included the Dutch politician Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom, Norbert Hofer of the Hungarian Freedom Party, and Marine Le Pen of the French National Front Party. 3. Klein and Winnicott both belong to the British school of object relations psychoanalysis, and yet there are differences of emphasis between the two: Winnicott focuses less on innate drives and instincts and

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Affect and Emotion more on the subject’s psychosocial relationship with the environment. Both Klein and Lacan emphasize the importance of the drive (see Borossa et al. 2015). 4. In psychoanalysis, identification refers to the formation of the subject through the process of ‘taking in’ the other. 5. Klein (1957) referred to unconscious fantasy as phantasy. I also use the spelling ‘phantasy’ when deploying her theory in this section of the chapter. 6. In the United Kingdom, the concept of the metropolitan elite was widely used to discredit the governmentbacked pro-Remain campaigners. See, for example, the following article in the pro-Brexit UK Newspaper The Daily Mail: ‘Metropolitan elite out of touch with ordinary “ghastly” Britons’ (Drury 2016). 7. Obama referred to this group as ‘folks who feel left out’ (King 2016). 8. Ressentiment is a contested term, and its different uses are related to different philosophical traditions. From a psychoanalytic perspective, ressentiment can be used in a similar way to Melanie Klein’s concepts of envy and projective identification. For further discussion, see Clarke (2006). 9. Clinton apologized for her comments the next day. See CNN Politics [online] 9 September 2016: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-basket-of-deplorables/ [accessed 28 April 2017]. 10. Including, for example, the unacknowledged debts of postcolonialism (Venn 2006) and of gender and sexuality (Munt 2012) and the repressed shame of slavery on which the American dream was constructed (Schneiderman 1996) and refugees and benefit claimants (Tyler 2013).

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13 TRAUMA Marshall Alcorn

The word trauma has had a history like a much-neglected film actor who did a bit of work from 1920 to 1970 but somehow around 1980 came into massive public visibility and appreciation. The visibility takes many forms. As a concept, trauma gives significant discomfort to critics in a variety of disciplines. Clinicians worry about the scope of the term and the nature of memory malfunction. Scholars in humanities, where the term continues to be popular, worry about the validity of the word and the historical plasticity of its symptoms. Arguments about trauma are apparent in the shifting definitions from the DSM III to the DSM IV to the DSM V. And arguments about the term are ongoing between research-oriented biological psychiatrists and experience-near psychoanalytic clinicians. Some scholars believe that trauma was first discovered and explained by the discipline of psychoanalysis. Johnathan Lewis (Lewis 2012: 298), for example, argues that ‘psychoanalysis originated as a theory of trauma and its consequences’. Other scholars argue that psychoanalysis, as a discipline, has never really understood trauma. Ruth Leys (Leys 2000: 25), for example, claims that trauma ‘represents an obstacle to psychoanalysis, one that constantly threatens to overturn its basic assumptions’. Other scholars (e.g., McNally 2005: 815) have argued that the modes of suffering experienced by trauma are produced by the categories used to study and treat it. If psychoanalysis is a theory of the mind in conflict, trauma complicates psychoanalysis because it directs attention to an event outside the mind that impacts it. Psychoanalysis studies the ‘internal’ mind and the conflicts internal to that mind; trauma refers to another kind of mind, one connected to a world of violence and injury. German analyst Werner Bohleber (Bohleber 2010: 75) argues that ‘For a long time, trauma and its consequences, social and political violence, was [sic] not accorded the status that it should have in psychoanalysis. Clinical and theoretical assessments of it were often characterized by a peculiar ambivalence’. This peculiar ambivalence can be traced back to Otto Fenichel’s (1945a) masterful synthesis of psychoanalytic thought in his 1945 Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses. When Freud died in 1939, he left unfinished many theoretical ideas not consistently developed. An exploratory thinker, Freud would take up questions that would lead in many directions. Although he worked on a synthesis of his thinking in his final years, particularly with the New Introductory Lectures, many concepts were left unfinished. Fenichel brought more coherence to the totality of Freud’s writings, and in Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses, Fenichel followed the then-dominant line of thinking to separate traumatic neurosis from the other categories of neurotic conflict seen in psychoanalytic practice: hysteria 174

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and obsessional compulsion being two dominant formations. Trauma was thus different, but he worried about that difference and he argued that the assumption that the sensory excitation of trauma was not in fact greater than the instinctual excitation causing psychoneurosis (Fenichel 1945b: 35). The key question was whether trauma, compared to other categories of psychoneuroses, was a unique consequence of an external event. Is the mind of trauma impacted and disorganized by some external force, perhaps something more powerful than what is commonly termed repression? In Fenichel’s first discussion of true trauma, the force that disrupts the mind has a unique and external causality. Its impact is grounded in the experience of an external reality, a trigger able to disable any non-neurotic mind. In combat trauma, for example, the threat of death can impact any person, overwhelming—as Freud (1920: 26) describes it—the protective shield that protects a mind from disturbance. In psychoneurosis, by contrast, the mind is disturbed by a force generated entirely by the mind itself, the mind is misdirected by repression. In this account of disturbance, the neurotic actively chooses repression: she or he, as they say, ‘makes a choice’ and thus has a responsibility for the suffering she or he chooses. Repression is unique to each mind and is in theory able to be managed by the mind that creates the repression. And in this very theoretical distinction, there are significant social implications: repressed minds are held accountable for their disturbance; traumatized minds are not. People are constantly suffering from and working through psychoneurotic ‘trauma’. Real trauma, a mind impacted by an external catastrophic event, is, it seems, engaged in a different or more desperate struggle. These differences suggest different clinical, moral, and legal frameworks. It is much more difficult to hold some other party responsible for psychoneurotic trauma. Neurosis is a condition caused by multiple factors for which individuals must themselves take responsibility. The mind here has created the repression causing the conflict. It is the responsibility of that individual mind to ‘work with’ and ‘overcome’ such conflict. The mind of the trauma victim is assumed to have less agency.The violence inflicted on the mind from events outside has reorganized its basic structures that define safety and threat. Biological research shows us how brains are changed by traumatic experience. Patients suffering from trauma are physically injured by external violence, and they are afforded more recognition for a disability. They are helpless with respect to an injury rather than a self-imposed act of repression. The traumatized are enmeshed in social, political, and legal structures that recognize their injury. Patients suffering from minds in conflict have less recognition, less sympathy, and fewer legal rights. This chapter will focus on two major points. First, at the level of everyday cultural discourse, a traumatized model of the mind has replaced a Freudian model of the mind. And by this, I mean that from roughly 1890 to 1980, Freudian understandings of the repression, the unconscious, and neurosis had a widespread and deep impact on Western culture. In the following years, and I can only survey from 1980 to today, roughly 40 years, the paradigm of the traumatized mind has replaced the Freudian paradigm of the unconscious mind, with widespread, legal, medical, and political effects. Second, the paradigm of the traumatized mind represents a more emphatic account of a mind disabled in its capacity to act and therefore more deserving of dignity and justice than the popular account of the repressed unconscious mind described by Freud. Finally, I will argue that trauma reflects a disabled mind, and that this understanding is a good thing. We have yet to fully understand the moral, legal, and medical implications of these new assumptions. This essay will develop these claims in three parts. The first part discusses the embattled historical evolution of trauma as a concept. The second part discusses trauma as an ongoing disability of agency in the context of a violent social world. The third part explores how current new psychoanalytic understandings of trauma have implications for political theory and ideological critique. 175

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History of Trauma Theory In trauma studies, there are two stories of origin for trauma. The differences between the two are instructive. One story, the train wreck story, situates trauma in relation to an injury covered by a lawsuit. In this story, something in the world goes terribly wrong, somebody is to blame, and the one who suffers deserves retribution. The train wreck story is a story about external violence, victims, and external agents. The train wreck story of trauma is charged with implications for ideological critique and social action.The other story, the conflicted mind story, begins with Charcot’s hysterics and leads to Freud’s statement in 1893 that hysterics ‘suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Breuer and Freud 1955 [1893]: 6). The conflicted mind story is a story about personal memory and struggles of the conscious mind. The conflicted mind story is less politically resonant and can be critiqued as a lamentable withdrawal from social responsibility. Research suggests, as I will show later, that the two different stories, after lengthy analysis, are the same story. A simple synthesis might be to say that the conflicted mind is the scene of a train wreck. But it is useful to spend some time with the complexity of the details gathered by each story.

Origin of Trauma Story I: The Railway Wreck—Trauma as Injury As Roger Luckhurst (Luckhurst 2008: 21) observes, ‘the general scholarly consensus is that the origin of the idea of trauma was inextricably linked to the expansion of the railways in the 1860s’. In this story of trauma, legal and political contexts play a key role in defining what trauma is and how it is to be managed. By 1860, English industry had attained a dramatic and visible presence in social life. Steam engines, new canals, railroads, bridges, and new unyielding iron constructions changed British experience. A journey from London to Edinburgh that took two weeks in 1730 took two days in 1830. In this unbelievable increase in speed, there were sometimes mishaps. Railway accidents were both fearful and spectacular events of a sort never before seen. Jill Matus (Matus 2001: 415) argues that starting around 1860, ‘trauma came to be viewed as a medical condition worthy of notice and study as a result of modern technology and its effects’. People involved in train accidents would report serious disabilities and subjective disturbances that they believed were caused by the accidents, although the apparent physical impact of the accident was either invisible or not clearly visible. Matus describes Charles Dickens’s trauma symptoms as the result of a railway accident from which he barely managed to escape with his life. The central and rear carriages of his train plunged into the riverbed below. Dickens’s carriage had come off the rail and was at a tilt. Dickens himself ministered to the sick and dying but afterward lost his ability to speak for two weeks.Years later, he suffered from ‘sudden rushes of terror’ and other forms of anxiety that Matus understands as consistent with modern descriptions of trauma (2001: 413). The train wreck story of trauma both overtly and covertly functions as an image of spectacular injury. Big metal machines lose their proper place in an orderly world and mangle many bodies. This spectacle of trauma is repeated again in the stories of World War I shell shock. The violence done to bodies in both stories is horrific beyond imagination. Travelers could legally hold railroad companies responsible for the negligence causing physical accidents. And as the shell shock story of World War I became informed by the train wreck story, soldiers suffering from shell shock saw new social responses. In 1914 they might be shot for cowardice. In 1918 they might be awarded a disability claim.The differences between the two social responses were enormous, but the new story and the new social response required persuasive argumentation. Acceptance of the new story came slowly. 176

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The term shell shock determined by the British Army in World War I operated with great effectiveness in helping the British public imagine the impact of trauma. As Ben Shepard observes, ‘The experience of being shelled seemed to leave men blinded, deaf, dumb, semi-paralyzed, in a state of stupor, and very often suffering from amnesia’ (Shephard 2001: 1). Trauma in these cases was something visible in the body, even though the wound itself was not visible. Doctors were particularly amazed by reports of ‘fatal shell shock without external signs of injury’ (Shephard 2001: 3) Reports circulated of groups of soldiers killed by an explosive blast when in fact no wound appeared on their bodies. In World War I, the cause for shell shock could be imagined as the obvious impact of an explosion.This narrative for trauma fit in well for the trauma narrative developed by the medical authorities who studied train wrecks. The word trauma as it is currently used across legal, medical, and social discourses is heavily invested in the Imaginary of physical injury. The Imaginary is a kind of imaginative backstory operating by means of association and allusion as particular terms are used in social discourse. This Imaginary (a complex network of cultural associations and imaginings) is not explicitly part of the explicit definition of the term but it is part of the affective impact of the term and thus its experienced meaning. Consequently, the meaning of trauma is influenced by the kinds of imaginary associations and allusions people project into its meaning. The lineage of the traumatic neuroses is indebted to this Imaginary of physical injury and culpable external agent. The lineage of psychoneuroses is not indebted to it.The train wreck story of trauma, amplified by the British shell shock story of trauma, put in place the spectacle of bodily injury.Train wrecks, doctors observed, could produce two kinds of real injury. One injury is visible, leaving marks on the body. The other injury is not visible on the body but seemed to be clearly present in the mind and involved agency over a body changed by the accident. Some doctors at the time claimed that these psychical injuries were the result of the sheer terror of the event, but other doctors argued that a biological causality was operative, even though it could not be seen. John Erichsen (1875: 15), for example, argued in 1875 that a ‘shake or jar’ received by the spinal cord could result in ‘its intimate organic structure’ becoming ‘more or less deranged’. The line between a physical injury and a psychic one, in discourses on trauma, was not clear. In England, the Workman’s Compensation Act of 1897 sought to protect workers from the negligence of their employers. Roger Luckhurst argues that very term accident developed a new meaning after 1860. The ‘accident was where the social, economic, political and bureaucratic elements of the state met up to determine and contest the traumatic costs of industrialization’ (Luckhurst: 25). In time, soldiers wounded by trauma in war were understood to be comparable to wounded workers in industry. Men had jobs to do; they did their best to get them done, but accidents impaired their agency. Shell shock brought this story of invisible but catastrophic wounds into almost every household in Britain. The image of the train wreck and the image of exploding shells resonate in many ways. Even if we have not ourselves been in accidents, we have seen photos of people’s faces captured by a camera just after a dramatic accident. They are bloodied; their faces are stunned. They are in a state of shock. These images are resonant for us. They come to mind, consciously or unconsciously, when we think of trauma, and they have a mark of authenticity. These discourses of industry and war set up a model for understanding trauma that remains hugely popular. Trauma is a ‘blow’ to the mind. It is as if the head is hit by a club. Some external event, a trigger, ‘hits’ the mind and upsets its original structure and function. Accidents that wound and break the body are clear expressions of power. And the train wreck story of trauma represents the victim of trauma as someone injured by an external accident. In this figuration, trauma is part of a much earlier military practice of awarding soldiers compensation for combat injuries, as when British sailors fighting the Spanish in 1780 might be awarded 40 pounds for the loss of a leg. 177

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In addition to its connection to a history of injury, the term trauma also registers as an urgent biological condition, a ‘shock’ that requires immediate attention. As a distinctly medical term, shock is a critical condition, often triggered by wounds, that precipitates a sudden drop of blood flow in the body. Shock in this sense has catastrophic implications: there is a loss of oxygen in the blood, the mind is unfocused and anxious, and death can occur quickly. By an interesting set of imaginative associations, psychological trauma, as Jean Laplanche points out, is patterned on a physiological understanding of shock (Laplanche 1976: 129–130). A mind is ‘hit’ and endangered by trauma, just as a soldier may be put in shock by an explosive blast or a passenger put in shock by the impact of a collision.

Trauma Story II: The Shock of Memory—Janet, Freud, and the Hysterics One narrative of trauma, as I have sketched out, is a story about war and catastrophic impacts of new technological creations. This story is masculine, aggressive, and spectacularly wounding. Luckhurst observes that the train wreck is the ‘history of trauma’ story given most legitimacy by scholars. As I will discuss later, stories of combat trauma are much older than the train wreck.1 Yet the train wreck story is affectively charged; it is dramatic and memorable. Themes of catastrophe often serve as an anchor for stories that seek to understand trauma. Unlike other concepts that give the mind increased agency as the result of increased understanding, trauma is a story about the mind’s reduced agency, and such a story struggles against the very nature of story itself. Traumatic impairment is a story that minds, normally intent on uncomplicated mastery, have difficulty formulating and using. A second story of trauma, the story of the hysteric, is a much different one. It has received less attention, and the attention that it has received characteristically seeks to diminish its legitimacy. The story of hysteria, compared to the story of combat trauma, is subtle, teasing, and mysterious. It is a story about women and their sexuality and a story about male doctors and their arrogance. For many scholars of medicine, the hysteric’s story is an embarrassment. Some current texts on the history of psychiatry represent this story as a time when medical science itself fell into something like mass hysteria. And indeed, trauma has always posed a challenge to medical observation. Toward the end of World War I, some doctors could see that the symptoms of shellshock in men were essentially the same as the symptoms of hysteria in women. But to use the term hysteria to refer to the suffering of men required more courage than most thinkers could manage. Bessel Van Der Kolk is one of many scholars who argues that the real origin of the understanding trauma is in the work done on hysterics by Janet in France: Janet became the first to describe the concept of what we call today Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in which he placed the concept of dissociation (désaggregation) central. He proposed that when patients dissociate the traumatic experience, they become ‘attached’ to the trauma, ‘unable to integrate traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well’. (Janet 1911: 532;Van der Kolk 2000: 238) In using the term post-traumatic stress disorder, Van der Kolk signals what continues to be a key observation. The injuries that trigger trauma are important, perhaps even more important than commonly recognized. But the disability of the trauma is not the initial injury. The injury is in the mind’s response to that initial injury. Trauma, in a more exacting use of the term, is always the event of an after-event. The impact of the catastrophe does not simply disorient a mind in 178

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its impact but also changes how a mind functions.There are disputes in the psychoanalytic community regarding how to describe the reorganized mind of trauma. The term repression, used most often by psychoanalysis, implies an act the mind does to itself. The term dissociation, used by Van de Kolk and others, suggests an action created by the event. Research on and disputes regarding the two terms are ongoing. The traumatized, Van der Kolk argues, are unable to integrate traumatic memories, because the mind becomes ‘dissociated’ by an overwhelming traumatic event. Because biological study of trauma now documents changes in the traumatized brain, dissociation has scientific implications for physical injury that ‘repression’ lacks. Work in neuroscience shows that the amygdala, that part of the brain that alerts the biological organism to a threat of injury, enlarges and the hippocampus, that part of the brain that manages and integrates memory, decreases in size. The amygdala is changed by trauma malfunction (Van der Kolk 2015: 62–66): it generates fear signals in response to perception that in reality pose no threat. Dissociation and repression are linked to different stories regarding the mind’s operation, but the two terms perform similar functions. In both conditions, knowledge about traumatic history is not available for thought. And this lack disables thought in many ways. Integration of memory would give memory a ‘proper place’, a ‘proper function’, and a nuanced affective response. Lack of integration keeps the memory emotionally alive, and staying alive, the memory distorts other memories and new perception. All meaning risks being collapsed into traumatic meaning. The hysteric’s trauma story is in sharp contrast to the train wreck story. First, according to Charcot, hysterics suffered from their condition because of their ‘predisposition’. There may be triggers in the external world for the hysteric’s symptoms, but the disease is not a direct effect of an external trigger. Trauma is not the creation of a victim by an external actor but the expression of a defective character. After Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory of hysterical trauma, much more attention was given to the mind in conflict, to each mind’s particular history of conflicts and its heroic effort to have, or fail to have, effective agency. As Freud worked to perfect the hysteric’s treatment, he gave even more careful attention to the patient’s talk, her or his conscious mind, her or his memories, and the evidence from her or his speech. Freud saw in this disorganization a pattern of repetition in speech and behavior that suggested another alien organization working within the self. Freud’s analysis strongly suggested that another agency, one different from the conscious mind, was thinking and acting in the body. As a number of theorists have argued, what we see in hysteri, is the unconscious; or in other formulations, the mind is eclipsed as ‘the body speaks’ (Fairbairn 1954; Griffith 1994;Van der Kolk 2015). This other source of speaking and acting is also another source of agency, and the conceptual work given to understanding this other source of agency has a variety of formulations. The study of hysteria shifted attention from the initial injury of trauma to the lived aftermath of trauma. Trauma in psychoanalysis was much less interested in the event itself. Psychoanalytic study, particularly in its work with hysterics, began to focus on a network of encysted memories of events. Such a shift was useful for several reasons. First, trauma, unlike most physical injuries, is an injury that continues to disable after all the visible signs of the initial injury have disappeared. Second, the meaning of trauma was not in the event itself but in the aftermath of the event as that aftermath became organized in a particular way. The key symptoms for a traumatic disorder have been remarkably consistent since Fenichel’s account in 1945.2 Fenichel’s observations, like all of the various DSM descriptions, are consistent with Judith Herman’s conceptually simple formulation in 1997. Judith Herman described trauma as being visible in the responses of hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction. These descriptors are consistent with all accounts of trauma from the DSM III to the DSM V and can be seen in descriptions of mind suffering from the experiences of combat as described 179

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by authors dating as far back in history as Shakespeare. In hyperarousal, minds are quick to startle and quick to anticipate new threats. In intrusion, they suffer from unwanted reawakenings and relivings of their old memories. In constriction, they suffer from their mind’s reduction in scope and engagement with the world. All these symptoms can be understood, or in many cases directly witnessed, as a return of traumatic memory. The psychoanalytic perspective shifted the attention in trauma. The result located trauma in the ‘interior’ of the mind and as an action of the mind. The external world of the initial injury and trigger faded out of focus. This shift from an interaction with the outside world to a drama taking place solely in the internal world was solidified as Freud changed his understanding of hysteria from one where an external agent, the father, abuses the daughter to one where the daughter, caught in the imaginative recognition of the father’s sexuality, imagines a seduction that does not take place. Trauma becomes not an event but a memory. It may well be that Freud overlooked evidence that parental abuse in fact occurred. But Freud’s analysis of the mind did not simply minimize the external event but also demanded a more sophisticated account of the mind’s relation to memory. Freud demanded the recognition that, however we think about trauma, what impacts the mind is not the external force but instead a memory put into place by that force. What we call trauma are things going on in the mind long after the impact of the original traumatic event. Trauma responds, Freud suggests, to ‘memory’ (Freud 1893). But memory, as that term is often used, does not adequately represent the complex functions of human agency compromised by trauma. Psychoanalysis has developed a large repertoire of terms for exploring this impact of memory.There is transference, the repeating in the present of behavior from the past.Transference demonstrates that part of what is impaired in perception. Information in the present cannot be effectively seen. There is also projection, repetition, denial, and many other operations signaling the mind’s failure to register and process new information. This failure in the processing of new information has enormous social and personal consequences, and this last observation requires more extended consideration (Alcorn 2013).

Trauma as Disabled Agency If the unconscious and the mind in conflict were the major contributions of psychoanalysis to the cultural life of the 20th century, trauma is the major contribution of a post-Freudian psychoanalysis to the cultural life of contemporary culture. ‘The catastrophes and extreme experiences that people suffered in the 20th century turned trauma into the centuries hallmark’, says Werner Bohleber (Bohleber 2010: 102). This understanding of extreme experience is now part of our everyday cultural life. Roger Luckhurst (Luckhurst 2008: 87–116) argues that starting sometime around 1980, a new narrative form emerged that has been termed the trauma narrative. Toni Morrison, Dorothy Alison, Marilyn Robinson, Pat Barker, and many others patterned stories on trauma and its aftermath. In addition, countless film and television heroes have a traumatic backstory that gives a complex history to the meaning of their actions. They are who they are because of what they have suffered. They make predictable mistakes because they have recurrent fears etched in traumatic memory. If the popular reading of Freud’s story is one of the recovery of lost mastery, the popular reading of the trauma story is one of thinking within the limits of compromised traumatic agency. And I emphasize that what I am describing here is psychoneurosis and trauma as those entities are imagined in popular culture. Clinicians, in my own observations, have a variety of assumptions about the mind’s struggle for agency. The conflicted mind of psychoanalysis was always a mind of compromised agency, but for a variety of reasons, it was easy and comforting to minimize the impairment of such loss. The dominant 180

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psychoanalytic story of trauma was one of loss and recovery. This allowed dominant culture to maintain a fantasy of dominant mastery and dominant agency. With relational psychoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the rise and ego psychology receding into history, the story of the mind’s diminished agency has had a more sympathetic cultural hearing. For many in Western culture, it is easier to imagine the impact of trauma in relation to heroic struggles. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan begins with the sequence of an old man visiting the Normandy graveyards of World War II. Spielberg, himself the son of a Pacific War combat survivor, has worked on many films to represent the experience of combat. Saving Private Ryan begins with a family attentive to the experiences of an old veteran. He is walking slowly ahead of a large trailing family. Before we see his face, we see the faces of his family showing obvious concern for his feelings as he approaches the spot that memorializes the sacrifices he and others made. When he arrives at the entrance to the cemetery, he stops for a moment, looking at the rows of crosses with an expression of overwhelmed emotion.Walking out into the rows of white crosses, he breaks down into tears and falls to his knees. His family gather around him. As he faces the crosses of the dead, the camera focuses on his face, and as his eyes stare painfully into the past, the film’s depiction of the combat action of 1944 begins. Pvt Ryan, now an old man, becomes a figure for traumatic memory. The film begins with the viewer witnessing the family witnessing the veteran witnessing the past. It takes a lengthy narrative to unfold the meaning of this past. He is a strong man and a valiant warrior. But caught in the recurrence of traumatic memory, he breaks down. Saving Private Ryan works as a melodrama for traumatic history. We can accept an understanding of compromised agency because we see it in the context of past heroic agency. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan does not fully represent trauma, but it represents a significant advance over earlier stories of World War II trauma. William Wyler’s much-admired 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives shows veterans Fred Derry, Homer Parish, and Al Stephenson returning home from the European theater and showing dramatic examples of disturbances with trauma, memory, and traumatic nightmares. American culture, as depicted in this film, is affronted by their intrusions into the everyday routines of their lives. Even good people are unsympathetic and unable to relate to their suffering. Today, a flood of information informs contemporary culture about trauma and its effects on the mind. Animations explaining trauma are used to educate police and emergency assistance people in trauma management. This training in turn helps victims. Incoherent stories of rape are no longer seen as dishonest stories; they are the kind of stories produced by trauma victims. Video games represent traumatized characters. Discussions of video games explore the nature of trauma and its relation to human action. Because trauma is a story of the mind’s compromised agency, trauma often emerges as a challenge to established authority. The history of trauma is a history of changes in assumptions made about legitimate social authority. Hysteria and combat trauma forcefully appear when social authority makes unrealistic demands on human agency. Understandings of trauma increasingly develop when the legitimacy given to established social authority is more open to prolonged interrogation. Anthony Babington (Babington 2003 [1997]: 70–72, 83) describes how an understanding of shell shock emerged in World War I. At a time when senior field officers and medical doctors could see nothing more than cowardice, senior enlisted ranks serving in the trenches could see their comrades close to them as suffering a degree of debilitating anxiety that overwhelmed their capacity to act. What they saw in combat was good soldiers finally ‘losing their minds’, as they themselves represented it. A sergeant-major offers testimony that a comrade ‘as soon as shelling starts . . . goes all to pieces and goes practically off his head through sheer terror’ (Babington 2003: 93). The sergeant-major, close to the suffering individual, has a feel for the 181

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workings of the mind that the more senior field officers removed from battle do not have. He is a witness to a mind that is, as Freud later described it, ‘overwhelmed’: a mind that cannot act, a mind whose agency is compromised by traumatic events. And yet this description of a ‘loss’ of mind of one soldier in the trenches is read by a corps commander, higher in the ranks, and removed from the scene of combat, as a moral failure of will. The corps commander asserts that ‘Cowards of this sort are a serious danger to the army. The death penalty is instituted to make such men fear running away more than fear the enemy’ (Salman n.d.).3 This attitude persisted in some units well into World War II. In the Royal Air Force during World War II as well, pilots who broke down during combat flights were described as suffering from a ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ (Babington 2003: 158). And that term was humiliating. To the extent that the category shell shock did not exist for the senior officer, the malady may have been real, but it did not exist in any official discourse. Cultural practice could not think with the word trauma until a variety of institutional discourses assimilated, understood, and circulated the term. Before this institutional assimilation took place, what officially existed was cowardice in battle. In this narrative is something that can be loosely called the social construction of trauma. To recognize a paralysis of agency in someone entrusted to carry out the work of an institution requires an acceptance of the limits of authoritative power itself. And such acceptance is an often-unbearable thought. The story offered here may suggest that trauma is only one side of the scenario: trauma is in the solider who cannot perform; trauma is in the soldier who ‘goes all to pieces’ from shelling. A more comprehensive narrative might suggest that trauma and the seeing of trauma are related. The commander who cannot see trauma in another seems to experience in himself a terror that threatens him to his core. He is overwhelmed and endangered by that thought that if the army cannot rely on people to fight, the army, as a force, cannot be relied on to defend the nation.The traumatized soldier represents, for the senior field officer, an overwhelming traumatic thought that cannot be managed and is thus ineffectively controlled by a greater demand for discipline. This impact of trauma is too often neglected. Our focus for trauma is often on the immediate and literal threat to life in combat and the destruction of human agency in rape.Trauma can also appear in the extreme threat to security in a mind supported by confidence in a social system that will maintain and protect its privileged sense of mastery. Empathy for trauma can therefore be experienced as a traumatic threat to established authority.

Trauma and the Social World I emphasized thus far the recent history of trauma as a story of progress in relation to an increased understanding of the mind’s compromised agency. An understanding of trauma is, in this respect, an increased capacity for care for the individual suffering trauma. But if, as a culture, we have made some progress in our acceptance of this compromised agency, there is much work yet to be done. Much attention is given to the workings of memory after the traumatic event. Less work is done on the immediate impact of trauma on an interrelated social world. Joseph Fernando (Fernando 2009: 216), focusing on the traumatic trigger, offers an analysis of an everyday event that is not trauma in the strict sense but demonstrates aspects of the traumatic process. He recounts his own experience of being surprised by another family member while drying himself off in the bathroom. His son jumped toward him playfully, out of view, but making a hissing sound. Fernando writes, ‘For a moment I had no idea what was happening. . . . I had the distinct feeling time was standing still’ (Fernando 2009: 126). Work in neuroscience discusses Freud’s discussion of an ‘overwhelmed’ ego as the effect of a biological fight-or-flight response of the amygdala to a threat. In such a situation, the more recently evolved areas of the 182

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brain, designed for thinking, shut down. As the body responds to fear, the lower regions of the brain, responding to signals from the amygdala, shut down cognition. The body will freeze, flee, or fight as instinctive responses. This shutdown of cognition, and thus of ‘responsible’ agency, is all too common but difficult to accept. In Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film presentation of the John le Carre novel Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, the MI6 Intelligence head, known as Control is told that a valued agent, sent to meet a Hungarian general, has been caught and shot. This event is one with catastrophic consequences, and the scene is shot from a number of angles showing the stress of the moment.The messenger reports the information, and we see an image of Control frozen in his inability to act in receiving the information. The messenger asks for instructions, but Control seems frozen in mental paralysis. As the messenger becomes more insistent that time is crucial and the bureau needs to act, the camera pans outward from its image of the face of Control, suggesting a mind isolated in time and in social relation, increasingly distancing itself from the moment and the information received. Given the names of the characters, the film serves as an allegory for traumatic processes. Here, as elsewhere, artistic expression reveals an emerging new boundary of trauma awareness. Intelligence communities, like academic communities, make it their business to respond to and work with information. Quick, efficient, and effective use of information is crucial to the life of the community. But we all recognize that for some minds, at some times, some information cannot be easily processed. Information is often emotionally charged. Bad news, as the saying goes, can come like a blow. In Alfredson’s film, Control cannot process information precisely at the time when it is most crucial that he do so. We know that some kinds of information are difficult to take in.We know that some instance of information assimilation is ‘painful’. Yet we seldom explore systematically how much information circulating in a society can strike a person or a community like a blow, impeding the emergence of a rational problem-solving process. We habitually imagine people as competent processors of information. This is often not the case. Not all new and uncomfortable information is equivalent to a traumatic experience in a precise use of the term, but an understanding of trauma can allow us to pay attention to critical failures of information processing. As James Griffith (2018: 56) observes, “Existential neuroscience and evolutionary psychology propose that trauma induces a physiological, and potentially reversible, shift in brain information processing that maximizes speed and force of reaction to threat.This shift occurs at the expense of impaired executive functions and person-to-person processes of social cognition.” I have used examples from Fernando’s experience and Alfredson’s film to represent a dramatic moment of trauma’s impact. But the most obvious real-world link to the traumatic response to new information is the response of George Bush Jr to the 9/11 terrorist attack. A good deal of discussion has circulated around both photos and reports of Bush being told of the assault on the twin towers. One much-discussed photo showing Bush’s pained face reveals a classic deerin-the-headlights traumatic freeze response. Reports suggest that Bush was deeply humiliated by this photo. It suggested that he was helpless in the face of catastrophic information. He is given information, but he cannot think. He later claimed that he was not helpless but ‘boiling mad’, and to prove his resolve, he went to war with Iraq. The need of a president to be ‘boiling mad’ rather than stunned after a crisis suggests deep and widespread social insecurity with traumatic responses in leaders. The image of a paralyzed mind is often too much to bear. Demands are made for a mind with competent mastery, which is paradoxically satisfied by disabling rage. Such demands in the face of trauma prolong trauma. George Bush was not the only person to be temporarily stunned by the new of 9/11. Ty Solomon (2011: 907–928) discusses how many research studies show Americans unable to think 183

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or debate issues after the event. His article’s title is a quote from an interview: ‘I wasn’t angry because I couldn’t believe what was happening’. Solomon’s essay argues that thought is itself exploded after such a traumatic event. He draws attention to our need to understand, not just affect, but the lack of expression itself: ‘recent studies examining the “void of meaning” surrounding 9/11 do, without necessarily realising it, point to the inexpressible’. Solomon discusses the work of two political science scholars, Dirk Nabers and Jack Holland' (Nabers 2009: 275–292; Holland 2009: 275–292) who describe a ‘meaning void’ that opened up after 9/11. Most minds are temporarily disoriented by an unexpected experience of attack. Such an event generates inexpressible affective experience as the habitual security of cognition is disrupted. Trauma’s impairment of cognition is in the initial impact, but it continues in the aftermath of the impact, in the resumption of ‘thought’ after the attack. Such thought lacks the logical capacity and flexibility of strategic cognition. A traumatized mind has an experience of ‘thought’ but is in fact caught within a frame of traumatic disarray that signals danger where none may exist. It is easy now, in retrospect, to demonstrate that the American wars after 9/11 were huge mistakes with costly consequences. The United States invaded a country that played no part in the attack. A fragile stability in Iraq had held in check many tensions. The American response to 9/11 unraveled that stability. In traumatic repetition, old fears will be reactivated and old ghosts arise as current threats. George Bush Jr, after 9/11 fought old ghosts; he fought his father’s war. Trauma presents a triple impact on social action. First, the act itself stuns the mind that needs to respond, making it temporarily unable to think. Second, the ‘thinking’ that emerges from such a mind is experienced as thought, but thought lacks cognitive flexibility and precision in that it is experienced as urgent and absolutely compelling. Vamik Volkan argues that when a ‘massive disaster occurs’, many of those affected ‘will suffer from various forms of post-traumatic stress’. The society affected will generate ‘new societal processes’ and often ‘give the next generation new psychological tasks’ (Volkan 2000). The group will band together in the face of threat. Social bonds can become more intense as the result of affectively resonant fantasmatic discourse. Such behavior seeks to re-create a fantasmatic security in the face of threat. Such delusional security can be generated and amplified by symbolic or literal attacks on any figure associated with the threat.

Conclusion If the modernist world was concerned with anxiety and neurosis, contemporary culture has shifted attention to trauma as an overarching principle for understanding violence and its impact on social function. Social thinkers Dider Fassion and Richard Rechtman (Fassin and Rechtman 2007: xi) observe that ‘Trauma has become a major signifier of our age’. Trauma has become an ‘unassailable moral signifier’. Experiences of trauma that were socially hidden after World War II, for fear of shame, are now expressed and given honor;.Trauma has become a ‘moral signifier’, and in serving as such, it welcomes the trauma victim into a social field that now allows a story of violence and unbearable pain to be told. Freud’s model for trauma offered a metaphor of a protective shield that protected the mind from disruptive thoughts and perception. Trauma breaks through the shield and incapacitates the mind. Freud’s later work offered an extended theoretical description of how a variety of self-schemas—ego, shield, breaking event—worked. The ego is a construction of libidinally cathected representations. Libido acts as a glue to hold connections in the mind together in operational relations that structure thought. We see the world and remember it, and in remembering, we anticipate new experience. Some memory is therefore alive, libidinal, and future directed. It is energized and works all on its own. The body is the repository of many such 184

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memories, and some memories are part of the structure of the self; they act in repetitive patterns, moving toward goals and avoiding threats. Trauma is memory that is always on as threat anticipation. Trauma and its aftermath are pervasive in culture. Communities across the globe suffer violence and generate politics to eliminate continued violence. Social bonds are thus commonly solidified in trauma-triggered paranoidschizoid thought. Such discourse becomes the norm for social communication and, as such, is taken for granted and assumed to be natural. Normative discourse fails to recognize traumatically impaired thought. Demands made for the recognition of trauma generate fear. And this fear triggers attacks on calls for thoughtfulness, thus repeating traumatic processes. More so than many mental disruptions, trauma is a threat to rationality. Judith Herman, writing in 1997, argued that trauma is discovered after every major war and then promptly forgotten until the next war. Human communities, it seems, organize around stories of heroic action, and trauma is an affront to such stories. In the current century, however, awareness of trauma is everywhere. Our understanding of trauma and our concerns for its stories are more nuanced than ever before. Trauma is not incoherent, as Ruth Leys has argued (Leys 2000), though it is elusive and uncommonly challenging. And yet if we have the capacity to witness the stories told by those who suffer, we can better fabricate a global community responsive to pain and injustice.

Notes 1. Anthony Babington discusses an account of combat trauma in Spanish soldiers conscripted for service in Netherlands during the Thirty Years’ War that was given the term nostalgia by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, in 1678, p. 11. 2. Art Blank, professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, is interviewed about his work in trauma by Cathy Caruth in Listening to Trauma. He relates that when he was sent to Vietnam by the army, he carried Fenichel with him to understand trauma. 3. This reference—Dr. Thomas W. Salmon. The Medical Hygiene War Work Committee, Committee for Mental Hygience. New York City (undated) The Care and Treatment of Mental Diseases and War Neurosis (Shell-Shock) in the British Army—is cited by Anthony Babington.

References Alcorn, Marshall (2013) Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire Not to Know in the Classroom, New York: Palgrave Press. Babington, Anthony (2003) [1997] Shellshock South,Yorkshire: Penn and Sword Press. Bohleber,Werner (2010) Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma:The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books. Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1893) ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria, 1–17. Erichsen, J.E. (2011) [1875] On the Concussion of the Spine, Nervous Shock, and Other Obscure Injuries of the Nervous System, London: Longman. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1954) ‘Observations on the Nature of Hysterical States’, Psychology and Psychotherapy, 27(3), 105–125. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2007) The Empire of Trauma, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Fenichel, Otto (1945a) Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Fenichel, Otto (1945b) ‘The Concept of Trauma in Contemporary Psycho-Analytic Theory’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26, 33–44. Fernando, J. (2009) The Processes of Defense: Trauma, Drives, and Reality—A New Synthesis, New York: Jason Aronson Press. Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1–64.

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Marshall Alcorn Freud, S. (1893) ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of the Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria, 1–17. Griffith, J. (1994) The Body Speaks:Therapeutic Dialogues for Mind-Body Problem, New York: Basic Books. Griffith, J. (2018) ‘Trauma, Neuroscience, and Narratives of Lived Experience,’ in Schreiber, E. (ed.), Healing Trauma:The Power of Listening, New York: IP Books. Holland, J. (2009) ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11: From Void to Crisis’, International Political Sociology, 3(3), 275–292. Janet, P. (1911) L’etat mental des hysteriques, 2nd ed., Alcan, Paris. Laplanche, J. (1976) Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lewis, J.D. (2012) ‘Toward a Unified Theory of Trauma and its Consequences’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 9(4), 298–317. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Luckhurst, Roger (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge Press. Matus, J. (2001) ‘Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection’, Victorian Studies, 43(3), 413–436. MCNally, R. (2005) ‘Troubles in Traumatology’, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 50, 815–816. Nabers, D. (2009) ‘Filling the Void of Meaning: Identity Construction in US Foreign Policy After September 11, 2001’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 5(2), 191–214. Shephard, B. (2001) A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Solomon, T. (2011) ‘ “I wasn’t angry because I couldn’t believe what was happening”: Affect and Discourse in Response to 9/11’, Review of International Studies, 38(4), 907–928. Van Der Kolk, B. (2000) ‘Trauma, Neuroscience, and the Etiology of Hysteria: An Exploration of the Relevance of Breuer and Freud’s 1893 Article in Light of Modern Science’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 28, 237–262. Van Der Kolk, B. (2015) The Body Keeps the Score, New York: Penguin Books. Volkan, V. (2000) ‘Traumatized Societies and Psychological Care: Expanding the Concept of Preventive Medicine’, Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, University of Virginia Health System website, www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/csmhi/

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14 FANTASY Matthew Sharpe and Kirk Turner

Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek is almost single-handedly responsible for adapting the clinical concept of fantasy into a political category. In a series of groundbreaking works beginning with The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek argues that a Lacanian understanding of fantasy enables us to analyze the deepest logics and functioning of political ideologies and thus to formulate a new understanding of political subjectivity.This chapter examines Žižek’s theorizations of ideological fantasy and its different manifestations or veils (Žižek 1997: 1–35). We begin by recalling the fundamental coordinates of Freud’s, then Lacan’s, conceptions of fantasy, allowing a theoretical lineage to be established which accounts for Žižek’s coaptation and extension of what was originally a clinical term. Following this, we turn, in this light, to Žižek’s reformulation of fantasy in the context of a post-Marxian theory of ideology. First, we pursue Žižek’s critique of the Marxist notion of false consciousness, by way of his famous analyses of ideological cynicism, and go into his theory of ideological disidentification and the function of ideological fantasy in structuring groups’ quasi-transgressive forms of jouissance. Second, we look at Žižek’s analyses of sublime objects of ideology and the function of ideological fantasy in papering over social antagonism, or the Real, by constructing narratives of the loss or theft of jouissance. As an avenue for future research, we show just how well and powerfully Žižek’s theory allows us to comprehend contemporary right-wing populism as an ideological formation.

Fantasy in Freud and Lacan Fantasy, described by Laplanche and Pontalis (1968: 7) as ‘the specific object of psychoanalysis’, has proven an elusive and contested concept from its inception in Freud’s works. Indeed, filtered through the writings of his adherents and detractors, the term has retained a certain fluidity up to present theoretical articulations among both clinicians and non-clinical scholars. Freud often uses the term in a nontechnical manner, to designate forms of thinking that are meaningfully fanciful or illusory. The contrast here is with rational thought, which has become subject to the reality principle. For Freud, when the child’s biological needs in earliest infancy are more or less immediately sated by its carers, its thinking remains wholly subject to the pleasure principle. There is no need to check fantasized scenarios of wish fulfillment against external reality, with its frustrations and obstacles. As the child develops, ‘with the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained 187

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subject to the pleasure principle alone’ (Freud 1911: 222). This split-off ‘thought-activity’ is what Freud calls fantasy. It is characterized, like unconscious thought more widely, by a complete failure to distinguish between reality and wish. Nevertheless, fantasy has itself what Freud calls a psychical reality. And this subjective reality, he would come to see as increasingly central to his understanding of the psyche and the neuroses. On the one hand, Freud will continue to talk of conscious fantasies or daydreams, as in his famous piece ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’.These, like sleeping dreams, stage the fulfillment of wishes, using the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and projection also at play in the ars poetica. Many of these wishes, moreover, hearken back to the period of our infancy, involving variants of the Oedipus complex and the family romance (saving a mother figure, marrying a father figure, etc.). On the other hand, following Freud’s rejection of the seduction theory after 1897 (which sought to trace the origins of sexuality back to real, historical events), Freud would come increasingly to speak of the unconscious fantasy or fantasies: ‘Unconscious fantasies have either been unconscious all along or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious fantasies, daydreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through “repression” ’, as he tells us (Freud 1908: 161). So, what then are the features of the later Freud’s account of fantasy? The unconscious’s own failure to distinguish between reality and fiction, together with the difficulties associated with seeking out the truth of infantile seductions, prompted Freud to propose that what mattered psychoanalytically was less the historical reality of the infantile scenarios that emerged in analysis and more the fact that the analysand produced this material in their free associations. In short, the fantasmatic scenarios that analysands would typically report, whether of seduction, a primal scene (witnessing or overhearing parental intercourse) or castration, became for Freud their own object of analysis. And following his final works, they become related less with the analyst’s interpretations—that is, insights applied to ‘some single element of the material’ (Freud 1937: 261) and more with necessary ‘constructions’:1 the concretization of various traces of repressed material, the patient’s ‘early history’. Freud’s seduction theory had already posited that the trauma associated with infantile seduction was constructed retroactively, with the onset of puberty and adult sexuality recasting the childhood memories. Freud’s notion of the unconscious fantasy hence also involves this retroactivity, as Laplanche and Pontalis comment: In their content, in their theme (primal scene, castration, seduction . . .), the original fantasies also indicate this postulate of retroactivity: they relate to the origins. Like myths, they claim to provide a representation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas which confront the child. Whatever appears to the subject as something needing an explanation or theory, is dramatized as a moment of emergence, the beginning of a history. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968: 11) In a first feature of fantasy that remains important in Žižek’s politicization of the category, therefore, they are origin stories, like many collective myths. Seduction fantasies narrate the origin of sexuality. Castration fantasies account for the origin of the anatomical difference between the sexes. Primal scene fantasies explain the origin of the individual. A second feature is also telling here, in our context. Faced by the common content of many individuals’ fantasies—‘the same fantasies with the same content are created on every occasion’ (Freud 1917: 370)—Freud was drawn to hypothesize a common phylogenetic source for them. There is a ‘store of unconscious fantasies of all neurotics, and probably of all human beings’ (Freud 1915: 269). This ‘store’ is transmitted to individuals through inherited ‘memory traces’. These ‘memories’ ultimately 188

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hearken back to prehistoric events in the life of the species, notably the famous alleged murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. At this point, as we might say, Freud’s account of fantasy itself becomes proto-political, uneasily gesturing toward a determination of individual psychology by collective experiences, if not a collective unconscious. Characteristically, Lacan’s ongoing attempts to retheorize the fantasy in light of his engagement with structuralist linguistics and anthropology also aim, in one of their dimensions, to bring unity to Freud’s divergent formulations. Like Freud, Lacan claims that there is an original or fundamental fantasy underlying the psychical life of individuals. Like Freud, he contends that this fantasy ultimately involves a fantasy of origins. Like Freud, Lacan, particularly in his early formulations of the 1950s, maintains that the fantasy serves an ultimately defensive function, which he compared to the technique of the freezing of movement in cinema (intimately entwined with the course of memory and related to Freud’s notion of the screen memory): ‘This instantaneousness is characteristic of the reduction of the full signifying scene articulated in subject after subject to something that is immobilized in the fantasy’ (Lacan IV: 16/1/1957). As he would add, it is essential that one does not ‘misrecognize the scenario or story aspect’ (Lacan 2017: 387), which each desiring subject somehow puts themselves into (in various guises as subject/object, active/passive, etc.). The fantasy hence serves to conceal from the subject the lack inherently involved in the ultimate traumatic register associated with what he calls symbolic castration (the entry into language and culture, or the Symbolic order) and with it the installation of sexual and generational difference. The fantasy, for Lacan, is thus vital in situating the split subject, and its desires, in relation to the big Other. (It is this relationship that, as we will see in detail later on in the chapter, allows Žižek to expand on the social implications of fantasy). Yet Lacan contests, as itself mythical, Freud’s postulation of the prehistoric murder of the primal father. And while he maintains that the fundamental fantasies of different individuals share structural features, he rejects the notion of common, phylogenetic inheritance. The most important features of fantasy, for Lacan, are associated with what Laplanche and Pontalis (1968: 1) refer to as the ‘the structural function and permanence’ of fantasy formations, as opposed to contingent imagery, for example, associated with daydreams. Lacan, in his ongoing Séminaire, would thus move beyond recounting the individual fantasies of patients in the clinic, including shared fantasies,2 toward a consideration of the role of the fantasy ‘frame’ as a component of individual subjectivity. His graph of desire, for instance—a model of how such inherent features as language, demand, the ego, and identification interact—makes fantasy a set component of the psyche, in its interrelation with the linguistic order of signification. The ‘only thing we are sure of ’ in fantasy, Lacan argues, is that the subject is ‘the prop [support] of the signifying chain’ (Lacan 2015: 212). As speaking subjects, each of us faces the exigencies associated with learning a natural language and adopting a gendered identity in our society’s Symbolic order. This commonality is sufficient for Lacan to explain the overlapping dimensions of individuals’ fundamental fantasies. As is well-known, the individual is called to identify with the ‘name of the father’ at the resolution of the Oedipus complex, as a signifier of the paternal prohibition against incest. Up to this decisive moment, the child has been engaged in the project of becoming the phallus (the truly satisfying Thing, in the Real) for the mother. Now, it is compelled to renounce this pre-oedipal desire. From here onward, the individual’s fundamental fantasy will take on the functional role of coming to terms with this traumatic loss, or what Lacan calls symbolic castration—an exigency which befalls little girls and little boys. Lacan’s formula for this fantasy, as is well-known, is (S◊a) (the barred subject, divided by the imposition of the Law, facing the objet petit a).3 Its function, as Žižek has highlighted (e.g., 1997: 189

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7–8), is above all transcendental in a Kantian sense: indeed, Lacan tells us that it is the ‘fabric underlying the world of reality’ (Lacan 2017: 200). Its deepest role is to fill in the gaps in the subject’s negotiations with reality, specifically that inaugurated by the human entry into language— between thinking and being, the conscious and unconscious—and thus to prevent the subject’s consistency itself from ‘fading’. Fantasy in this way structures what and how the individual is to desire, from the ground up. For Lacan, there is no predetermined rapport sexuel and sexuality, above all our other needs, is subject to the vicissitudes of the social Law sanctioning exogamy and prohibiting incestuous object choices. Likewise, whatever the retroactive reconstructions of fantasy might suggest, there was no untroubled pre-oedipal unity between the (m)Other and the child.4 Nevertheless, the fantasy of the neurotic postulates the existence of some sublime, lost object, hailing from its earliest experiences, but taken from the individual by the Other. Its restitution, so the fantasy promises, might ‘make me whole again’, in the words of the popular song. This object, the objet petit a, is that ‘little piece of the Real’ which the subject supposes might answer the question che vuoi? (what do you want from me?), which each individual faces as they come to take their place in its familial and wider Symbolic order (Žižek 1989: 95–114; Sharpe 2000–2001: 101–120). The subject will seek out metonyms of this object in their love objects (some hair type, way of speaking, looking, etc.).Thus, there is nothing essential to an object itself: it is merely the placeholder in the channeling of desire, as ‘human desire is adjusted (coapté) not to an object, but to a phantasy’ (Lacan VI: 12/11/1958). It functions in this sense as the object cause of one’s desire, as against their enjoyment (jouissance). This objet is nevertheless, strictly speaking, an object which only comes to be in being lost. It gives form to a retroactive attempt to fantasmatically veil the Real of symbolic castration. ‘My division of the subject was not inevitable’, announces the fantasy, ‘the Other, who can really enjoy, is responsible for my lack’. The end of psychoanalysis, in this light, involves what Lacan calls the traversal of the fantasy and involves the fall of the object.The subject must come to see that there is no lost object that could offer him or her completion, only his or her own contingent history and desire, which he or she is invited to take responsibility for.

Žižek and Ideological Fantasy Slavoj Žižek’s political application of Lacan’s conception of the fundamental fantasy is predicated on his theorization of the big Other as the transpersonal order of language and Law. Lacan would in later works use the category discourse to describe social formations. He never used the term fantasy in this manner. As we have intimated, Žižek takes the fact that different subjects in a linguistic community are interpellated into the same Symbolic Other as the basis to postulate what he terms collective ideological fantasies, which can be analyzed by using Hegelian and Lacanian categories. Žižek locates his political theorization of fantasy in the legacy of Marxian ideology critique. His starting point is the critique of Marx’s notion of ideology as false consciousness. According to this idea, ideologies are written or spoken discourses that misrepresent social reality, obscuring relations of domination.What ideology critique must accordingly do is show duped subjects the falsity of these representations, counterposing more truthful or adequate representations of social totality. This lifting of the veil should be sufficient to motivate political change, aiming at overthrowing the now-revealed relations of domination. Drawing on his own experience growing up in former communist Yugoslavia, Žižek argues that in later modern societies, what the German theorist Peter Sloterdijk called enlightened false consciousness prevails. In former communist regimes, Žižek claims, no one consciously believed in the ruling ideology.Yet everyone acted as if they did believe; and so the political order continued. Likewise, in later capitalist 190

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societies, we all know well that ‘the emperor is naked’. Cynicism about politicians and the system is utterly normal, and sometimes-biting political critique and satire is a taken-for-granted part of the media ecosystem.Yet, again, we act as if we did not know this. And the system continues just as if we were all true believers (Žižek 1989: 12–27; 1997: 1–6). Žižek has consistently denied that this situation means we have entered a post-ideological era. After all, he reminds us, no one taken in by any ideology has ever thought anything else, other than that their way of seeing the world was the truest or most enlightened. Drawing on Sohn-Rethel’s and Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, Žižek (1989: 27–56) instead proposes that a different, post-Lacanian conception of ideology is needed to understand contemporary political subjectivity. This conception moves in two only seemingly divergent directions, which we will examine in sequence.

Ideological Fantasy, Disidentification, and the Obscene Underside of the Law On the one hand, as Žižek (1997: 1–6) echoes The X-Files, the truth is out there. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek proposes that we must see that ideology resides not in people’s conscious beliefs but rather in their social practices (esp. Žižek 1989: 27–39). People’s actions speak louder than their words, and what they bespeak are unconscious beliefs and attachments.That we know money is only paper or metal, without any use value, purely conventional, and so on does not prevent us from acting as if money was intrinsically valuable.The ideology here is in our wallets, as it were, not in our heads. As Žižek writes, What [subjects] do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know . . . overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. (Žižek 1989: 33) Pursuing this thought, Žižek’s conception of ideological fantasy is tied to another novel concept he introduces into political theory: ideological disidentification. Louis Althusser famously argued that ideologies do not misrepresent social reality. They present an imaginary relation of the subject to that reality. Subjects are interpellated into a given ideological order. Through this ideological interpellation, they come to identify themselves as the bearer of a given identity within this order. Thus, in the famous mise-en-scène, when the police officer exclaims ‘hey you!’, the interpellated subject turns around, taking it to be themselves who has been hailed. For such ideological interpellation to work, Žižek counters (1989: 43–44; 1997: 5–6), the subject must nevertheless be convinced that ‘not all’ of their being is reducible to this ideological identity. They must be convinced that they have freely given their assent to the injunctions of the Other—and that therefore, in what Žižek will call a definitively ideological fantasy, something of them remains ‘authentic’ or ‘Real’, completely untouched by ideology. As Žižek explains in The Plague of Fantasies, The lesson is . . . clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich 191

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human person beneath it. ‘Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency’. Close analysis of even the most ‘totalitarian’ ideological edifice inevitably reveals that not everything in it is ‘ideology’ (in the popular sense of the ‘politically instrumentalized legitimization of power relations’): in every ideological edifice, there is a kind of ‘trans-ideological’ kernel, since, if an ideology is to become operative and effectively ‘seize’ individuals, it has to batten on and manipulate some kind of ‘trans-ideological’ vision which cannot be reduced to a simple instrument of legitimizing pretensions to power (notions and sentiments of solidarity, justice, belonging to a community, etc.). (Žižek 1997: 27–28) For a political ideology to be truly efficacious, Žižek thereby contends, it must operate on two levels. On the symbolic level, there will be the official, public dimension of an ideology, assigning mandates, prescriptions, and prohibitions.Yet on a second, fantasmatic level, ideologies involve not prohibitions but a ‘superegoic’ dimension. Power, for Žižek, as for Foucault, never solely says no. This other dimension involves injunctions to enjoy in certain, sanctioned ways (‘you may!’) or forms of repressive desublimation, to use an older Freudo-Marxist category. Ideological fantasy at this level, as we will see, involves ways of narrativizing and managing people’s relations to jouissance. Žižek is arguably at his best when he adeptly identifies forms of this obscene underside of social Law: in everything from the thinly veiled homophilia underlying the bonding of soldiers within the military—or the forms of often edgy, ‘politically incorrect’ humor that characterize subgroups—to those forms of ideological cynicism which we opened this section by examining, like the ridicule of the top brass of the M*A*S*H staff in the classic American teledrama: a cynical distance from the military authorities that (exactly) enabled them to continue serving in otherwise-unbearable circumstances. Žižek analyses the Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket in this manner: Full Metal Jacket . . . successfully resists this ideological temptation to ‘humanize’ the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing ‘Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .’)—in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest . . . The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic ‘human distance’ towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription ‘Born to kill’ is accompanied by the peace sign, etc.—in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. (Žižek 1997: 27) If we were to ask what it is above all that members of a given political regime share, Žižek would suggest that it is above all certain distinct modes of quasi-transgressive enjoyment. The paradox is that such ways of enjoying are experienced by subjects as ‘nonideological’: ways of organizing sexual relations, senses of humor, festivals, sports, ways of preparing food, religious 192

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customs, and even ways of disposing of excrement (Žižek 1997: 3–6). In one more of his profoundly original contributions to theory, enjoyment is for Žižek a political factor.

Ideological Fantasy, the Sublime Objects of Ideology, and Thefts of Enjoyment So, what is the second direction taken by Žižek’s conception of ideological fantasy that we evoked above? If Marx proposed the notion of false consciousness for ideology, Žižek proposes what we might call a conception of a false unconscious. For Marx, what ideologies conceal are the reality of relations of domination between classes. For Žižek, drawing from Lacan, what ideologies conceal is not reality. We have already seen that he thinks that ideological fantasies structure people’s quotidian practices and modes of enjoyment. Ideological fantasies conceal what Lacan calls the Real. The Real, for Lacan, is what resists symbolization, or what ‘sticks in the gullet of the signifier’. More than this, the Real is what insists at those points wherein the Symbolic order, necessarily, pushes up against its own limits. No Symbolic order can explain its own origins without presupposing itself, just as the fundamental fantasy that would explain the origin of the subject can do this only by the petitio principi of transposing the subject, impossibly, back into the position of a witness to their own emergence. And, just as the fundamental fantasy serves to cover over the Real of castration in individuals, so too will Žižek argue that ideological fantasies at their deepest levels serve to conceal what Žižek sometimes calls the Real of social antagonism (e.g., Žižek 1989: 139–144; 1997: 11–17). We can approach what is at stake here by examining another of Žižek’s key concepts: sublime objects of ideology. Political ideologies, Žižek argues, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, turn around certain key signifiers: the nation, the party, the people, socialism, the Aryans, and so on. These signifiers play, within the ideology, a key ‘quilting’ role. Partisans of different modern ideologies, for instance, each appeal to competing notions of underdetermined, emotive signifiers: equality, liberty, and fraternity.The introduction of one or other master signifier (S1, in Lacan’s mathemes), like socialism or liberalism, will determine just which signification we assign to these other signifiers (S2) in the ideological field. If we identify with the signifier socialism, for instance, then liberty will mean something like freedom from the alienation of labor (as against the freedom to trade); equality will mean the equality of distribution (as against of opportunity); and fraternity will mean the united working people, in direct command of the means of production (as against, for instance, individuals’ co-belonging to some racial, cultural, or national group). Political struggle, on this understanding, becomes a struggle over which master signifiers should command the ideological field: What is at stake in the ideological struggle is which of the ‘nodal points’, points de capiton, will totalize, include in its series of equivalences, these free-floating elements. Today, for example, the stake of the struggle between neo-conservatism and social democracy is ‘freedom’: neo-conservatives try to demonstrate how egalitarian democracy, embodied in the welfare state, necessarily leads to new forms of serfdom, to the dependency of the individual on the totalitarian state, while social democrats stress how individual freedom, to have any meaning at all, must be based upon democratic social life, equality of economic opportunity, and so forth. (Žižek 1989: 96) The evident centrality of these master signifiers inclines subjects to suppose that they must be replete with meaning or signification. For Žižek, however, like Laclau, Mouffe, and Lacan before 193

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him, they are in truth empty signifiers.When a subject evokes ‘American greatness’, for instance, any number of competing, inconsistent visions can be signified: the Wild West, Lyndon Johnson’s ‘great society’, the poetry of Walt Whitman, or Ronald Reagan’s facing down the Soviet Union. No one directly knows the ‘American essence’ that the term prompts us to imagine must nevertheless exist. Instead, each interpellated subject carries more or less vague apprehensions. But the term functions, insofar as individuals each take it that Others, or at least the leaders, must know what is at stake in these signifiers. The missing, presupposed signifieds of ideological master signifiers are what Žižek terms sublime objects of ideology. Again, someone might naively suppose that the vagueness of a concept would speak against its political efficacy. Like Edmund Burke, Žižek disagrees. To no purpose, he notes, might we point out to ‘a true believer’ that ‘American greatness’, like the ‘German essence’ evoked by Nazi ideologues, is not a stable, clear concept. They are likely to read this inconsistency, this vagueness, as its own indirect testimony to the more-than-ordinary sublimity or ‘greatness’ of what is at stake. The parallel between this reflective posture and that which Immanuel Kant assigns to our aesthetic response to sublime objects, and the way that our very failure to be able to ‘get our heads around them’ intimates to us the transcendent grandeur of the Ideas of Reason, is not lost on Žižek. The sublime objects of ideology implicate, as it were, transcendent Ideas of Ideological Reason. Outsiders, then—people not interpellated into a given ideology—are likely to be bemused or unable to understand what subjects of a given ideology find most moving. For us today, Hitler’s way of coming to a climax in his speeches looks like hysteria and the adulation of his followers a collective madness. For true believers, it was experienced as testimony to a national awakening of almost-religious dimensions. Sometimes, Žižek in the context of looking at nationalist ideologies terms the sublime objects of ideology at play the National Things. The term evokes das Ding: the first imago of the omnipotent mother in the mind of the pre-oedipal child. A different term our politicians are wont to deploy to describe this ‘Thing’ is ‘our way of life’. Our national Thing in Australia is thus a ‘way of life’, or rather (as explained above) a particular mode of enjoying: beaches, cricket in summer, Australian rules football or rugby in winter, barbeques, larrikinism, surfing, bikinis, etc. Such sublime objects of ideology, Žižek argues, are often characterized by the most contradictory attributes. On the one hand, adherents will hence attest that their ideological Thing is singular, unique, irreplaceable, and inalienable: more deeply a part of who they are as a nation or a people than anything else. On the other hand, almost always when this way of life or enjoying is invoked by politicians, it is positioned as under threat of theft, corruption, loss, or dissolution. Žižek has explained this idea of a theft of enjoyment invariably posited in ideological fantasies in a striking analysis of the putative outbreak of ethnic tensions that followed the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia: Every nationality has built its own mythology narrating how other nations deprive it of the vital part of enjoyment the possession of which would allow it to live fully. . . . Slovenes are being deprived of their enjoyment by ‘Southerners’ (Serbians, Bosnians . . .) because of their proverbial laziness, Balkan corruption, dirty and noisy enjoyment, and because they demand bottomless economic support, stealing from Slovenes their precious accumulation of wealth by means of which Slovenia should otherwise have already caught up with Western Europe. The Slovenes themselves, on the other hand, allegedly rob the Serbs because of Slovenian unnatural diligence, stiffness, and selfish calculation. Instead of yielding to life’s simple pleasures, the Slovenes perversely enjoy constantly devising means of depriving Serbs of the results of their hard labour by commercial profiteering, by reselling 194

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what they bought cheaply in Serbia. The Slovenes are afraid that Serbs will ‘inundate’ them, and that they will thus lose their national identity. (Žižek 1993: 205) Ideological fantasies, in this dimension, represent deep-seated culturopolitical narratives that explain a people’s relationship to enjoyment or jouissance. More than this, they represent ways of coming to terms with the finitude involved in being subjects to the Symbolic order and thus with the loss of direct, unmediated access to enjoyment. Recall that individuals’ fundamental fantasies, for Lacan and Freud, re-narrate the origins of the individual, positioning them as the more or less passive victims of a theft of enjoyment by the Other. Just so, ideological fantasies will position the sublime Thing—national unity or greatness, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the community of the people, and so on—as having been stolen, damaged or corrupted, always by some contingent, external force. Roger Griffin (2003), a leading theorist of fascism, argues that the unerring ‘core’ of the different species of fascism and Nazism is always a notion of national palingenesis. This rebirth is in its turn situated in terms of a larger narrative of a fall, which, from Žižek’s perspective, is ideological fantasy at its purest (1997: 11–24): assigning all blame for the nation’s perceived, present woes to an ‘Other of the Other’ (the Jews, plutocrats, Muslims, liberals, etc.) who, at some point, have infiltrated the national community and corrupted its essential purity. So, we arrive at the deepest function of ideological fantasy as a form of false unconscious, in Žižek’s analyses. The falsity here is not falsity to social reality, for reasons we have seen. It is a falsity that inheres in how these invariant narratives of the loss or theft of ‘our’ enjoyment by ‘Others supposed to enjoy’ serve to conceal how our community was never wholly integrated, undivided, without challenges and antagonisms (mirroring how the individual tries to maintain its ostensible consistency, against falling apart).The ideological fantasy, or plague of fantasies, that might congeal around a political movement, like populism today, need in this light not even be anything like internally consistent. In Nazi ideology, for instance, the ‘international conspiracy of world Jewry’ is simultaneously positioned as responsible for Bolshevism, which tries to overthrow capitalism, and for finance capitalism, capitalism in its highest, most abstract form. In contemporary right-wing populism, left-wing elites are likewise simultaneously depicted as utterly relativistic and morally tepid as well as puritanical, proto-totalitarian enforcers of ‘political correctness’; again, they are hyper-liberal friends to the LGBTQI+ community and tacit supporters of extremist Islamism, longing to enshrine Sharia law. One function of a Žižekian critique of ideology will of course be to show the irrational inconsistency in such fantasies. Nevertheless, what lends ideological fantasies strength is never their rational content. It is the way that they serve to conceal the finitude and the flaws of our own systems or regimes. They are, in the political realm, ways of repressing the fact that ‘the Other does not exist’, and never did as a utopian, untroubled, harmonious regime. Žižek at different times has thus illuminatively compared the logic of ideological fantasies to the discourses of theodicy in the Christian tradition, which propose to explain the origin and meaning of evil, consistent with the supposition of an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity. His analysis suggests what we might term a kind of political theodicy or kettle logic at play in ideological fantasy (Žižek 2004; Sharpe 2005). The one thing necessary is that ‘we’, in our ‘essence’, can never be responsible for our own malaises: it is either an ‘Other supposed to enjoy’ who is to blame, as we have seen; or else our own falling away from our own essence, goaded by this Other; or else what our ill-intentioned critics point to as problems is ‘fake news’, propaganda, and so on. As Žižek comments, ‘[w]hat sets in motion this logic . . . is of course not immediate social reality . . . but the inner antagonism inherent in these communities’, which the ideological fantasy enables us to avoid confronting (Žižek 1993: 205). 195

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Conclusion Žižek’s notion of ideological fantasy is a remarkable contribution to post-Marxist attempts to understand ideology and how it continues to function in complex later modern, highly reflexive societies. By shifting the focus of ideology critique away from false consciousness and toward the unconscious and material social practices—and thus from discourse or representation, to questions of political enjoyment—Žižek’s work opens up powerful insights into how subjects ‘know not what they do’ and continue to remain prey to ideological capture. Žižek’s relationship with Marxist theory, within whose legacy he locates his contribution, has not been uncontroversial, however, with Ernesto Laclau (in Butler et al. 2000) in particular calling into question the consistency of Žižek’s form of Lacanianism with Marxist theories of history and social reproduction. Convergently, Geoffrey Boucher (both alone (2016) and with Sharpe (2010)) has questioned whether Žižek reduces all of politics to ideology by drawing on the Lacanian category of the big Other to conceive political regimes as macrosubjects. Sharpe (both alone (2002) and with Boucher (2010)) has questioned whether the equation of social antagonism with the Lacanian Real can sustain a normative, progressive political theory.Yannis Stavrakakis (2010), among others, has called into question the political prospects of Žižek’s hypostatization of a radical act as the means to political change. Let us close by considering one especially timely avenue for further research. We live in a period when right-wing populism has reclaimed legitimacy and even won power in nations such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the United States for the first time since 1945. The Lacanian notion of ideological fantasy provides us with a uniquely powerful optic through which to unmask the operations of this form of Ultranationalism. The right-wing populist ideology’s sublime object is the People, quilted closely either to notions of the Nation or the Race (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017). As Mueller comments, although his influential book (unlike competitors’ (Judis 2016)) is marked by a contentious identification of populism with its distinctly right-wing, nationalist forms (Stavrakakis and Jaeger 2018), Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declaring at a party congress in defiance of his numerous domestic critics: ‘We are the people. Who are you?’ Of course, he knew that his opponents were Turks, too. The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. (Mueller 2016: 3) From a Lacanian perspective, of course, such a moralized conception of the People represents a prime case of a sublime object of ideology. Thus, anyone who disagrees with the People, as a matter of empirical fact, presents no problem for the right-wing populist. The very fact of this disagreement simply means that they no longer count as a member of the People. This is why right-wing populism is profoundly anti-liberal, whatever its claims to democratic credentials, and so profoundly hostile to reasoned public debate. As Mr. Trump announced to his jubilant followers in May 2016: ‘the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything’ (cited by Mueller 2016: 24). But while the right-wing populists’ ‘people’ is thus positioned as morally pure, just as Žižek asks us to suppose, it is always depicted as under the gravest threat from ‘Others supposed to enjoy’ its confounding and corruption. The principal populist ‘Others of the Other’, we know, are the nefarious ‘elites’ who are variously arraigned for a vapid cosmopolitanism and intellectualism, lacking loyalty to anything, dominating the ‘liberal media’ and disseminating ‘fake news’, and so on.Viktor Orbán’s justification of his refusal to take 196

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part in any public debates in Hungary before the 2010 and 2014 elections represents an almost fable-like distillation of the fundamental populist fantasy: No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious. . . . I am sure you have seen what happens when a tree falls over a road and many people gather around it. Here you always have two kinds of people. Those who have great ideas how to remove the tree, and share with others their wonderful theories, and give advice. Others simply realize that the best is to start pulling the tree from the road. . . . [W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done. (cited by Mueller 2016: 26) Everything is here, as Žižek sometimes says: the metaphoric, paternal valences of the fallen tree; the ‘robust’ lads who, with an unquestionable common sense to which Orbán claims ownership, realize what ‘we all know what needs to be done’; the useless elite types, more interested in idle chatter than helping their fellows; and the fabulous equation between running a complex modern society, enmeshed in a complex network of international agreements, with something as obvious as removing a roadblock from some bucolic road. As work by Ernesto Laclau, Yannis Stavrakakis, Benjamin De Cleen, John B. Judis (Laclau 2007; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Judis 2016), and others has claimed, however, populism by itself is politically underdetermined. Its discursive stratagems, unstitched from right-wing categories of race and nation, can be appropriated by progressive movements and animated by a like sense of the real crises facing neoliberalism in the European South and more widely. The psychoanalytic approach to ideological fantasy, by allowing us to understand the extra-rational grounds of ideologies’ appeal, positions us uniquely to understand why some such movements succeed in winning popular allegiance and how some other movements might challenge their emerging, profoundly worrying hegemony.

Notes 1. As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973: 88) explain, construction is ‘an explanation by the analyst which is more extensive and further removed from the material than an interpretation, and which aims essentially at the reconstitution of a part of the subject’s childhood history in both its real and its phantasy aspects’. 2. Nonetheless vital, and repeatedly returned to throughout his career, is Freud’s commonly encountered masturbation fantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ due to its structural as well as dynamic role. 3. Originally associated with the ‘other’ or counterpart of one’s ego and the object of desire in Lacan’s work (such as the agalma or that which is precious that we seek in someone), the ‘small a’ object comes to be that which causes desire in Lacan’s work, the object ‘lost’ but which is by definition inaccessible/ unattainable—that is as exemplary of the notion of lack and that which is a remainder following the unconscious/conscious split of the subject through the assumption of language. Politically, it is hence a function which can be echoed and co-opted. 4. Without the imposition of the Law, indeed, Lacan holds that individual desires can only remain wholly subjected to the demand of their first Other, a situation precipitating forms of psychosis.

References Boucher, G. (2016) ‘An Ideological Conception of Politics—Critique of Žižek on Political Theology’, Critique, 44(4), 451–463.

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Matthew Sharpe and Kirk Turner Boucher, G. and Sharpe, M. (2010) Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London:Verso. De Cleen, B. and Stavrakakis,Y. (2017) ‘Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism’, Javnost:The Public, 24(4), 301–319. Freud, S. (1908) ‘Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality’, S.E. 9. Freud, S. (1911) ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, S.E. 12. Freud, S. (1915) ‘The Unconscious’, S.E. 14. Freud, S. (1917) ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Part III)’, S.E. 16. Freud, S. (1937) ‘Constructions in Analysis’, S.E. 23. Griffin, R. (2003) ‘The Palingenetic Core of Fascist Ideology’, in Campi, A. (ed.) Che cos’è il fascismo? Interpretazioni e prospecttive di richerche, Rome: Ideazione editrice. Judis, J.B. (2016) The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports. Lacan, J. (IV) The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV, Roche, L.V.A. (trans.), www.freud 2lacan.com/lacan/. Lacan, J. (VI). Desire and its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, Gallagher, C. (trans.), www. lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/. Lacan, J. (2015) Transference:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, Fink, B. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity. Lacan, J. (2017) Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, Grigg, R. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity. Laclau, E. (2007) On Populist Reason, London:Verso. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. (1968) ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49(1), 1–18. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. (1973) The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Nicholson-Smith, D. (trans.), London: The Hogarth Press. Mueller, J.-W. (2016) What is Populism?, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sharpe, M. (2000–2001) ‘ “Che vuoi?”/ “What do you want?”: The Question of the Subject, the Question of Žižek’, Arena Journal, 16, 101–120. Sharpe, M. (2002) ‘The Sociopolitical Limits of Fantasy: September 11 and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Ideology’, Clogic, https://clogic.eserver.org/sharpe-september-11-and-slavoj-Žižeks-theory-ideology. Sharpe, M. (2005) ‘Žižek, Slavoj’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/Žižek/#Hb. Stavrakakis,Y. (2010) ‘On Acts, Pure and Impure’, International Journal of Žižek Studies, 4(2), 1–35. Stavrakakis,Y. and Jaeger, A. (2018) ‘Accomplishments and Limitations of the “New” Mainstream in Contemporary Populism Studies’, European Journal of Social Theory, 21(4), 547–565. Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative, Durham: Duke. Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2004) Iraq:The Borrowed Kettle, London:Verso.

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15 IDENTIFICATION (WITH THE AGGRESSOR) Jay Frankel

From the late 1910s through the early 1930s, Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s intimate friend and one of the most important analysts in Freud’s inner circle, experimented with ways to revive stalled treatments of his narcissistically disturbed patients—patients who, he came to discover, had generally been severely abused as children. His resulting explorations placed what he called identification with the aggressor (IWA) at the heart of the traumatic response. Familiarity with this concept will make it easy to see how a similar response causes people to be taken in by authoritarian leaders and movements. While many of Ferenczi’s patients had suffered extreme sexual abuse or violence in childhood, less blatant but still exploitative parental acts also appeared to be traumatic (Ferenczi 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933). Importantly, Ferenczi observed, in his patients’ descriptions of their childhood traumas, a second stage of trauma:1 parents’ hypocrisy about the assault itself was a crucial factor in determining how damaging a trauma was likely to be. Ferenczi believed that ‘children get over even severe shocks without amnesia or neurotic consequences, if the mother is at hand with understanding and tenderness and (what is most rare) with complete sincerity’ (Ferenczi 1931: 138). But ‘[a]lmost always the perpetrator behaves as though nothing had happened’ (Ferenczi 1933: 163), and he may also blame the child for the abuse (ibid.). The child’s efforts to find help ‘are refused as nonsensical’ (ibid.). ‘Probably the worst way of dealing with such situations is to deny their existence, to assert that nothing has happened and that nothing is hurting the child . . . These are the kinds of treatment which make the trauma pathogenic’ (Ferenczi 1931: 138; Ferenczi 1932: 193). More recent research confirms the destructive ‘conspiracy of silence’ that very often surrounds child sexual abuse (Butler 1996). Ferenczi’s view that parents’ hypocrisy was decisive in causing his patients’ pathology was supported by their traumatic response to a similar, defensive ‘professional hypocrisy’ (Ferenczi 1933: 158) in him, their analyst. Hypocrisy, whether explicit or implied by not responding to a child’s pain, strong-arms her into repudiating her own experience and going along with the adult’s message. As will become clear, a similar two-stage phenomenon occurs on a mass scale and is pivotal in understanding the dynamics of authoritarianism.

Identification With the Aggressor Identification with the aggressor is a term with a confusing history. While the term was later popularized by Anna Freud (1936) as a mechanism of defense in which a victim of aggression copes 199

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with her helplessness by becoming an aggressor, it was originally introduced by Ferenczi (1933) to indicate subordination to an aggressor and identification with the particular victim role the aggressor expects. But the two phenomena are related; victims of aggression often both submit to an aggressor, and become aggressors toward someone more vulnerable. Submission and aggression, in these very forms, are present in the authoritarian personality, as described by Adorno and his colleagues (1950). And by identifying with the aggressor in Ferenczi’s submissive sense, the victim also becomes an aggressor toward himself. I will be using the term as Ferenczi used it. An elaboration of the basics of the IWA response in traumatized children, based on Ferenczi’s conception, will provide background for understanding the workings of IWA on a mass scale. How do children respond to abuse? Ferenczi saw IWA as the core of children’s traumatic response: One would expect the first impulse to be that of rejection, hatred, disgust and energetic refusal. ‘No, no, I do not want it, it is much too violent for me, it hurts, leave me alone’, this or something similar would be the immediate reaction if it would not be paralyzed by enormous anxiety. These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought, for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their senses. The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor. (Ferenczi 1933: 227; emphasis in original) Terrified and overwhelmed, ‘the child becomes hypnotically transfixed on the aggressor’s wishes’ (Howell 2014: 50) and, completely subordinated to his will, molds herself to his image of who she must be (see Crittenden and DiLalla 1988). Subordination is a survival response when real danger threatens, and also a tactic to ensure continued belonging in the family when rejection looms. In order to adapt most precisely, the child must also introject the aggressor—create an internal model with which she can identify, to know his feelings and intentions from the inside. This includes introjecting the aggressor’s image of who she must become. The introjection process requires that the child’s own experiential reality be ‘vacated [to be] filled by the will of what has terrified her’ (Ferenczi 1932: 48). Ferenczi also wrote about how splitting, dissociation, and introjection combine to minimize the child’s fear and psychic pain by creating a soothing, false reality alongside her frightened, urgent focus on the real aggressor. The suffering part of the person is ‘repressed’ (Ferenczi 1932: 9), leaving an emotionless ‘guardian angel’ (ibid.) to cope with impinging reality while anesthetizing the feeling part of the personality with ‘consolation fantasies’ (ibid.) and hallucinations: ‘Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor, he disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes intra- instead of extra-psychic; the intra-psychic is then subjected, in a dream-like state as is the traumatic trance, to the primary process . . . it can be modified or changed by the use of positive or negative hallucinations. In any case the attack as a rigid external reality ceases to exist’ (Ferenczi 1933: 162).

Dimensions of IWA We can think of IWA as including behavioral, mental, and moral dimensions, with the latter two supporting behavioral accommodation in its crucial task of managing, placating, satisfying, soothing, or otherwise neutralizing the aggressor. 200

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Mental accommodation includes, first, dissociation. In addition to evacuating her own experiential reality both so she can bear the assault, and also be able to focus completely on and identify with the abuser, the child also dissociates particular perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that could interfere with playing her role well. Ferenczi said, ‘In order to ensure silence, also internal silence: forgetting, repression’ (Ferenczi 1932: 118). The child, terrified of exclusion, faces the dilemma succinctly articulated by Groucho Marx: ‘Who you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?’—and chooses the former. Dissociation can range from doubting one’s perceptions or the validity of one’s feelings, to blocking particular feelings or memories, to being completely unable to think or feel, or—most extreme—even to remain conscious (Ferenczi 1932: 130). Jettisoning one’s own direct experience removes the foundation for the senses of authenticity and agency. Mental accommodation also requires creating necessary inner experiences. In addition to generating fantasies and hallucinations that numb her own inner agony, a child develops precocious capacities needed to manage the real aggressor, in order to survive (Ferenczi 1933: 165, Gurevich 2015). These capacities include receptive abilities like hypersensitivities and superintelligences (e.g., Ferenczi 1930–1932: 262; Ferenczi 1932: 81, 203, 214) that gauge the environment and calculate the best way to survive, as well as precocious active responses to the abuser, as the situation requires—for instance, premature sexuality or caregiving. And children can manufacture other feelings and thoughts, if these will calm the adult. One must feel and believe one’s role in order to play it most convincingly. IWA depends on deactivating the capacity to think for oneself. The purpose of the parent’s aggression is ‘helplessly binding a child to an adult’ (Ferenczi 1933: 165)—control over the child’s mind as well as behavior: a psychological enslavement that insures that the child serves the adult’s needs rather than her own. But independent, critical thinking is inherently an act of psychological separation, and its exercise facilitates separation—it undermines efforts by the child, dreading emotional expulsion, to stifle her own separation and autonomy and fit in. IWA also entails moral accommodation: the victim blames herself for being abused or abandoned. This includes feeling guilty and also shamefully defective—losing a sense of goodness and wholeness (Frankel 2015a). Ferenczi referred to ‘introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult’, which he saw as most damaging (Ferenczi 1933: 162). A decade later, Fairbairn gave similar observations a new explanation and a different name, ‘the moral defence’ (Fairbairn 1943: 65): the child takes the parent’s badness onto herself so she can feel she has good parents—more vital to her sense of security than feeling herself as good, according to Fairbairn. The sense of being bad can feel like an essential tie to an emotionally abandoning (outer and internalized) parent. A parent can galvanize a child’s guilt, and further undermine her sense of having a right to live an autonomous life, by a display of suffering—what Ferenczi called the ‘terrorism of suffering’ (Ferenczi 1933: 166)—with the result that the child becomes compulsively sensitive to others’ needs, and a compulsive caregiver. Ferenczi also noted the child’s sense of shame (Ferenczi 1933: 162). Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1972) and affect-researcher Silvan Tomkins (1987) both observed that shame results when someone’s expression of feelings is met with indifference or a refusal of affective exchange (and cf. Kilborne 2002)—Ferenczi’s trauma of emotional abandonment, implicit in all intrafamilial trauma. The person wonders, ‘what’s wrong with me?’, believing the other’s lack of response reflects some defect in oneself. Both guilt and the sense of shameful defect enforce submission. A guilty child feels her self-assertion damages her parent, while a sense of shameful defect makes a child doubt the soundness of her own thoughts and reactions and, more generally, her ability to function as an autonomous person. The behavioral, mental, and moral aspects of IWA work together synergistically. The child feels: I’ll be what you want, I’ll like it and won’t question it, and if I’m unhappy something’s wrong with me. 201

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Ferenczi described how, alongside IWA, people escape traumatic experience through “positive or negative hallucinations” (Ferenczi 1933: 162), soothing regressed trance states (ibid.), and confused defiance (Ferenczi 1933: 163). Often, people who forfeit their sense of self through IWA cloak this in illusions of bold self-assertiveness—a narcissistic compensation for their loss. These fantasies typically also include a sense of special belonging that denies the feelings of emotional abandonment that drive IWA—denies them by idealizing a person, group, or idea with whom one feels a self-enhancing bond. Paranoid and manic splitting amplifies this feeling of specialness by projecting all badness onto a person or group seen as evil or contemptible, and injecting an aggressive excitement that hides vulnerability. These omnipotent fantasies actually facilitate continued capitulation, precisely by dulling the despair of losing one’s self and one’s place.

Persistence and Prevalence of IWA The tendency to IWA, in its various dimensions, often persists through life, though over time what began as an automatic organismic reaction takes on a purposeful, defensive dimension (Howell 2014). But IWA does not only occur in reaction to gross trauma. A persisting IWA tendency is widespread, observable clinically in many patients who have not been victims of frank trauma (Frankel 2002); in social phenomena like the Stockholm syndrome (de Fabrique et al. 2007), where hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors; and in experiments like Milgram’s (1963) simulated-electric-shock studies of obedience, and in Zimbardo’s (Haney et al. 1973) Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal subjects, randomly assigned to be guards or inmates in a mock prison, often quickly and completely identified with these roles, sometimes even when this offended their character. The frequency of the persisting IWA tendency—certainly far greater than the incidence of gross familial child abuse—supports the idea that less obvious acts like symbolic aggression, disguised seduction, emotional abandonment, and narcissistic exploitation (Miller 1996; Faimberg 2005) can traumatize children (e.g., Ferenczi 1930). Indeed, the pervasiveness of IWA suggests that this response potential, triggered by a built-in fear of social exclusion, may have evolved to maintain a necessary degree of social hierarchy, obedience, conformity, and cooperation in a species reliant, like ours is, on a group survival strategy (Bigelow 1972; Bouchard 2009; Frankel 2015b). Phenomena like the Stockholm syndrome, as well as Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s research findings, suggest that IWA is not only a built-in response potential in children, but also in adults, and thus that it can play a significant role in sociopolitical life. IWA, which describes the compliance and loss of autonomy characteristic of abused children, is an especially useful concept in understanding the prevalent, yet self-defeating, submission and compliance upon which authoritarian political movements depend (Frankel 2015b; and also see Adorno et al. 1950; Fromm 1941).

Conclusion One of the most pressing questions about irrationality in contemporary political life is why so many working- and middle-class people in many countries, in recent times, have passionately supported authoritarian political movements whose actual aims oppose these people’s real interests and benefit only a powerful elite. The tandem traumatic responses of IWA and the compensatory narcissism that follows and supports it—understood as potentials in people generally—shed new light on this question. I see a rather close correspondence between what happens in an abusive family and an unjust political/economic system, including many of the same elements: the nature of the trauma; the 202

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mechanisms of accommodation and compliance; and the role of exciting omnipotent fantasy, which facilitates compliance by hiding the pain that results from the loss of a secure sense of belonging and trust in one’s society, and of a sense of personal value and security rooted in that connection (see Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975; Salgó 2013). IWA is triggered by the fear of emotional abandonment. Traumatic emotional abandonment can occur in societies as well as families—what sociologist Daniel Bell (1962), seeking half a century ago to explain the appeal of the radical right, called being dispossessed.The link between dispossession and the emergence of authoritarianism has been well documented (e.g., Bell 1962; Irwin and Katz 2016; Salgó 2013; Scheppele 2015; Stein 2010; Stern 2003). Dispossession can be economic or cultural, or both. For instance, economically, the resurgence of right-wing politics in many countries in recent years may well be related to increasing wealth- and income inequality (Piketty 2014) and the loss of social welfare protections over the past several decades—a time in which neoliberalism has become the guiding global economic ideology—intensified by the global financial crisis late in the last decade, which caused suffering for so many people across the globe. In terms of a fear of cultural dispossession, wars, oppression, horrific violence, and disorder in the Middle East have created a refugee crisis for Europe in recent years, and this crisis has frightened many white native-born citizens in European countries, who feel they are losing their place in their own lands; think of the rallying cry of those Britons who voted to leave the EU: ‘I want my country back’. Indeed, the fear of displacement by refugees, immigrants, and minorities has been an effective political platform for the right-wing political resurgence not only in Europe, but also in the US. The reactionary Tea Party movement there began almost immediately upon the election of the United States’ first black president, and followed an election campaign in which Obama’s opponents raised the specter of the threat of those who were not ‘real Americans’, meaning those who were not white and Christian, with roots in the heartland. And president Obama’s election took place against the background of growing ethnic and gender diversity (United States Census 2011); indeed, the US is on track to become a ‘majorityminority’ country, with non-Hispanic whites moving into the minority in just 30 years (United States Census 2012). This sense of cultural threat in the US coincided with the onset of the financial crisis and its disastrous economic impact on many Americans—a double dispossession for many white, working-class Americans. More recently, Donald Trump was elected president largely based on explicit hostility to Mexican and other dark-skinned immigrants and barely masked hatred of non-white Americans, with a promise to ‘make America great again’—in other words, to re-create an earlier ‘golden age’ in which whites who had been economically and culturally dispossessed would have their place in society restored. How are people coerced into embracing, or at least acquiescing in, their own dispossession? Ferenczi’s (1933) concept of parental hypocrisy in the family becomes, on the larger scale, ideology, in its original and I believe still very useful meaning:2 a dogma based on a false consciousness that systematically misrepresents reality, while reflecting and supporting existing power relations, and justifying the privilege of the powerful and the lack of it for everybody else, in order to keep the oppressed in line. As in an abusive family, aggression by the powerful against the powerless is presented as beneficial to all. In the US, for instance, the right-wing position is that taxes on the wealthy, regulations on corporations, and government spending on social insurance programs must all be kept low—and that these reactionary policies, which in fact hurt everyone who is not rich, are good for everybody. People hurt by these policies are blamed for their own suffering, a remarkable parallel with what often happens to abused children—the unemployed, for instance, are told they must not really want a job (even though jobs have disappeared), and that a social-safety-net would undermine their motivation to find one. The sense of being defective 203

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is likely to be internalized, though often disavowed and projected onto a scapegoat group. The ideology in which blame is embedded—the neoliberal idea that the ‘magic’ of unfettered markets is a panacea for all of society’s problems (see Giroux 2014: 76–77)—is presented as natural law or absolute truth, and its questioning seen as a sacrilege and an outrage, setting up a barrier of anxiety to thinking outside the approved ideological framework. Like hypocrisy, ideology is coercive, and creates a brittle sense of belonging that masks alienation and shame. In society as in the family, the victims’ defensive reaction to this devastating one-two punch—dispossession, then disavowal of the aggression, portraying it as beneficial—is often one of enthusiastic compliance and passionate identification with the oppressor’s ideology. Contrary perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are dissociated, discounted, blocked, overridden. Like exploited children, oppressed people, desperate to belong and feel secure, are all too ready to give up thinking for themselves and advocating for their real needs; and dissociating their own personal perspective and needs makes this possible. Their readiness to abandon their own needs and their personal thinking is further facilitated by internalizing a sense that they themselves are responsible for difficulties and disappointments that stem from causes beyond their control—a typical response in traumatized people, but one further intensified by ideologies that emphasize exaggerated individual responsibility, like American ‘fundamentalist individualism’ (Rustin 2014) or a neoliberal market fundamentalism (Harvey 2005). Instead, people buy into the feel-good omnipotent fantasy (a.k.a. the ideology) being sold to them: their wish to belong overpowers the ability to clearly see the nature of the hard realities they face (Freud 1921; Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975; Layton 2010; Salgó 2013; Glynos 2014). The fantasy is thus a narcissistic compensation for their losses. The fantasy—of belonging to a special group, and being under the magical protection of the group’s charismatic leader, with whom one identifies—provides a feeling of specialness that numbs and replaces insecurities and despair. The special feeling of belonging includes paranoid splitting and aggression, and manic excitement. The paranoid element includes a sense of one’s own specialness, closely tied to idealizing one’s own group and leader, splitting off rage and resistance toward the powerful onto false enemies, deflecting personal feelings of insecurity, weakness, contemptibility, and badness onto scapegoats like minorities and other relatively powerless members of society (see Layton 2010, 2014; Alford 2014), and disqualifying as bad or alien any dissenting voice that contradicts the fantasy. The manic urgency (manic as a psychological defense, not a psychiatric diagnosis) to always feel good, and disavow all need, vulnerability, and self-doubt, similarly erases bad feelings that could awaken resistance (Peltz 2005; Layton 2010). The constant level of excitement necessary to maintain the manic defense is supported by a ‘culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947/2002: 94 ff.) of constant fantasy-feeding distraction and entertainment—narcissistic compensations for insecurity and despair; indeed, Giroux has called the US ‘a fully entertained population’ (Giroux 2014: 50). Importantly, manic urgency does not tolerate the tension inherent in critical thinking or working with contradictory thoughts. The manic element dovetails with paranoia by bestowing a feeling of specialness on those inside the tent, promising the restoration of belonging, power, and control over one’s life, while (at least implicitly) threatening disdain, exclusion, and (at least symbolic) aggression toward anyone who might be thinking of leaving it. Hewing to the fantasy of specialness also helps people feel they are affirming their personal value and self-determination. This is ironic since, contrary to the fantasy, such ‘belonging’ requires compliance and the sacrifice of personal autonomy. In fact, the fantasy reflects and furthers an ideology that may be antithetical to many followers’ interests, and the good feeling of ‘belonging’ to the special group expedites these followers’ submission to exploitation by the powerful, and the relinquishing of their own rights and interests. Indeed, blinding 204

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oneself to one’s own real needs and interests is a precondition for acceptability in this fantasy community (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975; Salgó 2013). The result is that people align themselves with leaders and a sociopolitical system that oppresses them (Adorno et al. 1950; Feldman 2003). Identification with an aggressor is thus the intrapsychic core of authoritarian attitudes among those who embrace an idealized leader and the mindless attitudes of their fellow followers. Identification with the aggressor involves the loss of an inner sense of autonomy as well as the freedom to act (Arendt 1948), undermining the feeling of being able to resist an authoritarian leader and system, and making it easier for those in power to maintain control.

Notes 1. Modeled largely on Ferenczi’s work, M. Balint (1969) described a similar traumatic process as occurring in three phases: the first, the pre-trauma stage, is the experience of safety, the second the assault itself, and the third the hypocrisy about it. 2. The concept of ideology, as used here, follows its original meaning, though the concept has since evolved (see Žižek 1994).

References Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D.J. and Sanford, R.N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper and Row. Alford, C.F. (2014) ‘Voting Against One’s Interest: The Hatred of Big Government’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 19(2), 203–208. Arendt, H. (1948) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken. Bálint, M. (1969) ‘Trauma and Object Relationship’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 429–435. Bell, D. (1962) ‘The Dispossessed’, in Bell, D. (ed.) The Radical Right, 3rd ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1–45. Bigelow, R. (1972) ‘The Evolution of Cooperation, Aggression, and Self-Control’, in Cole, J. and Jensen, D. (eds.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1–57. Bouchard,T.J. (2009) ‘Authoritarianism, Religiousness, and Conservatism: Is “Obedience to Authority” the Explanation for their Clustering, Universality and Evolution?’, in Voland, E. and Schiefenhövel,W. (eds.) The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 165–180. Butler, S. (1996) Conspiracy of Silence:The Trauma of Incest,Volcano, CA:Volcano Press. Crittenden, P.M. and DiLalla, D.L. (1988) ‘Compulsive Compliance: The Development of an Inhibitory Coping Strategy in Infancy’, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 16, 585–599. de Fabrique, N., Romano, S.J., Vecchi, G.M. and van Hasselt, V.B. (2007) ‘Understanding Stockholm Syndrome’, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 76(7), 10–15. https://leb.fbi.gov/2007-pdfs/leb-july-2007. Faimberg, H. (2005) The Telescoping of Generations, New York: Routledge. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1943) ‘The Repression and Return of Bad Objects’, in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, 59–81. Feldman, S. (2003) ‘Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism’, Political Psychology, 24(1), 41–74. Ferenczi, S. (1929) ‘The Unwelcome Child and his Death Instinct’, in Bálint, M. (ed.) Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Mosbacher, E. and others (trans.), London: Hogarth, 1955/1980, 102–107. Ferenczi, S. (1930) ‘The Principle of Relaxation and Neocatharsis’, in Bálint, M. (ed.) Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Mosbacher, E. and others (trans.), London: Hogarth, 1955/1980, 108–125. Ferenczi, S. (1930–1932) ‘Notes and Fragments’, in Bálint, M. (ed.) Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Mosbacher, E. and others (trans.), London: Hogarth, 1955/1980, 219–279. Ferenczi, S. (1931) ‘Child-Analysis in the Analysis of Adults’, in Bálint, M. (ed.) Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Mosbacher, E. and others (trans.), London: Hogarth, 1955/1980, 126–142.

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Jay Frankel Ferenczi, S. (1932) The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, Dupont, J. (ed.), Bálint, M. and Jackson, N.Z. (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Ferenczi, S. (1933) ‘Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child’, in Bálint, M. (ed.) Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Mosbacher, E. and others (trans.), London: Hogarth, 1955/1980, 156–167. Frankel, J. (2002) ‘Exploring Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life, and the Therapeutic Relationship’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12, 101–139. Frankel, J. (2015a) ‘The Persistent Sense of Being Bad: The Moral Dimension of Identification with the Aggressor’, in Harris, A. and Kuchuck, S. (eds.) The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi, New York: Routledge, 204–222. Frankel, J. (2015b) ‘The Traumatic Basis for the Resurgence of Right-Wing Politics Among Working Americans’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 20, 359–378. Freud, S. (1921) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 18, 65–144. Freud, A. (1936) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, New York: International Universities Press. Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom, Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Giroux, H.A. (2014) The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine, San Francisco: City Lights. Glynos, J. (2014) ‘Hating Government and Voting Against One’s Interests: Self-Transgression, Enjoyment, Critique’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 19(2), 179–189. Gurevich, H. (2015) ‘The Language of Absence and the Language of Tenderness: Therapeutic Transformation of Early Psychic Trauma and Dissociation as Resolution of the “Identification with the Aggressor” ’, Fort Da, 21(1), 45–65. Haney, C., Banks,W.C. and Zimbardo, P.G. (1973) ‘A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison’, Naval Research Review, 30, 4–17. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1947/2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Noerr, G.S. (ed.), Jephcott, E. (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Howell, E.F. (2014) ‘Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Understanding Dissociative Structure with Interacting Victim and Abuser Self-States’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 48–59. Irwin, N. and Katz, J. (2016) ‘The Geography of Trumpism’, New York Times, 12 March, www.nytimes. com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html. Kilborne, B. (2002) Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kohut, H. (1972) ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 27, 360–400. Layton, L. (2010) ‘Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Perversion of Truth’, Subjectivity, 3(3), 303–322. Layton, L. (2014) ‘Some Psychic Effects of Neoliberalism: Narcissism, Disavowal, Perversion’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 19(2), 161–178. Milgram, S. (1963) ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378. Miller, A. (1996) The Drama of the Gifted Child, New York: Basic Books. Mitscherlich, A. and Mitscherlich, M. (1975) The Inability to Mourn, New York: Grove Press. Peltz, R. (2005) ‘The Manic Society’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 15(3), 347–366. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the 21st Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rustin, M. (2014) ‘Belonging to Oneself Alone: The Spirit of Neoliberalism’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 19(2), 145–160. Salgó, E. (2013) Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in Mothers’ Hands, New York: Routledge. Scheppele, K.L. (2015) ‘Orbán’s Police State’, Politico, 15 September, www.politico.eu/article/ orbans-police-state-hungary-serbia-border-migration-refugees/ Stein, R. (2010) For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stern, J. (2003) Terror in the Name of God:Why Religious Militants Kill, New York: HarperCollins. Tomkins, S.S. (1987) ‘Shame’, in Nathanson, D.L. (ed.) The Many Faces of Shame, New York: Guilford, 133–161. United States Census Bureau (2011) ‘2010 Census Shows America’s Diversity’, 24 March, www.census. gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb11-cn125.html (accessed 28 June 2014).

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16 MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA Claudia Lapping

State acts of recognition of responsibility for past atrocities are controversial, almost paradoxical, and inadequate in a most painful sense. Examples include Willi Brandt’s spontaneous gesture at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to the Japanese apology to the government of South Korea for sexual crimes committed by its military, the UK government’s acknowledgment that the Bloody Sunday killings were unjustifiable, and the South African truth and reconciliation commission hearings on violations committed under South African apartheid.These acts require acknowledgment precisely because they are unspeakable, and the act of acknowledgment in no way captures the excess of the act that can’t be seen or spoken.This inadequacy is repeated here, now, in written words that denote these events as if they are known, knowable, or speakable. Nevertheless, the fraught significance and the inadequate weight of moments of state recognition signal something of the politics of loss, of the impossibility of shedding the past, and of the need to address in some way the ongoing resonances of the past in present political relations. Psychoanalytic conceptions of mourning and melancholia provide us with a way of conceptualizing the resonances of loss in the simultaneous constitution of individual and political identities. Their theorization of the unconscious dimensions of these identities, in the aftermath of loss, can help us to better understand the constitution of the political field. Pursuing this aim—the production of a better understanding of the constitution of the political field—this chapter explores the use of psychoanalytic understandings of mourning and melancholia in political theory and analysis. It sets out the multiple features of Freud’s theorization of mourning, melancholia, and melancholic identification. It then traces how contrasting aspects of Freud’s account are elaborated in more recent discussion by Jean Laplanche, Judith Butler, Derek Hook, and Slavoj Žižek and in contrasting positions on the politics of resignification and the politics of the Thing. The implications of these theorizations are further explored in the presentation of a concrete instance: the Mitscherlichs’ study of postwar Germany in The Inability to Mourn (1967). The chapter then focuses on studies in political theory that come under the broad headings of left melancholia or feminist melancholia. This is a body of writing analyzing the affective attachments underlying positions taken up within both political and academic fields, frequently staged as an opposition between more traditional Marxist/ feminist approaches and post-structuralism.The final section introduces theorizations of the role of the witness in the aftermath of historical events associated with trauma. In looking across this range of instances of speculative and empirical analysis, the chapter argues for the importance of 208

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distinguishing between generalized epistemological arguments and the specific political potentialities associated with a particular case, as well as their contrasting roles in the interpretation of strategy and tactics in a politics of loss (cf. Lacan 1977; Hill 2002).

Mourning, Melancholia, and Melancholic Identification: Freud’s Early and Later Theorizations of Loss The term mourning is associated with bereavement, whereas melancholia is associated with the symptoms of depression. In his initial theorization, Freud elaborated on the distinction between the two conditions in terms of unconscious relations to loss. His later work explored the wider implications of these relations. In reviewing the productivity of the concepts for political analysis, keep in mind how the multiple features associated with each have been retheorized both in Freud’s own later work and in more contemporary engagements with his ideas. Recent work in politics, sociology, and cultural studies can perhaps be understood in relation to the identifications that they articulate with distinct interpretations of specific conceptual elements of Freud’s theories. Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia is based on an analogy he constructs between patients mourning bereavement and patients exhibiting symptoms of melancholy. He notes the similarity in the ‘painful frame of mind’, the ‘loss of interest in the outside world’, and the ‘loss of the capacity to love’ (Freud 1957: 244) that characterizes both conditions. However, he notes with curiosity the fact that while the unusual pain associated with mourning is considered an understandable response to a visible loss, the prolonged distress experienced in cases of melancholia is treated as pathological and in need of explanation. Freud suggests that further exploration of the analogy between the two might make each more intelligible.The comparison is the basis for his theorization of the unconscious relations within both conditions and for his conceptualization of a lost object within processes of melancholy. The metaphor of the lost object can help us to account for cases where the ‘mourning’ is not for someone who has died and also for cases where ‘one cannot clearly see what it is that has been lost’ (1957: 245). Freud suggests, for example, that in cases where this ‘loss’ is ideal rather than actual, ‘it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either’ (Freud 1957: 245). This unperceived or unconscious status of the loss blurs the distinction between the external and internal world and suggests a certain emptiness of the ego. He says that ‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself ’ (Freud 1957: 246), and the distinction between externalized and internalized loss is significant. Freud suggests that in mourning the ego is able to detach itself from the lost object through a process of reality checking: ‘Each individual memory and expectation in which the libido was connected to the object is adjusted and hyper invested, leading to detachment from the libido’ (1957: 245). In melancholia, in contrast, the lost object is internalized and becomes a constitutive element of the ego. He describes melancholia as an acutely painful and unresolved form of mourning, associated with selfreproaches, self revilings, and a delusional expectation of punishment. This attack on the self distinguishes melancholia from mourning, in which, he says, ‘the disturbance of self-regard is absent’ (Freud 1957: 244). The self-reproaches associated with melancholia, Freud says, can frequently be understood as identifications with the loved object: If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at 209

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all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves, or has loved, or should love. (Freud 1957: 248) He concludes, ‘the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego’ (1957: 248).Through these identifications, the features associated with the lost object are internalized by the ego, and the emotions directed at the object are turned inwards, creating a split within the ego between the internalized object and the critical emotions the ego directs at it. Freud suggests an ongoing struggle in which the ego fights both to detach from the object and also to maintain the strong emotional attachment.The ambiguity in the loved/hated nature of the lost object and the failure to detach from the object cause of melancholia thus create a visceral ambivalence in the relation between the object and the ego; or to be more precise, the ambivalence persists in the relation between the internalization of the object and the other elements of the ego. In his later work The Ego and the Id (1923), however, Freud speculates that, rather than being a feature that distinguishes melancholia from mourning, the internalization of the object might be a common feature of the two states: ‘It might be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects’ (Freud 1923: 29). Building on this extension of his understanding of melancholic processes, Freud suggests that the identification with a lost object is far more significant than he had originally suggested. He speculates that this melancholic process plays a part in the construction of the superego, which is instantiated in the first identifications of the subject. The simultaneous formation of the subject and the superego takes place during the Oedipus conflict, in which the child is forced to give up their polymorphous desire for the mother and to identify with (one of) their parents, thus taking on a sexual identity (Freud 1923: 34). These identifications instantiate the influence of the parents and of wider social and moral obligations within the child: ‘The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting the same obstacle within itself ’ (Freud 1923: 34). Freud notes that this formulation constitutes an alteration in the conceptual structure of melancholia: ‘these identifications’, he says, ‘are not what we would have expected’ (Freud 1923: 32). Instead of an internalization of the object, there is an internalization of the prohibition of the object, and this is the basis of the superego. This development, Freud says, begins to suggest the ‘full significance’ (Freud 1923: 28) of melancholic identifications and of the role they play in the formation of the ego. There are several significant distinctions within Freud’s accounts. There is the distinction between a process in which the subject is able to detach from the lost object and a process in which the relation to the object is sustained, in some form, within the ego. There is the distinction between the internalization of the lost object within the ego and the internalization of the prohibition of the object. And there is the distinction between melancholia as a pathological process and melancholic identification as the common basis for the formation of the subject.

Recent Elaborations of Freud’s Concepts of Mourning and Melancholia for Political Analysis Contemporary theorists—Jean Laplanche, Judith Butler, Derek Hook, and Slavoj Žižek—have developed contrasting aspects of Freud’s conceptualizations of mourning and melancholia.Their elaborations foreground contrasting political implications of his ideas. 210

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Laplanche engages with Freud’s suggestion in his earlier paper that the loss associated with mourning is both understandable and conscious: Where are we to find mourning which would only be conscious, with no infantile reverberation, no ambivalence and no narcissistic consequences? . . . If mourning, in fact, entails no narcissistic wound, no breaching of the ego, how can it be understood to be so painful? (Laplanche 1999: 249) He draws attention to the impossibility of a fully conscious experience of loss, and he associates this with the extremity of pain associated with mourning, since this pain can only be understood through the theorization of a viscerally significant, unconscious, or unspeakable, aspect of the affective attachment to the object. The foregrounding of the narcissistic wound associated with unconscious loss is suggestive for the analysis of visceral political and cultural relations. As Freud had noted in his later work, significant aspects of the relation to the lost object may be common in mourning, melancholia, and processes of melancholic identification. Butler elaborates further the political implications of the processes of unconscious melancholic identifications that Freud theorized in his later work as inherent to the process of becoming a subject. She extends this idea to theorize the possibility that identification with a lost object may be the basis for the cultural and political prohibition of certain identities and attachments: In The Ego and the Id, [Freud] makes room for the notion that melancholic identification may be a prerequisite for letting the object go. By claiming this, he changes what it means to ‘let an object go,’ for there is no final breaking of the attachment. There is, rather, the incorporation of the attachment as identification, where identification becomes a magical, a psychic form of preserving the object. Insofar as identification is the psychic preserve of the object and such identifications come to form the ego, the lost object continues to haunt and inhabit the ego as one of its constitutive identifications. The lost object is, in that sense, made coextensive with the ego itself. Indeed, one might conclude that melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego, and, hence, to avert the loss as a complete loss. Giving up the object becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic internalization. (Butler 1997: 134) The distinction between the melancholic internalization of loss and the externalization embodied in processes of mourning is significant for the politics of melancholia: If the object can no longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that internalization will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss. (Butler 1997: 134) She identifies this pathological melancholic internalization in the hyperbolic masculine identifications that are associated with a foreclosure of homosexual attachment.This political extension of Freud’s idea, she suggests, points to the need for cultural practices of mourning to re-introduce or re-signify the lost or obliterated object of repudiated identities. Key here is the risk that 211

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internalization acts as a corollary or support for the exclusionary cultural or social prohibition of the object. Žižek (2000) introduces a further distinction into the political mapping of melancholic relations. He foregrounds the impossibility of bringing the object of melancholic yearning into discourse: ‘In short, what melancholy obfuscates is that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack’ (Žižek 2000: 660). This clarification is in line with Butler’s careful delineation of the status of the object. She is mindful of contrasting modes of unconscious loss (Butler 1997: 139), although it is also worth noting that Derek Hook, in his reiteration of Freudian distinctions between mourning, melancholic identification, and the pathological condition of melancholia, criticizes her for overgeneralization in her account of the foreclosure of homosexual attachment. Hook argues for the need to avoid generalizations about states of cultural melancholia and to pay attention to the singularity of both historical circumstance and individual subjects’ relations to loss: As in psychoanalytic treatment, one needs to attend not only to given sociohistorical circumstances but the singularity of the given subject’s (or subject community’s) responses to such circumstances, as set of responses that never fit the answer that theory would predispose us to expect. (Hook 2014: n.p.) The aspect of the object, or the lack in the object, that resonates with or constitutes the subject’s narcissistic wound is not to be known in advance, if it is to be known at all. In slightly different ways, both Žižek and Hook point to the epistemological and empirical impossibility of representing the object of loss. In addition, Hook and Žižek, perhaps more vehemently than Butler, foreground the risk of conceptualizing melancholic internalization as a productive way of preserving a socially repudiated object, citing the way this has been proposed in some recent cultural analyses. Eng and Han, for example, in an exploration of the intersections of clinical and cultural politics, note the danger of the way melancholic internalization of loss ‘threatens to render the social invisible’ (Eng and Han 2003: 355). Nevertheless, drawing on a Kleinian understanding of the significance of internal objects in relation to individual psychical pain, they argue that in clinical work, the preservation of the lost object may sometimes be an ethical necessity (Eng and Han 2003: 362). They further suggest that the melancholic internalization of the lost object may be associated with a productive politics of preservation: ‘the melancholic process is one way in which socially disparaged objects—racially and sexually disprivileged others—live on in the psychic realm’ (Eng and Han 2003: 364). They cite Butler’s reference to the psychic violence of conscience as an indictment of exclusionary social formations and speculate that there may be potentially productive, truth-telling energies associated with melancholic internalization. For Hook, in contrast, it is important to maintain a distinction between the unconscious preservation of loss associated with melancholia and the gradual differentiation of the ego from the object brought about in acts of mourning and cultural remembrance. The painful selfreviling constituted in the melancholic attack on the internalized lost object, he suggests, risks turning back on the subject if there is cultural preservation without differentiation (Hook 2014). Žižek thematizes this risk in the quest for cultural ownership of an object that might fix an identity in place: ‘The melancholic link to the lost ethnic Object allows us to claim that we remain faithful to our ethnic roots while fully participating in the global capitalist game’ (Žižek 2000: 659). Here he foregrounds the way the object associated with a repudiated identity is always 212

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constituted by an already exclusionary social and economic system. He opposes the internalized attachment to a fixed cultural identity to an ethics of the unknowable: ‘the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice’ (Žižek 2000: 666). The ‘Thing’ here refers to an absolutely unknowable force that drives symbolization, described by Lacan as ‘the cause of the most fundamental human passions’ (cited in Evans 1996: 205). Thus, Žižek suggests, the preservation of a relation to an internalized object of loss covers over this fundamental driving force that constitutes lack both in the object and in the social conditions of its repudiation: the ethnic object is defined within a specific economic system, the symbolization of which disguises the cause of the passions out of which it is constituted. For Žižek, this delegitimizes any process that in its preservation of the object also maintains existing economic and symbolic relations to the object while denying the unimaginably excessive cause of those relations. The alternative is a political act in which the subject embodies the monstrosity of the Thing, the excessive unnameable aspect of the not-object that is unspeakable, and that may be capable of disturbing the social fabric (Žižek 2000: 669). This conceptual terrain gives rise to a series of questions. What are the implications of Laplanche’s suggestion that the unconscious trace of the lost object relates to a narcissistic wound? Might some form of cultural articulation of that trace serve as a political gesture against oppression/obliteration? Or does the conscious cultural preservation of the object necessarily constitute a reifying act of reparation with the social conditions of lack that brought about the imagined loss? What might it mean, politically or empirically, to take the position of the Thing? As Derek Hook (2014) points out, the specific and varied texture of any instance of loss make it impossible to predict in advance its political and psychical effects. With this in mind, before moving on to look at discussions of feminist and left melancholia in political theory, in the next section I draw on the Mitscherlichs’ classic sociological/psychosocial study of postwar Germany, to lay out the conceptual terms in slightly more concrete form.

Interpreting the Lost Object: Methodological and Political Implications of The Inability to Mourn Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich’s classic study of postwar Germany, The Inability to Mourn (1975), is a major early contribution to the field. Methodologically, I draw attention to the range of evidence that the authors deploy in the study to interpret processes of mourning or of the failure to mourn. Conceptually, I foreground shifting interpretations of the lost object and instances of redirection of libidinal energies that are traced in their study. Politically, there is a question about the role that a process of mourning might play in bringing about a recognition or resignification of loss. The Mitscherlichs’ study begins with the observation that despite the mass involvement in the Nazi movement, from membership in the Hitler Youth to active service in the SS (Schutzstaffel) or the German army, there was little evidence of guilt or depression following the defeat of Hitler and the exposure of the extent of the Nazi atrocities. They argue, ‘That so few signs of melancholia or even of mourning are to be seen among the great masses of the population can be attributed only to a collective denial of the past’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 28). Their study traces the different mechanisms of denial within economic and cultural activity and within case studies of patients in clinical psychoanalytic practice. As evidence of cultural denial, the Mitscherlichs cite the commemoration of German losses in the bombings of Dresden and Frankfurt but the lack of any comparable memorial of the victims of the concentration camps (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 30); they note the sustained readership for ‘books and newspaper articles claiming that what was done was done under pressure from 213

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evil persecutors’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 16); they contrast a newspaper notice celebrating the birthday of a professor who served in the Nazi government with the continuing negative reactions to the few who resisted the regime (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 51–53); and they point to the lack of historical studies of the Nazi period by West German scholars (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 53). In the sphere of political and economic activity, the Mitscherlichs argue that the refusal of West Germany to give up its claims to the territories of East Germany constituted a denial of the realities of their defeat (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 5). They point to an associated diversion of libidinal energy from the field of politics to the field of industry and consumerism (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 9) and suggest this industrious diversion of energy constitutes a ‘manic defense’ by means of which to ‘obliterate the past’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 15). As a corollary of these processes, the Mitscherlichs point to the ‘theory of enforced obedience’, whereby the leaders of the Nazi regime, who had previously been the object of attachment and idealization, ‘were alone responsible for putting genocide into practice’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 15). This redirection of libidinal energy appears to keep at bay the more painful response to loss whereby the object is internalized and guilt and self-reproach are turned inward. Alongside their analysis of the cultural and political landscape, the Mitscherlichs present three case studies of patients in clinical psychoanalysis. Two of these patients, they suggest, presented themselves as the victim in relation to the war, one describing the German people as a whole as suffering great wrongs, the other blaming his compatriots for robbing him of his pride in his nation. The third patient, who said he had never been a convinced Nazi, despite serving as an officer during the war, recalled memories of compliance during the process of his analysis. The Mitscherlichs point to the significance of both the repression of these memories and the fact that, in a way that was not typical of this patient, the recollections were apparently not accompanied by any strong affective response. They interpret this lack of affect as indicative of the cultural context, because it did not seem to be explicable solely in relation to the patient’s individual resistance. This suggests that individual mechanisms of denial are supported by the network of denials in the cultural and political sphere and thus might be understood as ‘a collectively approved resistance’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975: 35, italics in the original). The consistency of the denials of guilt or responsibility across cultural, political, and clinical instances constitutes a persuasive picture of a collective inability to acknowledge the losses associated with the war. However, the object of loss shifts: at some points, it appears as the loss of a powerful leader; at others, it is the loss of national pride and guilt-free identity. There is little direct evidence of any sense of a loss associated with the enactment or victims of Nazi atrocities. In most instances, the evidence from the cultural field indicates the way cultural and psychical mechanisms of denial are reinforced, while the clinical evidence helps to confirm an unconscious dimension of a loss that is being denied. While mindful of Hook’s caution against generalization, it would certainly be possible to conceptualize this as a type of foreclosure, a loss of an object that never existed as such, not because the atrocities never happened but because they are impossible to perceive or to conceive: the magnitude of the horror is simply too great. Politically, from a more Butlerian perspective, in line with the Mitscherlichs, this might indicate the need for a visible process of mourning, to find a mode of recognition or signification of the object within discourse. A Žižekian approach might, rather, foreground the impossibility of ever naming, or of bringing into discourse, the criminality and trauma of the Holocaust.The attempt to reconcile through a process of cultural re-signification, Žižek’s argument might suggest, risks in some sense cleansing or acquitting the social edifice from which the atrocity emerged. The opposition constructed here concerns political strategy: a cultural politics of re-signification is opposed to a more direct confrontation of the economic and political field with the Thing 214

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it cannot see. Empirically, though, it may not be possible to know in advance when these apparently, or epistemologically, distinct strategies may either come into conflict or coincide. This undecidable mess is what intrigues the empirical social scientist. In empirical work, psychoanalysis adds a layer to analyses of specific social, economic, and political relations and to our (mis)understanding of the complexity of these relations. Applications of psychoanalytic ideas in the field of political theory work slightly differently. Here psychoanalytic conceptions of mourning and melancholia are used to insert a more generalized and speculative interpretation of the unconscious into existing theorizations of the political field. The level of specificity or generality varies from case to case, and even highly generalized and speculative interpretations of unconscious attachment might be understood as a starting point for a reflexive process of reality checking to work though sedimented ideas.

Affective Force Within the Political Left: Interpreting Melancholic Processes in Political and Feminist Theory In 1990, Helmut Dubiel wrote ‘Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left’, an analysis of positions emerging in writing on the German academic left after reunification and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Dubiel’s object of analysis is a body of texts by a West German left-wing intelligentsia who had struggled to maintain a position between the anti-communism that dominated social science departments in the Federal Republic and the totalitarian socialism of the East (Dubiel 1990: 243). His analysis distinguishes a postmodern approach that ‘sacrifices leftist identity altogether’ from authors whose ‘first concern is preserving their own identity’ (Dubiel 1990: 241). He interprets these positions by using Freud’s initial distinction between mourning and melancholia and the need for a process of reality testing to work through and come to terms with loss. Neither camp, Dubiel argues, has understood or worked through the meaning of the loss of an empirically existing, if repudiated, alternative to capitalism. He identifies the postmodern position as a manic attempt to detach from the libidinal investments in this utopian alternative, while the reiterations of an unaltered vocabulary of empirical socialism suggest a persistent melancholic inwardness and failure to detach (Dubiel 1990: 242). Of the latter group, he suggests, ‘That empirical socialism became the target for the projection of leftist hopes in the West just as it was disappearing proves that interpretational patterns still stored in the unconscious of many leftists had become linked to its mere existence’ (Dubiel 1990: 244). His own interpretation suggests that ‘Nothing distinguished totalitarian socialism other than its sheer existence, other than the fact that it embodied the possibility that capitalism could be subject to a beyond’ (Dubiel 1990: 243). Dubiel’s response is to attempt to construct a process of mourning by subjecting the reified terms of socialism to a process of reality testing, to gradually release the libidinal investment and reengage with the world. He argues for the need to scrutinize all elements of the traditionalist socialist model in the light of contemporary economic and political developments: new technologies and speculative financial cycles, critiques of progress narratives and vanguardist models of revolution, and contemporary understandings of pluralism that question both authoritarian universalism and unreflexive analyses of the division of labor (Dubiel 1990: 244–248; also see Jay 1992). His overall argument is for an understanding that capitalism ‘is not an order identical with itself ’ (Dubiel 1990: 248), and he suggests that working through the terms of socialism is necessary to reactivate left politics: ‘civilizing capitalism to the point that it is no longer recognizable’ (Dubiel 1990: 249). This formulation, it might be argued, can be interpreted through both a Butlerian lens of articulation and re-signification and a Žižekian conception of impossibility and flux. 215

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The terms of Dubiel’s analysis are mirrored and extended in recent debates that trace the ongoing struggles of the left (Brown 1999; Dean 2012). Wendy Brown offers a similar contextual positioning of these struggles in the loss of unified movements, the delegitimization of class analyses, and the loss of narratives of progress. Also in line with Dubiel, she suggests a more painful unavowed loss is the loss of a feeling: ‘the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right and the true’ (1999: 22). Citing Freud’s analysis of the way hatred for the lost object is sadistically redirected, she argues that it is the loss of this idealized promise that drives divisions in the left and the disproportionate wrath directed toward both identity politics and post-structuralism (Brown 1999: 22–23). Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, she argues that the traditionalist left’s refusal to extend its interpretive vocabulary means it has failed to meet the challenge of the new right’s construction of a discourse that links ‘privatization’ to political logics associated with increased sexual and cultural diversification. In contrast, she argues, the left clings to a narrow vocabulary of the welfare state and defense of civil liberties: the Left has come to represent a politics that seeks to protect a set of freedoms and entitlements that confronts neither the dominations contained in both nor the limited value of those freedoms and entitlements in contemporary configurations of capitalism. (Brown 1999: 26) Drawing on Benjamin’s conceptualization of ‘left melancholia’ as a sentimental attachment to a feeling that blocks engagement with the world, she thus argues that the left is failing to develop the necessary critique of contemporary capitalism. Jodi Dean inflects this analysis with the observation that this disarmed politics might be understood also as a manic redirection of revolutionary desire: Instead of a Left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy, we have one that has given way on the desire for communism, betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat, and sublimated revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the hold of capitalism. (Dean 2012: 174; also see Segal 2003: 144–145) It is important also to trace productive delineations of these ideas within feminist theory, where regretful responses to shifts in feminist theoretical discourse, in the institutionalization and professionalization of feminism and in the relation between feminist epistemology and feminist activism, have been interpreted through the lens of melancholia (e.g., Wiegman 2000; Roy 2009). Wiegman, echoing aspects of Dubiel’s and Brown’s analyses, argues that ‘feminism is not self-identical’ (Wiegman 2000: 808) and that attempts to construct a unified feminist tradition risk imposing prescriptive norms on the development of feminist knowledge. She retheorizes analyses of left melancholia, in the context of feminism, as an apocalyptic anxiety provoked ‘less by an overwhelming sense of past loss than by a fear about the failure of the future’ (Wiegman 2000: 807).This anxiety, she argues, is associated with an attachment to a teleological narrative of a feminist time that is rooted in spontaneous origins but that defines the present in relation to the legacy of earlier generations. ‘Generational legacy’ she argues, ‘operates through a strategic foreclosure of the possibility of existing in time with new and radically discontinuous modes of spontaneous generation’ (Wiegman 2000: 811). Wiegman’s analysis also constructs a space of articulation with Dean’s call for the left to be faithful to impossible desire as opposed to allowing ourselves to be captured by activities that ‘feel productive, important and radical’ 216

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(Dean 2012: 176), which resonates with Wiegman’s analysis of regretful responses to increasing fissures between feminist activism and feminist theory. As an alternative to regret, she traces a painful space for a politics of the impossible: ‘I hope to inhabit the anxiety that the apocalyptic speaks without either capitulating to it (and hence declaring feminism is dead) or disciplining it (and hence declaring the present as fully productive to feminism’s future time)’ (Wiegman 2000: 815). Although offering contrasting formulations, all these authors foreground the risk of attachment to a political and temporal positivity as a significant feature of contemporary melancholic politics. These studies use speculative theoretical analysis to map different points at which it might be possible to interpret unconscious forces in a field of political positions. Although, as Dubiel notes (Dubiel 1990: 242; also see Segal 2003: 151), the speculative methodology means that claims remain at a rhetorical level of generality, the studies together constitute a rich account of possible moments of unconscious attachment. In addition, as instances of the field that is their object of analysis, the contrasting ways they interpret the objects of attachment (e.g., contrasting interpretations of ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘utopianism’ in Dean 2012: 175, and Dubiel 1990: 246) mark the texts themselves as libidinally invested subjective articulations. Each text seems to have a dual purpose, both as an analysis of the field and as a position within the field. There is, then, perhaps a question about the extent to which they might be interpreted as attempts to engage in a productive working through of injurious loss.This raises further questions about the conscious and unconscious affect associated with political attachments, about the way the loss of such attachments marks political subjectivities, and about clinical and non-clinical approaches to working through the ongoing political effects of such loss.

Bearing Witness to Trauma: A Politics of Re-signification and a Politics of the Thing In the previous sections, I’ve discussed work that explores the unconscious delineation and effects of loss. Here I consider the question of traumatic loss from a slightly different perspective. To do this, I draw on Samuel Gerson’s discussion of the concept of the third, the role of a ‘live third’ or witness in maintaining the subject, and an understanding of trauma as the loss of this life-giving relation: I apply the notion of the third to that entity—be it personal, social or cultural—that exists in relation to an individual and his or her experience of massive trauma. The concept of the witness is used as an exemplar of a ‘live third’—simply put this is the other whose engaged recognition and concerned responsiveness to the individual’s experience create livable meaning. The ‘dead third’ is conceptualized as the loss of a ‘live third’ on whom the individual had previously relied, had entrusted with faith, and in relation to whom or which, had developed a sense of personal continuity and meaning. (Gerson 2009: 1343) Gerson’s account encompasses a variety of conceptions of thirdness: a developmental conception of the oedipal third, a relational conception of an intersubjective or analytic third, and what he calls a ‘cultural third’—social, linguistic, and cultural formations that, in his words, ‘exert a powerful influence on the structures of thought and affect’ (Gerson 2009: 1342). Trauma, he suggests, following Freud, is less about the ‘degree of excess stimulation’ (Gerson 2009: 1345) than it is about the loss of a third in relation to whom, or which, the subject makes sense of 217

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her or his being. He formulates this as ‘the overwhelming experience of learning that there is an absence of concern about one’s plight’ (Gerson 2009: 1345). With this understanding of the role of the third in the trauma of the subject, Gerson’s aim is to explore the possibility of relieving the effects of such trauma: ‘We have all come to recognize that the most basic necessity for psychic aliveness in the aftermath of atrocity is the active witnessing presence of an other’ (Gerson 2009: 1353). Gerson’s paper concludes with a rather optimistic reference to German and South African national processes for recognition of trauma, noting the ‘compassion, honesty and responsibility that these nations have embraced’ (Gerson 2009: 1355) and perhaps failing to acknowledge the complexity of these processes. Nevertheless, his paper provides a framework for important questioning about what it might mean to construct a mode of witnessing within the political field that might alleviate the effects of loss. Paula Salvio provides an account of a process of witnessing that is sensitive to the complex risk entailed in a politics of making visible the invisible. She traces the Italian state’s denial of ‘systematic mafia infiltration into civil society’ and interprets this failure as a betrayal of its role as a third, citing Bollas’s suggestion that ‘Each state is a derivative of the parenting world that exists in the mind of its citizens’ (Bollas, qtd. in Salvio 2014: 99). This is the context for a biographical account of Letizia Battaglia’s construction of a photographic archive of mafia violence. Salvio narrates Battaglia’s career as a radical photojournalist, informed by a politics of participative spectatorship, and her documentation of approximately a hundred mafia executions or disappearances in Palermo between 1978 and 1992. During this period, ‘Battaglia and her assistants were present at every major crime scene throughout the city’ (Salvio 2014: 103) and used their photographic archive to curate anti-mafia exhibitions—‘in public spaces, apart from state control and without profit’ (Salvio 2014: 104)—to engage the public and to make visible crimes that had previously been denied. Salvio argues that this process ‘does not simply preserve a past but re-elaborates and re-inscribes history in ways that expand, disturb and ultimately reconstitute traumatic memories so they can be worked through’ (Salvio 2014: 102). She interprets the exhibitions as the basis for the development of a social protective shield, a mode of witnessing that constitutes social networks, here embodied in new networks of women-led activism and engagement with culture in a mode of citizenship denied by the Italian state (Salvio 2014: 100–101). However, Salvio’s interviews with Battaglia also reveal the pain of her position as witness. Following the murder of two of the most important mafia prosecutors, Battaglia stopped photographing crime scenes. In the interview, she said, I was never again to take photographs of the dead and all that goes with it. . . . I took the decision to never take another photograph of another dead body, of any more pain and certainly of no more Mafiosi. Today, exactly twenty years later, I can only deplore my weakness or indolence or whatever you want to call it. It was my duty to resist, to take more photographs and to consign them to a future memory. These photos which I never took actually hurt me more than those that I did. (Battaglia in Salvio 2014: 111) I wonder if we might relate Battaglia’s position as witness, her direct confrontation with death, and the impossibility of resolution of her project to Žižek’s account of a political act in which the subject embodies the monstrosity of the Thing—the Thing that continues to be refused by the social fabric, the Thing that cannot be recognized in its excess, the Thing that is the cause of the most fundamental human passions. In recognizing both a possibility of reinscribing loss and the painful political and affective unpredictability of this process, Salvio’s account illustrates 218

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the complexity of constituting an act of recognition of loss through a reconstruction of a ‘live third’ in the political field. The juxtaposition of the discussion of trauma related to the Holocaust and violent crime with the losses related to articulations of positions within the left intelligentsia may be uncomfortable, but these should not be seen as distinct, separately unified contexts. If we understand, as psychoanalysis does, an originary traumatic loss to be the basis for subjectivity and the unconscious to be the ongoing resonance of that originary loss, then we might perhaps ask, what narcissistic injury is repeated in libidinal articulations of positions on the political left? And the answer to this question may well suggest still-unknown resonances between responses to losses that relate to political attachments and experiences in other contexts in which a necessary relation to a third or a witnessing other has been broken or torn. Gerson’s and Salvio’s accounts of the psychoanalytic and political witnessing of trauma also help to frame a question that drives discussion of loss within political theory: What kind of political act might constitute an appropriate response for the subjectivity that has been undermined by trauma? Although it is necessary to distinguish between the clinical and political fields, one aim of bringing a psychoanalytic sensibility to bear on politics must be to inform strategy and tactics. At a strategic level, the contrasting epistemologies of recognition, re-signification, and impossibility will inform our analysis of the field. At the tactical level, however, we need to explore the specificity of each instance, avoiding omniscient predictions of the movement of political and psychical relations.

Conclusion The conceptual distinctions introduced in Freud’s theorization of mourning, melancholia, and melancholic identification can be used to open up the meaning of grief within the political field. Freud’s observation of the visceral ambivalence associated with melancholia provides a basis for later theorizations of the fundamental passion or narcissistic wound that underlies both the intransigence and the unpredictability of forces associated with loss. His conceptualization of complex mechanisms of internalization of both lost objects and cultural prohibitions provides a basis for exploring processes of the repudiation of excluded or marginalized identities. His identification of contrasting processes of internalization and externalization helps us to map the contrasting ways political energies are directed in the aftermath of loss. Most crucially, his formulation of unconscious object loss as a way of explaining intensely painful affective processes guides our understanding of relations to loss as a psychical layer embedded within political and economic relations. In relation to the use of these ideas in political theory and analysis, the argument of this chapter has been that it is important to distinguish between epistemology and the empirical exploration of a specific case. Epistemological arguments indicate some of the political risks involved in the representation of loss and the way such representation covers over the constitutive lack both in the object and in the social relations of its production. But it is important to remain open-minded in exploring unconscious relations to a particular instance of loss, the specific yet undecidable effects of preserving or naming that loss or of the refusal to name.

References Brown, W. (1999) ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Boundary2, 26(3), 19–27. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dean, J. (2012) The Communist Horizon, London and New York:Verso Dubiel, H. (1990) ‘Beyond Mourning and Melancholy on the Left’, Praxis International, 10(3–4), 241–249.

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Claudia Lapping Eng, D. and Han, S. (2003) ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’, in Eng, D.L. and Kazanjian, D. (eds.) Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 343–371. Evans, D. (1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge. Freud, S. (1923) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume X1X: The Ego and the Id and Other Works, London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001, 3–66. Freud, S. (1957) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume X1V, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 243–257. Gerson, S. (2009) ‘When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 1341–1357. Hill, P. (2002) Using Lacanian Clinical Technique: An Introduction, Press for the Habilitation of Psychoanalysis. Hook, D. (2014) ‘Refuting Melancholia: Postures of Melancholic Identification in the Apartheid Archive’, Rozenberg Quarterly, http://rozenbergquarterly.com/refuting-melancholia-postures-of-melancholicidentification-in-the-apartheid-archive/#more-12085 (accessed 27 August 2017). Jay, M. (1992) ‘Once More an Inability to Mourn? Reflextions on the Left Melancholy of Our Time’, German Politics and Society, 27(Fall 1992), 69–76. Lacan, J. (1977) ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power’, in Ecrits: A Selection, London and New York: Routledge, 250–310. Laplanche, J. (1999) Essays on Otherness, London and New York: Routledge. Mitscherlich, A. and Mitscherlich, M. (1975) [1967] The Inability to Mourn, New York: Grove Press. Roy, S. (2009) ‘Melancholic Politics and the Politics of Melancholia: The Indian Women’s Movement’, Feminist Theory, 10(3), 31–357. Salvio, P.M. (2014) ‘Reconstructing Memory Through the Archives: Public Pedagogy, Citizenship and Letizia Battaglia’s Photographic Record of Mafia Violence’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 22(1), 97–116. Segal, L. (2003) ‘Theoretical Afflictions: Poor Rich White Folks Play the Blues’, New Formations, 142–156. Wiegman, R. (2000) ‘Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures’, New Literary Histories, 31, 805–825. Žižek, S. (2000) ‘Melancholy and the Act’, Critical Inquiry, 26(4), 657–681.

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17 LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE Ed Pluth

Among the many impasses and questions psychoanalysis deals with—why was I born, what is sexual difference all about, what is a father?—there is an overarching, perhaps transcendental one: what does it mean to be a speaking being? What are the effects of language acquisition on organisms such as ourselves? Lacan crafted a new word (the parlêtre) for human beings that emphasizes our speaking nature (instead of, say, our use of reason) and held that the basic properties of language are crucial to determining how we are, and what we do. Of course, one of the first psychoanalytic patients referred to the practice as the talking cure, and Freud established it as a psychoanalytic rule that one must say whatever comes to mind: one must verbalize, despite our inclinations toward silences and repressions. Although Freud himself did not engage in any formal studies on the nature of language and signs, Lacan believed that to say Freud ignored the importance of language would be to overstate the case: in Freud’s complete works, one out of three pages presents us with philological references, one out of two pages with logical inferences, and everywhere we see a dialectical apprehension of experience, linguistic analysis becoming still more prevalent the more directly the unconscious is involved. (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 424) It is true that Freud discussed at length how certain words would evoke other words, and this sort of association is a critical part of psychoanalytic practice. Nevertheless, Freud did not seem to think that language use defined us to quite the extent that Lacan did. Freud situated language use in the preconscious and conscious areas of the psyche, and he remained agnostic about the nature of unconscious thinking: the real difference between a Ucs. [unconscious] and a Pcs. [preconscious] idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. (Freud 1962 [1923]: 10)

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Lacan, by contrast, would go so far as to argue that the subject that psychoanalysis deals with is ‘entirely a consequence of the fact that there are signifiers’ (Lacan 1962: 5 February).We exist in a linguistic medium in which demands are exchanged, from infancy on, and the very structure of this medium creates material conditions for us that go beyond communicating demands, conditions that Lacan conceives of under the headings of desire, drive, and enjoyment (or jouissance). Describing the importance for him of the works of structural linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Lacan wrote that the mechanisms described by Freud as those of the primary process, by which the unconscious is governed, correspond exactly to the functions this school of linguistics believes determine the most radical axes of the effects of language, namely metaphor and metonymy. (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 676–677) In the mid 1950s Lacan focused on how these two linguistic ‘mechanisms’ were formative and structuring for how we experience lack, identity, and desire. After explaining Lacan’s views on these matters, this chapter will discuss how the presence and the functioning of these two mechanisms have been made visible not only in the unconscious but in social and political life and in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek.

Saussure, and Lacan’s Modifications of His Theory of the Sign In any discussion of language in Lacanian theory, one is obliged to begin with Saussure, yet it is worth pointing out that Lacan’s engagement with Saussure is actually less intense than might be expected. There is only one somewhat sustained engagement with Saussure’s major work, the Course in General Linguistics, in the entirety of Lacan’s Écrits. It occurs in the well-known essay ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ in 1957. Prior to that essay, Lacan’s references to Saussure in his seminar—the twenty-seven-year-long course he gave to analysts in training and others, in different locales—were also not as frequent as one might assume. According to one index of proper names for the entire seminar, there are just four sessions in which Lacan brought up Saussure before the writing of ‘Instance’ in 1957. References to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson (both structuralists) during that same period were far more numerous. Keen on establishing linguistics as a rigorous science, Saussure believed that this task could never be accomplished unless one was as clear as possible about what the object of linguistics truly was.This meant answering the question, what is language, essentially? There were a couple of things about language that got in the way of answering this question clearly. For starters, there are so many aspects to language—languages involve sounds and ideas, and they have histories— that it is difficult to settle on any one feature that might be essential to it (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 8). Setting aside what was inessential would make the object of linguistics emerge more clearly. But what is left of language if such important things about it as speech, history, and conceptuality are stripped away from it? What is left is what Saussure called linguistic structure, which could be located, he claimed, in that part of language in which ‘sound patterns are associated with concepts’ (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 14). However, linguistic structure should not be thought to be present in the heads of individual speakers either, which would perpetuate the confusion by turning linguistics into a branch of psychology: Saussure says that linguistic structure is ‘the social part of language, external to the individual, who by himself is powerless either to create it 222

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or to modify it’ (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 14). Isolating a language from its history and from how it is spoken (and understood) by individuals makes it possible to focus on linguistic structure alone and creates the possibility for what Saussure called a synchronic study of language: a study that would be able to bring forth general properties and ‘constant principles’ of all languages (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 98). Comparing language to the game of chess, Saussure explained that ‘a state of the board in chess’ at a given moment of the game ‘corresponds exactly to a state of . . . language’ at a particular time (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 88). The point is that a synchronic study of language is thus taking a sort of snapshot of a language, isolating a particular moment in a language’s history, just as one does when analyzing a particular chess position. As the game of chess unfolds, the position of pieces on the chessboard changes (like sounds and meanings in languages do). But it is nevertheless the case that at any given moment ‘the value of the chess pieces depends on their position upon the chess board’—and not on how, for example, a bishop got to where it currently is, or where it might end up (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 88). In addition, what the bishop is made of, and how it looks, is of no import when assessing the strength of its position on the board, and the role it is playing in the totality of the game: ‘just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all the other terms’ (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 88). This reference to value is crucial. For Saussure, the meaning of a linguistic sign was its conceptual component (also called the signified), to which a sound pattern (also called the signifier) was associated. The value of a sign (a union of signifier and signified), however, depended on a sign’s overall position in linguistic structure vis-à-vis other related signs (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 113). For example, the French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton.The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both. (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 114) Only by studying the overall network or context of signs can a difference like this emerge. In one of his more famous statements, in fact, Saussure claimed that ‘in a language there are only differences and no positive terms’ (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 118). A structural, synchronic analysis of language does not get bogged down in the philosophical mysteries of how a sign can represent or stand for something else or in how, or whether, any given language user can understand someone else. It is interested in the differences and relationships between signs (and, eventually, phonemes) in a given language at a given time. This emphasis on differences would be taken a step further by Lacan, who would add to it the idea that differences are productive. In Lacan’s most sustained discussion of Saussure’s work, occurring in ‘Instance’, he does not suggest that he is making any serious deviation from Saussure’s positions. He admits, however, that the algorithm he gives us for the Saussurean sign (which for Saussure was an association of a sound pattern with a concept) does not appear in Saussure’s course in that form (see Diagram 17.1):‘The sign written in this way should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, although it is not reduced to this exact form in any of the numerous schemas in which it appears’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 415). Far from it! What does appear in the text of Saussure’s Course as a prototype for Lacan’s algorithm for the sign is a divided circle with the signified on top and the signifier on the bottom, as well as two arrows, outside the circle, going top down and bottom up (Saussure 1992 [1916]: 113). See Diagram 17.2. 223

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S s Diagram 17.1  Lacan’s Algorithm for the Linguistic Sign Source: Diagram from Lacan, Jacques (2006) [1966] Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York: W. W. Norton & Co, p. 418, 428.

Diagram 17.2  Saussure’s Diagram for the Linguistic Sign Source: Diagram from Saussure, Ferdinand de (1992) [1916] Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye and Albert Riedlinger, trans. by Roy Harris, La Salle, IL: Open Court, p. 113.

Compared to this image of the sign as a discrete, enclosed unit with a mutual back and forth between conceptuality and sound, Lacan’s algorithm for the sign is different in several ways. Of course, there is the reversal of order: the S on top stands for the signifier, not the signified, Lacan tells us. But what it omits is also important. Lacan’s algorithm is not presented as a closed-off autonomous unit, for one thing, and for another, there are no longer any back-and-forth arrows suggesting any sort of connection between the two domains of the signifier and the signified. These are crucial changes, as we shall see. Before getting to what these changes reveal about Lacan’s views, it is worth considering why Lacan calls what he presents us with an algorithm. An algorithm is used to establish a rule or protocol for solving problems in a particular field—here, language. So perhaps the best way to think of this is to say that Lacan wants to use an algorithm for thinking about and explaining two major ways that language operates, its two main operations or mechanisms: metonymy and metaphor. Lacan will approach these two linguistic mechanisms as different ways of dealing with or following through with a sort of basic principle that the algorithm establishes. Which is what? The key feature of the algorithm is the relationship it establishes between signifier and signified: ‘signifier over signified’, Lacan tells us, ‘ “over” corresponding to the bar separating the two levels’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 415). This ordering of signifier and signified (reversing how Saussure had it) serves to highlight ‘the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as distinct orders initially separated by a barrier resisting signification’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 415). So, the algorithm expresses the following basic essential aspect of languages: languages consist not just of signifiers and signifieds but more importantly of a relationship of subordination, such that there is effectively a bar or barrier between them. Here we have Lacan’s core idea about language: the relationship between signifier and signified is less one of association (the very word Saussure used to describe it), according to which a sound pattern or sound image is associated to a concept or vice versa, than it is of separation. In fact, Lacan soon adds an idea that is not, strictly speaking, obvious in the algorithm he presents us with but is consistent with it: signifiers are involved in ‘generating the signified’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 415).That Lacan sees this

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relationship in terms of generation or production, one in which signifiers produce signifieds, does not become clear until the formulae for metonymy and metaphor are presented a bit later in the essay.

Metonymy and Metaphor Structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson argued in his essay ‘The Linguistic Problems of Aphasia’ from 1956 that metonymy and metaphor were connected to two different forms in which aphasia appeared, involving either deficiencies in the ability to select signifiers from the set that is available in a language or a deficiency in the contiguity of signifiers, the stringing of signifiers in a language together (Jakobson 2001 [1956]). Drawing from Saussure, selection and combination are key ideas here: language use involves selecting certain signs from a language instead of others (Jakobson calls this the paradigmatic dimension of language) and stringing them together in an ordered way (the syntagmatic dimension). Jakobson thought that one type of aphasia involved an inability to exercise the paradigmatic or selective dimension of language well. In it, the aphasic’s word choice and word use heavily depend on context. Such an aphasic may be presented with an object whose name she or he well knows, but if the object is out of its usual practical context, the aphasic is not able to select the correct name for it. Thus, Jakobson thought that this type of aphasia leans more on the metonymic, contiguous dimension of signifiers and can be thought of as a deficiency in the ability to metaphorize. In a second type of aphasia, the aphasic generates what is sometimes referred to as word salad. The speaker’s syntax and grammar may be essentially correct, but the series of signifiers produced wanders off, and the overall meaning the speaker may be trying to express is not clear and is highly abstract. Problems with word selection (there is an abundance of it), or the paradigmatic dimension, are not as salient here, and this suggested to Jakobson that this type of aphasia could be thought of as an inability to string signifiers together correctly—thus a problem involving contiguity, which he associated with metonymy. As historian of structuralism François Dosse explains it, ‘Metaphor is impossible in the first type of aphasia, where there is a problem of similarity, and metonymy is impossible where there are difficulties of contiguity’ (Dosse 1998: 58). In Lacan’s first treatment of this paper by Jakobson, in his third seminar from 1956–1957, he thought he could use his insights to show how, beyond their impact on aphasia, ‘the lexical existence of the entire signifying apparatus is determinant for the phenomena present in neurosis, since the signifier is the instrument by which the missing signified expresses itself ’ (Lacan 1993: 221). Jakobson’s essay thus plays a major role in Lacan’s project to show how the unconscious is ‘structured like a language’: its key operations can be understood in the light of metonymy and metaphor (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 421–431). Lacan subsequently develops formulae for metonymy and metaphor that draw from Jakobson’s ideas while also obeying the basic rule that Lacan establishes in his algorithm for the linguistic sign—that there is a barrier between signifiers and signifieds. The formulae can be read or translated as follows:

f (S . . . S´) S ≅ S(−) s Diagram 17.3  Formula for Metonymy Source: Diagram from Lacan, Jacques (2006) [1966] Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, p. 428.

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The S . . . S’ function of signifiers (by which Lacan means their ability to be strung together) corresponds to the maintenance of the bar between the signifier and the signified—or, the fact that signifiers are in contiguity, following one after another, equates to the sustaining of the barrier between the signifier and signified. Hence, Lacan sees in metonymy the very process in which signifiers are separated from the signified: instead of a one-to-one signifier-signified relationship, one gets a succession of signifiers, an encounter with the signified always being deferred or delayed. This is why Lacan will also describe metonymy not just as a process that generates a signified but as one that ‘instates’ a ‘lack of being’ as well (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 428). This lack of being turns out to be what desire invests in. So in this way, we see how Lacan is trying to show that an aspect of linguistic structure is responsible for the how desire works: the structure of metonymy is the structure of human desire, aiming after an always lost, unobtainable object (corresponding to the position of the signified on the other side of the bar). Lacan treats metonymy first in ‘Instance’ no doubt because he thought, as he said in his third seminar, that ‘metonymy exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible. But metaphor belongs to a different level than metonymy’ (Lacan 1993: 227). It not only belongs to a different level but also performs a rather different function and is associated with a rather different effect.

 S’  f   S ≅ S (+ ) s  S Diagram 17.4  Formula for Metaphor Source: Diagram from Lacan, Jacques (2006) [1966] Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, p. 429.

In the formula for metaphor, the function S´/S of signifiers (the ability of one signifier to be substituted for another) is compared to the crossing of the bar that metonymy establishes between the signifier and signified. In metaphor, then, it is as if the signified, associated with a lack in metonymy, is brought into being: Lacan claims that here there is a ‘passage of the signifier into the signified’, a ‘moment’ that he will equate with the production of symptoms (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 429). The substitution in metaphor is the same as what occurs in repression: metaphor’s two-stage mechanism is the very mechanism by which symptoms, in the analytic sense, are determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of a sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom—a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element— the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved. (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 431) Lacan is that a psychoanalytic symptom itself can be thought to have the structure of a metaphor. If we take just the simplest notion of metaphor, in which an unconventional word for something is used instead of a more conventional one, we can make a distinction between latent and manifest content that is identical to how Freud thought of neurotic symptoms. This aspect of metaphor—its connection to the structure of repression and the creation of symptoms—also led Lacan to develop another one of his most famous concepts: the point 226

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de capiton—the ‘quilting point’ or ‘button tie’ signifier. His seminar on psychosis, in which he first worked out his ideas about metonymy and metaphor, was also the seminar in which he developed this idea. Reasserting his view that signifiers and signifieds have a tendency to part ways, that they ‘present themselves in a completely divided form’, Lacan hypothesized that it wouldn’t be impossible that one should manage to determine the minimal number of fundamental points of insertion between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be called normal, and which, when they are not established, or when they give way, make a psychotic. (Lacan 1993: 268–269) These ‘points of insertion’, which he describes in terms similar to what metaphor does, involving as they do a ‘passage of the signifier into the signified’, are what Lacan has in mind with the concept of a ‘button tie’ or ‘quilting point’ signifier. Bruce Fink describes the imagery this way: ‘A button tie, in the upholsterer’s vocabulary, is a type of stitch used to secure a button to fabric and stuffing in a couch or chair, whereby the button and fabric are held together not in reference to a wooden or steel frame but simply in reference to one another’ (Fink 1997: 91). The idea is that there are certain key signifiers in one’s psychobiography (such as what Lacan famously called the Name-of-the-Father) that serve as gravitational nodes around which other signifiers and meanings will circulate. As he wrote in a later essay, the button tie is that function ‘by which the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 681). Lacan’s view of the relationship between signifiers and signifieds involves the key idea that there is something always elusive and impermanent about signifieds in particular: signifieds are generated by signifiers yet at the same time elude them. In light of Lacan’s descriptions of metonymy and metaphor, it could already be said, as Lacan will say years later, that the truly essential relation in language is not in fact the relation between the signifier and the signified but the relation of one signifier to another (Lacan 2007: 13). In this respect, Lacan is taking the Saussurean thesis about the importance of differences in languages in a more radical direction. Whatever the relationship of signifier and signified may be, that relationship is derivative to an always-primary signifier-to-signifier relation.

Political Applications of Metonymy and Metaphor In Lacan’s discussion of metonymy and metaphor in ‘Instance’, he uses what seem to be almost existentialist concepts to describe two subjective positions that can be taken with respect to what the processes of metonymy and metaphor do to us: essentially amounting to the choices of either a ‘refusal of the signifier’ or the acceptance of a ‘lack of being’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 430). Claiming that the structure of metonymy fosters a sort of nostalgia (always chasing after an essentially lost, impossible object), one way of dealing with its effects, he writes, might be to ‘refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautology’ (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 430). This might look like some sort of effort to stop the flow of signifiers, to stop the chase, as it were, in order to fully and finally be or attain something—which Lacan describes as a refusal of the signifier. Like Sartre’s famous waiter, this strategy for dealing with desire might consist of striving to be a waiter in the same respect that an inkwell is an inkwell: to simply, and finally, fully be something.This strategy would inevitably fail, Lacan writes, since it could amount only to uselessly ‘turning the weapon of metonymy’ against itself. His point is that even in the assertion of a tautology (A = A), there is 227

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still a repetition, a repetition of signifiers (a one-after-the-other replication of the letter A) even if it is a repetition of the same (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 430).Thus, the metonymic process that makes the tautology, the repetition, possible also undermines the attempt to bring the process to a halt: the process persists or insists in the very attempt to eliminate its effects. The alternative option, accepting a lack of being, is one that Lacan associates with the conditions created by the structure of metaphor. This allows for a contrasting possible subjective position that is a different response to the same basic situation of lack. Just like metonymy, then, metaphor also offers a strategy for dealing with what it creates. It too affords us the ability to devote ourselves to becoming what we are, Lacan claims, which he describes in this case as some sort of embrace of incompleteness. This could veer in to an attempt to identify with nothingness, however, to not being anything in particular, fully, but Lacan observes that the structure of metaphor makes it such that one nevertheless is something, somewhere, even if one tries to lose oneself in nothingness (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 430). The important idea in either case is that both metonymy and metaphor create specific conditions (lack, desire) while also creating the appearance of the means to overcome those same conditions (by refusing signifiers, by refusing identities). It is possible to see the influence of this view of how signifiers and signifieds are related to each other, in which both lack and identity become key themes, in a variety of theoretical projects in the latter half of the 20th century. This idea indeed becomes a sort of axiom of what is called post-structuralist thought, whether political in orientation or not. This chapter will focus on the more overt and avowed influence of these ideas on the political thinking of contemporary political theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek. Laclau and Mouffe wish to avoid any version of discursive idealism (according to which all of reality would be constructed by language) but do want to affirm that discourse deeply shapes the social and political landscape. Their view in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, then, is that ‘metonymy [and] metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985]: 110). In this way, they seek to expand the range of these Lacanian ideas: starting with aphasia in Jakobson and onto desire and symptom formation in Lacan, we now have metonymy and metaphor applied to the existence of different social and political strategies. Among political strategies, Laclau and Mouffe find the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor functioning in what they call a logic of difference and a logic of equivalence, the first being more expansive and inclusive, the other more limiting and simplifying. The logic of equivalence is a logic of the simplification of political space, while the logic of difference is a logic of its expansion and increasing complexity. Taking a comparative example from linguistics, we could say that the logic of difference tends to expand the syntagmatic pole of language . . . while the logic of equivalence expands the paradigmatic pole. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985]: 130) Strategically, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the logic of equivalence (associated with the ‘paradigmatic’ and thus metaphor) consists of reducing social and political conflict to, say, two main opposed camps—despite all other relevant and existent social camps or groups. Furthermore, 20th-century Marxist parties could be understood to have operated in this way: despite the

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multiplicity of social and political antagonisms, there is ultimately one antagonism, class conflict, that is taken to be politically central. At the other end of the political spectrum anti-Semitic, nationalist, and racist discourses can be seen to be doing the same thing—there is one figure or identity in particular that is responsible for the most egregious social and political ills. Laclau and Mouffe themselves cite ‘millenarian movements’ from medieval Europe as an example of this type of logic: here the world divides, through a system of paratactical equivalences, into two camps: peasant culture representing the identity of the movement, and urban culture incarnating evil. . . . A maximum separation has been reached: no element in the system of equivalences enters into relations other than those of opposition to the elements of the other system. (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 129–130) Such a process is considered a logic of equivalence because groups among the peasantry that might otherwise have conflicting interests (members of different economic classes, ethnicities, geographies) are able to come together in unity against the alternative identity. The structure of metaphor can be recognized in this logic insofar as it is as if there is one signifier that counts as a place holder for many others, one social, political signifier that functions to unify (and substitute itself for) a diverse range of groups and interests, in opposition to an other. In contrast to the logic of equivalence, and linked to metonymy, is the logic of differences. Yannis Stavrakakis describes this logic, in his discussion of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, as both inclusive and expansive while still acting to unify a number of different social and political constituents (Stavrakakis 1999: 77). He presents New Labor, under Blair, as an example of such a discourse, but more recent political movements in Europe and South America are frequently considered examples of what Laclau and Mouffe had in mind as well. Laclau and Mouffe cited the 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and his one-nation formula, which was meant to overcome the more obvious oppositions between rich and poor, aristocrat and bourgeoisie. If these are two ways that political discourses create coalitions and attempt to achieve dominance, the Lacanian inspiration behind them also allows the authors to point out how both strategies are attempting to avoid and overcome the social and political equivalents of lack, desire, and castration. I have in mind what they refer to as the irreducibility of social antagonism. In thinking about how political movements handle this, they find Lacan’s concept of a quilting point useful. For them, any political discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a center. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points. (Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain. This limitation of the productivity of the signifying chain establishes the positions that make predication possible—a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic.) (Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985]: 112) In this way, Laclau and Mouffe are designating what they see as a social and political function of the Lacanian point de capiton.

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This concept is also an important part of Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, although he associates the quilting point idea with interpellation in Althusser’s work, thereby bringing it into a connection with a theory of the subject: The point de capiton is the point through which the subject is ‘sewn’ to the signifier, and at the same time the point which interpellates individual into subject by addressing it with the call of a certain master-signifier (‘Communism’, ‘God’, ‘Freedom’, ‘America’)—in a word, it is the point of the subjectivation of the signifier’s chain. (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 112) Thus, Žižek emphasizes, as Lacan did, not only that a point de capiton functions to fix meanings but also that it functions to create a subject with an identity, one whose identity is guaranteed by it. We should see the structure of metaphor in this, with the idea that the metonymic drift of meaning can be said to come to a halt with the creation of a signification that places one signifier over another, or replaces one with another. Along these lines, Žižek observes that the point de capiton acts to fix ‘the meaning of the preceding elements’ in a signifying chain (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 114). ‘That is to say, it retroactively submits them to some code, it regulates their mutual relations according to this code (for example, in the case we mentioned, according to the code which regulates the Communist universe of meaning)’ (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 114). The political or ideological quilting point can serve not only to create an identity, then, but can serve as a signifier that functions to make sense of all other (more or less obscure) social and political signifiers. In this way, a point de capiton can play a highly ideological role, by designating a meaning and cause of social antagonism. Žižek also brings metonymy and metaphor into his analysis of ideology. As he describes it, in anti-Semitic discourses one can see both metonymy and metaphor functioning: the signifier ‘Jew’ is a displacement, the basic trick of anti-Semitism is to displace social antagonism into antagonism between the sound social texture, social body, and the Jew as the force corroding it, the force of corruption. Thus, it is not society itself which is ‘impossible’, based on antagonism— the source of corruption is located in a particular entity, the Jew. (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 140–141) This metonymic structure is also accompanied by something more along the lines of a metaphor: ‘the figure of the Jew condenses opposing features, features associated with lower and upper classes: Jews are supposed to be dirty and intellectual, voluptuous and impotent, and so on’ (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 141). Thus, altogether, Žižek can claim that ‘the figure of the Jew’ can play a role that could be thought of as a social or political symptom, ‘a coded message, a cypher, a disfigured representation of social antagonism’ and that ‘by undoing this work of displacement/ condensation, we can determine its meaning’ (Žižek 2008 [1989]: 141). Hence, Žižek understands ideology critique along the lines of what psychoanalysis does: it should bring about what Bruce Fink called the dialectizing of the signifier at work in a symptom, opening it up to new uses and potentially new significations (Fink 1995: 77). But Žižek (like Fink for clinical psychoanalysis) thinks it is important to recognize that a discursive analysis of ideology and symptoms is insufficient. How they create enjoyment, and a subject passionately attached to that enjoyment, needs to be addressed and critiqued as well.

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Conclusion Psychoanalysis is a talking cure: Freud discovered that by talking about symptoms, one could alleviate them, if not make them disappear altogether. But it is fair to say that Freud did not explicitly thematize the very instrument of the psychoanalytic cure: language. Lacan, taking his cue from Saussure and other later structuralist linguists, went further by claiming that the unconscious itself was structured like a language and that we are essentially speaking beings. Indeed, the basic structure of the linguistic sign, which, Lacan emphasizes, involves the signifier over the signified, was responsible for creating some of the most important features of psychic life, even going beyond symptom formation. Apart from the sign being a structure that institutes a basic relationship of lack or absence between the signifier and signified, Lacan also considered how the two primary linguistic mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor shaped the way we are, most notably in terms of desire and our identifications. We’ve seen how Lacan’s thoughts on these matters have been expanded into the social and political arena by Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek. Laclau and Mouffe find the structures of metonymy and metaphor present in different types of political strategies, and they also see the Lacanian concept of the point de capiton functioning in political discourses in their efforts to pin down what are otherwise amorphous social and political meanings. Slavoj Žižek adds to this idea the Althusserian notion of interpellation, which allows him to study the deeper ideological functioning of anchoring signifiers and allows him to show how the structures of metonymy and metaphor function in a number of different political discourses and identifications. Thus, the structuring and determining nature of language and its mechanisms not only for psychic life but for our collective life is demonstrated by these thinkers. Freud and Lacan argued that even while our symptoms and sufferings are bound up with language, the key to their alleviation is found in a continued and persistent linguistic practice. Žižek likes to quote a Wagner opera to illustrate this insight: ‘the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you’ (Žižek 1993: 171). Language, whose structures are responsible for our idiosyncrasies is also the only thing that can help with them. When this psychoanalytic insight is expanded into collective life by thinkers like Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek the implication seems to be that political practices can not only learn from the psychoanalytic cure but also take on some of the same qualities.

References Dosse, F. (1998) History of Structuralism,Volume One:The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, Glassman, Deborah (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fink, B. (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fink, B. (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1962) [1923] The Ego and the Id, Riviere, Joan (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Jakobson, R. (2001) [1956] ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Fundamentals of Language, The Hague: Mouton, 67–96. Lacan, J. (1962–3) L’identification, unpublished typescript. Lacan, J. (1993) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III:The Psychoses 1955–1956, Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), Grigg, Russell (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2006) [1966] Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Fink, Bruce (trans.), With Fink, Héloïse and Grigg, Russell, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII:The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 1969–1970, Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), Grigg, Russell (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001) [1985] Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London:Verso.

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Ed Pluth Saussure, F. de (1992) [1916] Course in General Linguistics, Bally, Charles, Sechehaye, Albert and Riedlinger, Albert (eds.) Harris, Roy (trans.), La Salle, IL: Open Court. Stavrakakis,Y. (1999) Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge. Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (2008) [1989] The Sublime Object of Ideology, London:Verso.

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Psychoanalysis offers a thoroughgoing critique of what is variously called the individual, the ego, or the ‘I’, without abandoning, destroying, or annihilating ‘the subject’. This prospect of resituating the subject has for many been the grounds for a new thinking of politics. At the same time, this has been baffling for many, in particular those who have been instructed that the individual and above all individual consciousness is the locus of agency and that action is otherwise impossible. Perhaps the most important contribution of psychoanalysis to political theory is this movement from the individual to the subject and, moreover, in the fact that this movement is the grounds for the possibility—rather than the impossibility—of action, agency, and politics. Arising in complex relation to psychoanalytic theory, this has raised significant questions in what is known as the theory of the subject. This terrain involves not so much the effort to think or to theorize the individual as subject, although understanding the ways and the extent to which the individual has been taken to be the basis for the subject is an important preliminary for an expanded thinking of the prospects of the subject. Such an expansion opens the way toward grasping the nature of collective subjects. Collective subjects appear in the form of the collection of human bodies in, for example, groups, crowds, organizations, or assemblies but also, more subtly and probably more importantly, in the recognition that the action any individual human being rests on and has consequences for much broader collective subjects of which the individual is a part. That action and the subject are collective recurs across the social sciences and the humanities today in the widespread discussions of collective intentionality and collective agency (e.g., see Ludwig 2016, 2017;Tollefsen 2015) and in the insistence that thought and affect go well beyond individual consciousness (e.g., see Hayles 2017; Massumi 2015). Indeed, insisting on the social nature of each person is the foundational gesture of sociology, whether in the injunction that ‘[m]ankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted’ (Ferguson 1767: 10) or that ‘[t]he mentality of groups is not that of individuals; it has its own laws’ (Durkheim 1901: 40). This chapter seeks to demonstrate, however, that the recognition of collective subjects is not merely a scholarly matter, nor does recognition of sociality fall to the more socially minded, generous, or politically progressive. Rather, collective subjects are very much part of the practical world and in particular of the world of contemporary capitalist business. The objective of this chapter is to interrogate the potential for politics of collective subjects. The fact that agency is collective in specific ways changes not only the capacities for action in 233

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the world but moreover bears with it the potential for forms of intervention regarding the control of those capacities and who benefits and suffers from them. To be clear, this is not an argument for collectivism in the sense of wishing that the world were more social or interconnected. Rather, the point is that contemporary capitalism is already a fully collective project entailing the most massive mobilization of interconnected energies ever witnessed. Even if the individual is one of the key ideological figures of capitalism, it is impossible for capital to simply ignore the role or function of the collective. Capital finds enormous value in collective subjects, while at the same time capitalist ideology dissimulates the value that collective subjects create. This is not an outright collectivity denial but rather a policing of the consequences that arise from a recognition of the collective production of wealth, life, and society. The starting point for this discussion is the contribution of psychoanalysis to the rethinking of the subject and the relocation of agency outside the bounds of the individual human being. The first section of this chapter seeks to explain the transformation of the place of the subject in Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan before turning in the second section to the formal theory of the subject as developed by Alain Badiou. While such a treatment might satisfy some readers of this handbook who are interested in comprehending the theory of the subject, the third section of the chapter complicates this picture by turning to the realities of collective subjects in contemporary capitalism. It is here that the theory of the subject is put to the test, in particular by stressing that the capital-relation has always been a relation of established wealth to collective and collaborative human sociality. We turn, finally, to the question of what a collective subject can do, which cannot be answered in advance but requires diagnosis of the nature and capacities of each collective subject. This is so because collective subjects are always multiple, both in that they always face opposing forces and subjects and in that every subject is always more or less in internal conflict with itself.

From the Individual to the Subject (Freud, Lacan) It was perhaps inevitable for Freud to take the individual as the raw datum and focal point of the analytic situation and of the domain known broadly as psychology. But what Freud establishes again and again is the presence in that apparent individual of something that exceeds the individual. Through his work, Freud offers the progressive emancipation of the subject from the individual, and with this, he offers at the same time the potential for the emancipation of psychology from psychology, an exit from the reduction of the ostensible individual to nothing but individuality. Freud would find that the analytic situation is populated by the vast array of forces that exceed the given immediate individual human body. In his writings on group psychology and in his later ‘sociological’ writings, clearly any individual as conceived by Freud is always fully social. In his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud stresses that ‘the contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely’ (Freud 1921: 69). Freud therefore stresses the dangers of positing too sharp a line between the individual and the social and thus between individual and social psychology. He stresses that ‘only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual with others’, and that ‘from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well’ (Freud 1921: 69). Freud’s contribution, however, is not simply to assert the social character of the individual but moreover to emphasize how sociality is both constitutive of the human and painful,

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necessarily producing at least a certain level of ‘discontent’ (Freud 1930). With Freud, there is no complacent sociologism or social constructivism that would see the individual molded into society without remainder or residue. On the one hand, this involves a brutal realism: ‘every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct’ (Freud 1927: 7). It also means that the individual is neither outside of society nor seamlessly integrated into it. The originality of Freud’s position, however, goes further. Several times he likened the contribution of psychoanalysis to a Copernican revolution that, as with the calling into question of the idea that the earth was the center of the universe, would radically call into question ‘human megalomania’ and ‘the naïve self-love’ of human beings (Freud 1916–17: 284–285). Freud was clear that this radical challenge to human narcissism was the reason for the resistances to psychoanalysis, and indeed his specific emancipation of the subject from the individual was, and certainly is today, much more politically potent that any theses regarding sexuality or desire. Although its original significance was purely therapeutic, psychoanalysis ‘ended by claiming to have set our whole view of mental life on a new basis’ (Freud 1925: 214). This new understanding would necessary provoke hostility for affective reasons but was also in direct contradiction to the dominant philosophies of his time, in particular liberal individualism and the philosophies of consciousness that reduced mental experience to sense perception or the ratiocination of an individual mind. In short, ‘[t]he philosophers’ idea of what is mental was not that of psychoanalysis’ (Freud 1925: 216). Although many versions of psychoanalysis underplayed or set to one side this calling into question of the subject and instead merely assumed the understanding of the individual that Freud objected to, this calling into question was seized on with relish by Jacques Lacan. This was made possible by Lacan’s own intellectual proclivities, which included his interest in philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and social scientists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had also cast doubt on the category of the subject. But Lacan was keen to demonstrate that textual license could be found in the letter of Freud’s text for the radical rethinking of the individual, and against Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, to do this without abandoning any idea of the subject. Lacan insists that the subject is not something that he added to Freud’s thought. Instead, the subject ‘is all that gets talked about by Freud’ (Lacan 1967a: 87). Indeed, Lacan identifies the elaboration of the theory of the subject as nothing less than the historical mission of psychoanalysis. As he puts it, ‘Psychoanalysis is neither a Weltanschauung, nor a philosophy that claims to provide the key to the universe. It is governed by a particular aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the notion of the subject’ (Lacan 1964: 77). Lacan emphasizes that his questioning of the subject brought Freud in direct confrontation with the philosophical tradition. Lacan likens the treatment of the subject by Freud to ‘a sort of bulldozer operation, and it brings back to life everything that they have been trying to cover up about the subject for thousands of years of the philosophical tradition’ (Lacan 1967a: 87). Lacan explains Freud’s innovation with remarkable precision in the opening lecture of Seminar II, his seminar on the ego (the I, das Ich, le moi) in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis. ‘With Freud’, Lacan explains, ‘a new perspective suddenly appears, revolutionising the study of subjectivity and showing precisely that the subject cannot be confused with the individual’ (Lacan 1954–55: 8). Lacan reworks Freud’s position on mental functioning: Now what Freud’s contribution was is the following—the manifestations of the subject in question can in no sense be localised on an axis, on which, the higher they

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would be, the more they would consistently be confused with the intelligence, the excellence, the perfection of the individual. (Lacan 1954–55: 8–9) Against this matrix and the equation of the ego with consciousness, which Freud had radically called into question in The Ego and the Id (1923), Lacan stresses the split between the individual and the subject. ‘Freud tells us—intelligence has nothing to do with the subject, the subject is not on the same axis, it is ex-centric’ (Lacan 1954–55: 9). Here Lacan follows Freud in the use of spatial metaphors, which run through Freud’s work and which appear for example in the dislocation from home that Freud stresses in the idea of the unheimliche (Freud 1919) and in the Copernican formula that the ego ‘is not even master in its own house’ (Freud 1916–17: 285).The subject does not disappear but rather shifts place and is cast off-center: ‘the very centre of human beings is no longer at the place ascribed to it by an entire humanist tradition’ (Lacan 1955: 334). This brings about Lacan’s evocation of topological metaphors and his formula: ‘the subject is decentered in relation to the individual’ (Lacan 1954–55: 9). Throughout his teaching, this decentering of the subject in relation to the individual is developed in a number of ways, in for instance the formulae that the subject is always subject of the signifier and that desire is desire of the Other. Lacan noted the progressive emancipation of the subject from the individual in Freud, such that ‘the more Freud’s work progressed, the less easy he finds it to locate consciousness, and he has to admit that it is in the end unlocalisable’ (Lacan 1954–55: 8). In much the same way, in Lacan and after, ‘the subject’ is dislocated and decentered not only from the individual but also from any location. Importantly, this means that the unconscious is not another location way down inside the individual, as if the ‘soul’ is now driven deeper than consciousness to a deep internal unconsciousness. Lacan captures this with his concept of extimacy, which expresses the radical exteriority of that which is imagined to be the most intimate. Lacan draws out the contortion of the interior and the exterior, such that the locus of the unconscious is in the Other. As it is explained by Jacques-Alain Miller, The unconscious is not something one has inside oneself. It is very difficult to think, maintain, or get used to the fact that the unconscious has no profundity; that it is not an internal thing. On the contrary, it is fundamentally external to the subject . . . the Other is our exteriority, the exteriority of every subject. (Miller 1986: 36) In this way, the theory of the subject becomes once again a theory of change and is unmoored from any fixed substance. The subject in this sense is the principle of the ex-static, of that which is out of odds with stasis as such. These directions are of course anticipated in important ways by G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Lacan’s own decentering and delocalization of the subject, however, will move in other directions. For Miller, it will be that ‘the definition of the subject comes down to the possibility of one signifier more’ (Miller 2012 [1966]: 100). But Lacan has more than a little trouble with the model of language as a paradigm for all social action and of language as substitute for the material. He therefore just as often, and even more so in his later teaching, turns to mathematics and in particular topology for a conception of the subject as a pure principle of transformation. Thus, ‘[d]oing a bit of mathematics would not be bad training for psychoanalysts. In mathematics, the subject is fluid and pure, and it isn’t stuck or trapped anywhere’ (Lacan 1967b: 43, see also, e.g., 1961: 758). 236

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The Formal Theory of the Subject (Badiou) Probably the most important elaboration of the psychoanalytic theory of the subject, and certainly the most important elaboration of the theory of the subject in relation to politics, can be found in the writings of Alain Badiou. This develops in active relation to the thought of Badiou’s ‘master’ Lacan and unfolds in particular in his Theory of the Subject (1982), Being and Event (1988a) and Logics of Worlds (2006). Badiou learned deeply from the critique of the subject advanced by Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, and others. At the same time, Badiou, with Lacan, presses back against thinkers who abandon the idea of the subject as such. Badiou proposes to follow in the way that Lacan ‘holds steady with regard to the subject effect, when all the others will understand that it must be relegated to the museum of dying humanist ideology’ (Badiou 1982: 225). For Badiou, the distinction between the individual and the subject is at once both analytic and political. He is vitriolic in his critique of the figure of the individual, which he describes as ‘perfectly empty’ (Badiou 2005: 40). The figure of the individual is empty for the classic reason that it severs the individual human being from the real, concrete bonds of social existence and creates and maintains arbitrary divisions between those individuals. But the figure of the individual is also empty because of the pettiness of the concept of the person that accompanies it. Badiou insists again and again that to think of the person as merely an individual involves losing what is quintessentially human and reduces the human being to a state of animality. To live for nothing more than the acquisition of goods and material comfort is to destroy the possibility of human life. And such destruction is typical of the capitalist injunction to, as it is put so elegantly by his fellow traveler Gilles Châtelet, ‘live and think like pigs’ (Châtelet 1998). Badiou’s critique of the figure of the individual is developed in relation to his critique of mortality and finitude (Badiou 2018). He shows how the philosophical presupposition of limitation and finitude, as expressed for instance in Kant’s insistence on the limitations of reason and Heidegger’s account of the human limit of death, is part of a more general metaphysics of finitude that has come to dominate the philosophical and practical landscape (see also Badiou 2009b). It can further be shown that this metaphysics of finitude dominates the tradition of political liberalism from Locke to Hayek and beyond, and the premise of the limitations and finitude of the individual is pivotal in contemporary capitalist ideology and capitalist economics. Against the metaphysics of finitude and mortality that dominates today, Badiou makes a clear political point of the ancient idea that every individual mortal human being also possesses the capacity for exceeding their mortal finitude. While living beings of course live within definite physical and temporal limits, human beings also have the capacity to exceed themselves as individuals.To live beyond our individual animal mortality, which in Badiou’s formula means ‘to live for an Idea’ (e.g., see Badiou 2006: 510), is to live for something generic, something exceptional to the individual.This happens, for example, when a human being touches on a scientific, political, artistic, or amorous truth. This prospect of living beyond mortality is an ancient idea, as is found in the prospect that ‘Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal’ (Heraclitus 1979: 71, frag XCII) and in the injunction that ‘we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us’ (Aristotle 1984: 1177b31–1177b34). The subject in Badiou is grounded in ex-stasis and ex-istence. A subject bears not only the consistency of the imaginary and the insistence of the symbolic but also ‘ex-istence, wherein lies the real’ (Badiou: 1982: 239). To become a subject is to be called out of oneself, out of a state of torpor and submission to the current state of the situation. A subject is therefore not something found in the stability of for instance a ‘nature’ but inherently involves a principle of change. 237

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A subject is something more than and beyond the individual. It exceeds anything that appears as an individual, but it still acts in the very core of the individual human being. In the simplest of terms, as Badiou explains, My way of critiquing the metaphysical concept of the subject is to say that the subject is a creation or a construction, and that it’s not a given. What is given is in the form of the individual, for example. But ‘individual’ and ‘subject’ are not one and the same thing for me. Ultimately, they’re even in a completely fundamental opposition to each other, even though individuals are always called to become subjects or to be incorporated into a subject. It’s a summons, not a constant, natural movement. (Badiou 2013: 5–6) Badiou commits considerable energy to elaborating in detail what he calls the formal theory of the subject. Badiou’s theory of the subject is formal for the reason that it seeks to avoid the reduction of the subject back to the matter or substance of which any subject is composed and on which any subject must act. Subject is a matter of form at least as much as it is of content. The subject is in this sense ‘objectless’ and is objectless only as a result of a long historical and philosophical struggle with the reduction of the subject to an object—the individual, or any other one thing (Badiou 1988b). This is the reason why the formal theory of the subject can also be named ‘meta-physics’ (Badiou 2006: 43ff), because even if a subject must be borne by a physical body, a subject goes beyond and is exceptional to the merely physical body. A subject is what forms a body; it is a function or operation that finds in a body something more than it. At base, ‘The fact that the theory of the subject is formal means that “subject” designates a system of forms and operations’ (Badiou 2006: 47). Badiou therefore radicalizes the critique of those essentialisms that seek to deduce subjective experience or political subjects directly from the nature of what is. Hence, the thesis that ‘it is always in the interests of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics, that is, the objective for the subjective’ (Badiou 1982: 44). The principle of the subject is precisely that which goes beyond the present state of affairs and beyond the anticipated flow of history.This is why he will frequently repeat the formula ‘history does not exist’ (Badiou 1982: 92, 1985: 36–37, 1988a: 176, 2009a: 241). This entails a politics that appears to be stripped of any account of the objective situation, a communism grounded on a wager rather than a deduction, because for Badiou ‘We must always wager on communist politics: you will never infer it by deduction from Capital’ (Badiou 1985: 85). This may seem a peculiar position, but Badiou argues and indeed has some textual justification for his claim that Marx and even more so Lenin and Mao offer a subject always in transit through and beyond the situation. It is against a reduction of Marxism and communism to the economic machinery, a reduction that should be noted was useful to the powerful, that Badiou concludes: it was very clear to me that politics was a matter of orientation, action, decisions, and principles, a matter that demanded a subject or a subjective dimension. I observed, moreover, that the attempt to reduce politics—and Marxism—to a purely objective, purely structural, context, without the figure of a subject, led to nothing but a sort of pure economism. (Badiou 2013: 3) When the condensation of the theory of the subject finally arrives toward the end of Being and Event, one finds in crystalline precision the formulae that are developed across his work. 238

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Here his arguments are summarized: a subject is not a substance; a subject is not nothing, is not a void point; a subject is not an organization of sense experience; a subject is not an invariable and is not transitive to being; a subject can be qualified as individual, collective, or mixed; and, finally, a subject is neither result nor origin but ‘the local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation’ (Badiou: 1988a: 391–392). Because a subject is local, it will always be concrete and specific, borne in and beyond specific human and nonhuman bodies. In this way, the subject is fully abstract and desubstantialized, while it is also the name for the most definite coordinated process of uprising, the most decisive overcoming of what is by the concentration of force that passes through it but is irreducible to the individual that is its bearer.

The Collective Subjects of Capital It is routine to associate capitalism with the figure of the individual, whether in the idea of the individual as owner of private property and the possessor of certain human rights and formal freedoms or in the various manifestations of the ideological celebration of the individual and hard work of individuals. This finds its expression in the classical liberalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke that predominates in the political ideology famously characterized as possessive individualism by C. B. Macpherson (1962). In 19th- and 20th-century liberalism this played out in a generalized fear of the consequences of collective political subjects and the defense of ‘true individualism’ (Hayek 1935, 1945). This celebration of the individual and with it the condemnation of collectivity can be found from the most ancient to the most recent forms of elitism. It can be found in the ‘hatred of democracy’ that has been traced from ancient Greece to contemporary post-political politics by Jacques Rancière (1992, 2005). In relation to psychology and psychoanalysis, this hatred can be seen particularly clearly in Gustave le Bon’s famous work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which advances an unapologetic disdain for collective political organization and a demand for despotic government by ‘the best’ individuals. He writes, ‘Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase’ (le Bon 1895: xiii). Freud points out that there is nothing particularly original in le Bon’s hatred of collectives: Everything that he says to the detriment and depreciation of the manifestations of the group mind had already been said by others before him with equal distinctness and equal hostility, and has been repeated in unison by thinkers, statesmen and writers since the earliest periods of literature. (Freud 1921: 82) While this kind of hatred of the people, masses, crowds, and collectivities has a long tradition and plays an important role in many versions of contemporary elitism, more often than not the situation today is much more subtle and complicated. Indeed, as will be shown, it is hard to deny the collective and social character of human life altogether. A more subtle ideological defense against the existence and power of collective subjects is one of putting collectivism ‘in its place’, of acknowledging collective subjects but disavowing their consequences and their prospects for political action. In a psychoanalytic frame, the fact of collective subjects is acknowledged, even celebrated, but their consequences are placed elsewhere, off-center. Liberal political theory presents itself, therefore, as a theory of social action or even as a theory of society. Even the most extreme liberals or libertarians, including borderline psychotics such as Ludwig von Mises, stress that capitalism is a ‘form of social cooperation’ (von Mises 1941: 239

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1) and further that ‘Society is concerted action, cooperation. . . . Individual man is born into a socially organized environment . . . [and] . . . The individual lives and acts within society’ (von Mises 1949: 143). Even more sophisticated defenders of individualism argue against the silliest of common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. (Hayek 1945: 6) What is essential, and is so hard to grasp, is that the individual as bounded and self-sufficient is a myth that is produced in ideology while being destroyed in practice by the development of capitalism. This is so hard to grasp because the destruction of the individual in capitalist practice is accompanied by the most extreme forms of ideological celebration of the individual. The individual, if such a thing ever existed, is radically exceeded throughout modern capitalism and even more so, as will soon be demonstrated, in scientific management and contemporary business practice. Capitalist practice is therefore perpetually caught in a flip-flop oscillation between knowing that collective production is the basis of the increased productive powers of the worker on which it relies while that collectivity and its consequences is then disavowed. Capital is caught in a game that bears uncanny resemblances to the ‘here-there’ (fort-da) game that Freud discusses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which a child repeats the appearance and then disappearance of the loved object in a game in order to have some semblance of control over the coming and going of the other. The collective nature of the productive subject under capital is demonstrated in the various versions that Marx advances of the socialization of work that coincides with the development of capitalism.While taking as axiomatic that the human being ‘is above all a social animal’ (Marx 1867: 444), more important than this truism is Marx’s sustained account of the new forms of interconnectivity that arise with the passage from handicrafts and manufacture through to the modern factory system.While this transformation clearly destroyed a range of previous forms of sociality and collectivity, as Marx frequently recognizes, at least in passing, he places much more emphasis on the development under the capital-relation of what he describes as ‘the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one’ (Marx 1867: 443). The development of this productive power is outlined in detail through Capital and the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ (Marx 1867: 948–1084) and in the account that he provides in the Grundrisse of the development of a ‘general productive power’, a ‘general social knowledge’, the ‘general intellect’, and the ‘powers of social production’ (Marx 1857–1858: 705–706). Although, as will be seen, the social, general, and collective nature of production poses radical threats to capitalist ideology, capitalist business practice nevertheless rests on precisely this sociality of production and therefore cannot coherently deny it outright. This can be seen clearly in the system of capitalist command of labor described at the start of the 20th century by Frederick Winslow Taylor as scientific management and which subsequently has had a profound impact across the globe to the present. Scientific management involves for Taylor the eradication of the instinctual life of individuals and their previous habits and forms of social solidarity. Taylor dismisses these forms of life prior to control by capitalist managers as resting on naïve and dogmatic ‘rules of thumb’ and a socially enforced reduction of effort that he bemoans as ‘soldiering’. He is clear about the radical nature of his proposed transformation, in which control of the labor process is passed over to management, who then have to bend individuals to their will: ‘In the past 240

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the man has been first; in the future the system must be first’ (Taylor 1911: 7). This involves the eradication of the individual and the reign of ‘Science, not rule of thumb. Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism’ (Taylor 1911: 140). In this system, the productive subject is not the individual in any recognizable sense. Thus, he predicts that ‘The time is fast going by for the great personal or individual achievement of any one man standing alone and without the help of those around him’ (Taylor 1911: 140). While, on the one hand, eradicating the individual in the name of the system, Taylor is also clear that the target of intervention of scientific management is the individual. He therefore claims the importance of a strategy of individualization, of separating each worker from the others—thus, ‘the importance of individualising each workman’ (Taylor 1911: 73). This involves separating workers from their former bonds with others and from any sense of their way of life or their previous control over their work. This involves quite precisely the strategy of intervention at the level that Foucault (1979) importantly maintained was at the level of omnes et singulatim, of ‘all and each’. Scientific management targets intervention at the level of the individual, while Taylor recognizes that the increase in social productivity results not from the isolated individual but from the what Marx had called the general intellect. Taylor is clear that social productivity passes through but does not originate from any particular individual: This increase in the productivity of human effort is, of course, due to many causes, besides the increase in the personal dexterity of the man. It is due to the discovery of steam and electricity, to the introduction of machinery, to inventions, great and small, and to the progress of science and technology. (Taylor 1911: 141) The fact that production today is collective production can be seen across the world of work and business. The fact that production today is production in common is an ‘open secret’ that is recognized in practice but disavowed in capitalist ideology. This can be seen, for example, in the way that even the most apparently individualistic ideologies such as entrepreneurship, which were long premised on ideas of the individual heroic entrepreneur now embrace ideas of entrepreneurial teams, entrepreneurial organizations, and collective entrepreneurship (Jones and Murtola 2012). Similarly, it is vital today to recognize that finance capital is a collective subject in its own right, given that finance is precisely the terrain for the collective congregation of capitals on the stock, options, and futures markets (Jones 2016a). Finance is precisely a mechanism for weaponizing flows of capital so that they can extort the richest pickings, but moreover, finance is a method for the collectivization or socialization of capital to avoid the dangers of being pinned down in one location and held to account by its others—that is, by us (Jones 2016b). Contemporary capital constantly enjoins individuals to transform themselves in order to increase their human capital. In practice, this involves profound investment in skills and knowledges that arise outside that individual, which when injected into the bloodstream of the individual can then lay claim to individual reward. Developing human capital requires refining intellectual, affective, and communicational capacities to command the current state of knowledge and the capacity to relate to others. At the same time, collective capacities for sociality and care that have developed over millennia are set to work by capital in profoundly undervalued and precarious forms of service work. What is demanded of each individual is their profound embrace of their collectivity as team players and in customer service, in which the human capacity to relate to other human beings is in many forms of work the direct basis of the production of surplus-value. 241

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In this way, human sociality is prey for management consultants who advise ‘how to unlock the power of communities and networks to grow your business’ (Reillier and Reillier 2017). Likewise, business advisors sing hymns to the benefits for capital of taking advantage of forms of collective sociality as they present themselves in crowds and across platforms (McAfee and Brynjolfson 2017). What is truly horrifying, then, is not the capitalist repudiation of collectivity and sociality but rather their embrace. It should therefore be shocking but not surprising that a leadership guru such as Henry Cloud would publish the book The Power of the Other (2016). This is certainly not a work of Lacanian theory, although certain formulae have an uncanny ring to them: ‘we are fuelled from the outside, from connections with others’ (Cloud 2016: 28), and ‘you are who you are . . . because the power of other people has helped you get there’ (Cloud 2016: 63). The reason for acknowledging the other here, though, is not to understand what one is, to work out a symptom, or to cultivate an ethos of gratitude. The power of the other is an instrument for achieving high performance and surpassing your expectations. ‘When you have the power of the other on your side, you can surpass whatever limit you are currently experiencing or will ever experience in the future’ (Cloud 2016: 10). This is couched within an explicit account of ‘internalization’, which is a matter of ‘bringing what was on the outside in’ (Cloud 2016: 166). This entire enterprise is instrumental: there are ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ others, and the key to success is in a strategic calculation of which relationships with which others will be most useful. Such a book is important for the way that it clarifies capitalist ideology by specifying so clearly the logic of the relation between capital and its others. The point is that even the most misanthropic elitists, who might seem to simply hate other people, find it hard to maintain a consistent hatred of other people—for good reason, because their privilege depends on those others. The other is therefore always ‘abject’ for capital, something both desired and at once repellant, something that must be kept nearby to make sure that things get done but not too close, for fear that the other might have a life of its own. So while Henry Cloud describes the other as being ‘like some sort of superfood that keeps you healthy and charged up long after your first bite’ (Cloud 2016: 166), those who are eating the other might not always experience immense pleasure in the taste of those others being crushed between their teeth. The reality of what is called transindividuality (Balibar 2018; Combes 1999; Morfino 2014; Read 2016) is, then, not something that needs to be introduced from the outside onto contemporary capitalism, but rather, such a concept illuminates its reality. Contemporary production under capital is already radically transindividual. Further, the individual is not destroyed in puffs of theory or in books describing the erasure of the figure of man (Foucault 1966). The dismantling of the individual is a concrete historical process, one that has been underway for at least three centuries.Yet, it should not be surprising that this same period has been the time of the great ideological celebration of the individual and the rights of man. The celebration of the individual in political liberalism and capitalist ideology has not been ineffective. Indeed, it has had a scarcely imaginable power in constructing specific property rights and mechanisms of exclusion from what would otherwise be held in common by all. The idea of the individual is a response to the new forms of collectivity and collective subjects which have proliferated in every historical sequence and have flourished with the dominion of the capital-relation, which is a relation of capital to its others.

Conclusion This leads to several conclusions. Above all, most simply, subjects are always multiple. Subjects are multiple in the sense that any subject only ever arises or exists in relation to other subjects. 242

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Further, the composition of any subject is itself multiple, such that any subject is composed in such a way that it always, at least potentially, bears within it elements which are in antagonism with one another. It can be tempting to conceive the subject as one, even when it is a collective subject composed of heterogeneous elements. This return of the figure of the One provides satisfaction and nourishment both for its imaginary function and also because it is a key conceptual element of the tradition of Western metaphysics. At their best, Freud, Lacan, and Badiou are in radical breach of this tradition. At the level of the subject, even if there is a subject effect, any subject is always divided and characterized by incompleteness. At the level of ontology, even if there is some oneness, the one is not (Lacan 1971–72; Badiou 1988a: 31ff.). In his early work, Badiou conceived subjects as collective but at that point collective subjects were frequently still thought under the figure of the One. When thought of in this way, collective subjects appear, but not in their internal division or in their relation to other subjects. In the seminar of 15 April 1975, imperialist capital is presented as a collective subject: ‘We must conceive of imperialist society not only as substance but also as subject’ (Badiou 1982: 42). In the later seminar, on 14 February 1977, this appears to be overturned with the following reframing: ‘the bourgeoisie has not been a subject for a long time, it makes a place’ (Badiou 1982: 130).This is a reversal of terms in which the status of subject is given to and then taken from imperialist capital, in a movement in which capital is presented as subject and then not. At this stage of his work, Badiou has good reason for his claim that there is only one subject. This is because he is arguing against the liberal vision of politics as the meeting of two subjectivities. Badiou presses back against ‘the vision of politics as a subjective duel, which it is not’, and concludes that ‘There is one place, and one subject’ (1982: 130). This characterization pits ‘place’ against ‘subject’.This is further elaborated in Being and Event in the opposition of the ‘state of the situation’ to the subject. In such a framing, it is possible to admit with Marx and Engels that ‘[t]he bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part’ (Marx and Engels 1848: 70) and also to cast the action of the capitalist class and the capitalist state today as principally one of maintaining or reproducing the established capital-relation. For there to be a subject in Badiou’s sense would not be a matter of being a subject in the sense of being subjected to that capital-relation, but rather, subject would name the destruction of the capital-relation. The political subject will be found, then, in the proletariat (Badiou 1982: 44), immigrant workers (Badiou 1982: 265), communists (Badiou 1982: 183), and the discourse of Marxism (Badiou 1982: 127). These are united in the abolition of the capital-relation, in ‘the abolition of any place in which something like a proletariat can be installed’ (Badiou 1982: 7). In this concrete way, the subject is pitted against place. In terms of the theory of the subject, A ruling class is the guardian of the place, the obligatory functionary of the splace. Its aim, both violent and hidden, is to guarantee repetition and prohibit the political subject, through the blockage of interruption. To rule means to interrupt interruption. In the language of the politics of the State, this is called ‘restoring order’. Order is what is re-established while keeping silent about what establishes it. Like the subject it denies, order declares that it comes in the second place. (Badiou 1982: 184) This position seems to coincide with Marx and in particular the invocations of the 1840s. The subject is on the side of change, and this subject is recognized but denied by the powers that be. This calls for strength in the face of the denial of this capacity for change—thus, the call for the forming of a genuinely collective subject. In the Manifesto, Marx writes, ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’ 243

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(Marx and Engels 1848: 77). In the Poverty of Philosophy, the principle of motion is on the side of the impoverished and marginalized: ‘It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle’ (Marx 1846–47: 103). In the German Ideology, communism is named simply as the reality of the abolition of the present: ‘We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx and Engels 1845–1846: 57). Such motifs are crucial as calls to arms and in asserting the agency of those who are often otherwise considered to have none. They are discursive tactics of subjectivization in the sense that they seek not simply to reflect but to construct the subject of which they speak. In this way, they are crucial in contesting the idea that those who are presented as victors have all the agency. But when, in Capital, Marx presents capital as a subject, value ‘becomes transformed into an automatic subject’ and ‘presents itself as a self-moving substance’ (Marx 1867: 255–256), the basis of the force that presses back against this self-moving substance all but vanishes. To see only the oppressed as subject, as Badiou often does, further runs the risk of underestimating the extent to which the capital-relation involves the ‘constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ (Marx and Engels 1848: 70). It also loses sight of the fact that the function of capital and the capitalist state is not simply in ‘restoring order’ but rather in never-ending ‘reform’ and in the creation of the conditions for endless ‘innovation’. Marx attributed to collective subjects variously regressive and progressive potentials, depending on the composition of those subjects and their capacities for mobilization. These can be distinguished as collective subjects that act from above and collective subjects that act from below.The crucial point here is that that there is never one subject that acts by itself, either from above or from below. To see only the agency of, for example, capital from above can at worst lead to fatalism and at best lead to overestimating the unity of capital and underestimating the forces opposed to it. To set out a never-ending dialectic between subjects from above and from below allows for the multiplicity of subjects, the alliance between subjects, and the forming of new and sometimes temporary alliances between collective subjects. This also brings to center stage the reality of internal struggle in even the most progressive collective projects. Bringing this to the fore makes it possible to work this struggle through without abandoning the cause in the name of pluralism. While in Badiou’s early work, there are hints of acknowledgment of countervailing forces within and outside any progressive political subject, this becomes much more explicit in his later work. In Logics of Worlds, he identifies how a subject and its consequences can be reduced when faced with subjects that are reactive or obscure. Importantly, in Logics of Worlds and in particular in his account of the formal theory of the subject in that book, Badiou evokes the language and concepts of psychoanalysis. Specifically here, he deploys ideas of the unconscious and repression, terms that do not appear in the earlier Being and Event (1988a). The appearance of these defensive strategies marks a crucial development in his thought. A ‘reactive’ subject recognizes the contradictions and potential consequences of the present but seeks to extinguish these by a negation that places the present under a bar, because the present is less bad than the past (Badiou 2006: 54–58). By contrast, an ‘obscure’ subject attempts to complete the process of foreclosure by invoking an imagined complete world that promises a new destiny (Badiou 2006: 58–62). The reactive and the obscure point to two distinct mechanisms of defense against the collective subjects that preexist and develop with the capital-relation. The reactive subject effects a strategy of repression that admits yet denies the presence of a repressed collectivity. The obscure subject passes beyond repression toward what Freud called Verwerfung, a word that was traditionally translated as ‘repudiation’ but, as Lacan demonstrated, is much better translated as 244

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‘foreclosure’ (Lacan 1955–56: 321). As Freud stresses, foreclosure is a much more effective strategy of defense, in which ‘the ego forecloses [verwirft] the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all’ (Freud 1894: 58). This may clarify why a good part of revolutionary politics involves the demand precisely for the existence of elements that have been repressed or foreclosed. The repression and foreclosure of the reality and possibilities of collective economic and social life are part and parcel of the development of capitalist ideology. Clearly, this involves policing the hell out of any notion that collective life is produced by our collective labor and vigorously denying that capital is nothing but the privately appropriated work of others. At times the capitalist state seems to acknowledge the vast social effort that has produced and produces life, before a reactive recoil in which the efforts of each distinct individual is taken as the principle grounds for life and social participation. Meanwhile, in the depths of capitalist ideology, in capitalist economics, and in the corporate boardroom, reclusive sects tell themselves in concert that whatever befalls any particular concrete individual comes as a result of the efforts of that individual. In the former reactive case, the truth of the capital-relation is seen and then repressed. In the latter, it is almost as if the idea that capital is produced by its others had never occurred to capital at all.

References Aristotle (1984) ‘Nicomachean Ethics’, in Complete Works, Volume Two, Barnes, J. (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Badiou, A. (1988b) ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’ Topoi, 7, 93–98. Badiou, A. (2005 [1988a]) Being and Event, Feltham, O. (trans.), London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2006 [2005]) ‘Plato, our dear Plato!’, Angelaki, 11(3), 39–41. Badiou, A. (2009 [1982]) Theory of the Subject, Bosteels, B. (trans.), London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2009 [2006]) Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, Toscano, A. (trans.), London: Continuum. Badiou, A. (2010 [2009a]) The Communist Hypothesis, Macey, D. and Corcoran, S. (trans.), London:Verso. Badiou, A. (2011 [2009b]) Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Bosteels, B. (trans.), London:Verso. Badiou, A. (2015 [2013]) Philosophy and the Idea of Communism: Alain Badiou in Conversation with Peter Engelmann, Spitzer, S. (trans.), Oxford: Polity. Badiou, A. (2018 [1985]) Can Politics Be Thought? Bosteels, B. (trans.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Badiou, A. (2018) L’immanence des vérités, Paris: Fayard. Balibar, E. (2018) Spinoza politique: Le transindividuel, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Châtelet, G. (2014 [1998]) To Live and Think Like Pigs:The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies, Mackay, R. (trans.), Falmouth: Urbanomic. Cloud, H. (2016) The Power of the Other: The Startling Effect Other People Have on You, from the Boardroom to the Bedroom and Beyond—and What to Do About It, New York: Harper Business. Combes, M. (2013 [1999]) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, LaMarre, T. (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Durkheim, E. (1982 [1901]) Rules of Sociological Method, Halls, W.D. (trans.), New York: Free Press. Foucault, M. (1970 [1966]) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002 [1979]) ‘ “Omnes et singulatim”: Towards a Critique of Political Reason’, in Faubion, J. (ed.) Essential Works 1954–1984,Volume Three: Power, London: Penguin. Ferguson, A. (1995 [1767]) Essay on the History of Civil Society, Oz-Salzberger, F. (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, S. (2001 [1894]) ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. III, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1916–17]) ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (part III)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVI, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1919]) ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVII, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1920]) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVIII, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage.

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Campbell Jones Freud, S. (2001 [1921]) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVIII, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1923]) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XIX, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1925]) ‘The Resistances to Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XIX, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1927]) ‘The Future of an Illusion’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XXI, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Freud, S. (2001 [1930]) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XXI, Strachey, J. (trans.), London:Vintage. Hayek, F.A. (1948 [1945]) ‘Individualism: True and False’, in Individualism and the Economic Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F.A. (ed.) (1963 [1935]) Collectivist Economic Planning, London: Routledge. Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heraclitus (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Kahn, Charles (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, C. (2016a) ‘John Key, the Biofinancial Entrepreneur’, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Social Sciences Online, 11(2), 89–103. Jones, C. (2016b) ‘The World of Finance’, Diacritics, 44(3), 30–54. Jones, C. and Murtola, A.-M. (2012) ‘Entrepreneurship and Expropriation’, Organization, 19(5), 635–655. Lacan, J. (1979 [1964]) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [Seminar XI], Sheridan, A. (trans.), London: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1988 [1954–55]) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II:The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Tomaselli, S. (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, J. (1993 [1955–56]) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III:The Psychoses, 1955–1956, Grigg, R. (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, J. (2006 [1955]) ‘The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis’, in Ecrits:The First Complete Edition in English, Fink, B. (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2006 [1961]) ‘Metaphor of the Subject’, in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Fink, B. (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2008 [1967a]) ‘My Teaching, its Nature and its Ends’, in My Teaching, Macey, D. (trans.), London: Verso. Lacan, J. (2008 [1967b]) ‘The Place, Origin and End of my Teaching’, in My Teaching, Macey, D. (trans.), London:Verso. Lacan, J. (2018 [1971–72]) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIX: . . . Or Worse, Oxford: Polity. le Bon, G. (2002 [1895]) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Mineola, NY: Dover. Ludwig, K. (2016) From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action, Volume 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ludwig, K. (2017) From Plural to Institutional Agency: Collective Action, Volume 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macpherson, C.B. (2011 [1962]) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1955 [1846–47]) The Poverty of Philosophy, London: Martin Lawrence. Marx, K. (1973 [1857–58]) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Nicolaus, M. (trans.), London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1976 [1867]) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, Fowkes, B. (trans.), London: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976 [1845–46]) The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2010 [1848]) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Fernbach, D. (ed.) The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings,Volume 1, London:Verso. Massumi, B. (2015) The Power at the End of the Economy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McAfee, A. and Brynjolfson, E. (2017) Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Miller, J.-A. (1986) ‘Mathemes: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan’, in Ragland, E. and Milovanovic, D. (eds.) Lacan:Topologically Speaking, New York: Other Press.

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Collective Subjects Miller, J.-A. (2012 [1966]) ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’, in Hallward, P. and Peden, K. (eds.) Concept and Form,Volume One: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, London:Verso. Morfino, V. (2014) Plural Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser, Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Rancière, J. (1995 [1992]) On the Shores of Politics, Heron, L. (trans.), London:Verso. Rancière, J. (2006 [2005]) Hatred of Democracy, Corcoran, S. (trans.), London:Verso. Read, J. (2016) The Politics of Transindividuality, Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Reillier, L.C. and Reillier, B. (2017) Platform Strategy: How to Unlock the Power of Communities and Networks to Grow Your Business, London: Routledge. Taylor, F.W. (1911) Principles of Scientific Management, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Tollefsen, D.P. (2015) Groups as Agents, Oxford: Polity. von Mises, L. (1998 [1941]) Interventionism:An Economic Analysis, Greaves, B.B. (ed.), Indianapolis, IL: Liberty. von Mises, L. (2007 [1949]) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Volume One, Greaves, B.B. (ed.), Indianapolis, IL: Liberty.

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PART IV

Themes

19 SEXUALITY Eran Dorfman

One of the oldest examples of sexuality’s political potential appears in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece are tired of the ongoing war between their cities. Under the unifying leadership of Lysistrata, they declare that they will refuse to have sex with their husbands until the war is over, and miraculously enough, a peace treaty is signed much sooner than expected. The different peoples reconcile with each other, and so do the different sexes. Indeed, sexuality expresses much more than an intimate interaction between two bodies. It also involves various elements such as power, dominance, control, pleasure, and pain—elements that are inherent parts of any human interaction, from relationships between two people to complex social structures. These elements, however, are not static and take diverse shapes and forms according to the time and the place of their emergence. Sexuality changes accordingly in both its praxis and its discourse, interacting with different norms and codes that define what ‘legitimate’ sexuality is. The interesting question for our purposes, however, is not so much how sexuality is shaped by history—a question that has been studied extensively—but rather how sexuality may in turn shape history. What is the political potential of sexuality, and how can we realize it? In this respect, psychoanalysis may serve as a powerful tool of investigation. Indeed, sexuality has occupied a central place in psychoanalysis from the outset, and this place, moreover, has been the focal point of many criticisms and attacks against psychoanalysis. It is as if the way that psychoanalysis conceived of sexuality profoundly disturbed and threatened to reveal something hidden in society. The introduction of infantile sexuality, for instance, provoked outrage and disgust among conservative circles, which accused psychoanalysis of decadence and nihilism and of seeking to destabilize family and sexual norms. Later on, however, a contrary type of criticism was raised, one that considers psychoanalysis to be too conservative and oppressive. Psychoanalysis is actually both revolutionary and conservative, not because of Freud’s own personality or other external factors but because of the very nature of what psychoanalysis investigates. On the one hand, it introduces blind forces, which are the drives: Libido (or Eros, the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive). On the other hand, it focuses on the ways these forces are restricted by social norms and the various symptoms that are caused by these restrictions. Neither wishing to undo these norms nor aspiring to conserve them, psychoanalysis is content with describing the norms. Its aim is to find a cure for the symptoms within existing restrictions rather than to create a society with no symptoms at all. 251

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The drives initially do not know any limits, but they soon encounter obstacles and respond to them. It is around this tension that psychoanalysis posits its theory, examining the revolutionary power of Libido and the destructive action of Thanatos. But psychoanalysis equally reveals, although often indirectly, the ways society attempts to tame the drives and the consequences of this taming, which take the form of neuroses on both the personal and the political levels. This tension between the drives and society is not something that can be surmounted, since it constitutes the drama of human behavior in general and human sexuality in particular, constantly moving between nature and culture, between blind drives and calculated ways to articulate them. Moreover, it is within this tension that psychoanalysis’s potential to influence society and its political structures lies. Psychoanalysis actually constitutes an implicit political theory, since it describes the given norms of society and the forces that try to resist these norms and challenge them.The aim of this chapter is to elucidate this political theory and the reactions to it, from the onset of psychoanalysis to the present day, reflecting on ways to put this theory into action and realize the political potential of psychoanalysis with regard to sexuality.

Psychoanalysis Between the Normative and the Revolutionary ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (Freud 1905) is one of the rare texts that Freud updated continually with every new edition, according to the progress of psychoanalytical knowledge. The theory of sexuality, in particular, has developed rapidly since the beginning of the 20th century, but some elements have remained intact. These are reflected in the title of each essay: the first is ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, enumerating and analyzing different sexual perversions; the second is ‘Infantile Sexuality’, tracing the different sexual stages through which the child passes; and only then, in the third essay, ‘The Transformations in Puberty’, does Freud describe adult and ‘normal’ sexuality. This peculiar order of presentation is far from arbitrary, since, for Freud, the starting point of sexuality is necessarily perverse, and only later, after long years of personal investigation and experimentation from an early age onward, can one attain so-called healthy sexuality.1 The following are two of Freud’s most basic premises: (1) normality results from (a fight against) pathology, and (2) adulthood originates from childhood. Sexuality has obliged Freud to reverse the usual relationship between these poles, since it revolves around initially uncontrollable forces, which are the drives. Thus, Libido originally invests objects wherever it finds them, which leads to the diverse ‘aberrations’ detailed in the first of the three essays. Libido must consequently pass through different infantile stages, as described in the second essay, and only after many years and great difficulties does it manage to find its ‘right’ objects and patterns of behavior, as discussed in the third essay. However, even then, Libido constantly exposes the subject to the danger of illness since it wants much more than is offered to it. Repression is an integral part of civilized society, and the work of psychoanalysis is double: to help the analysand to adapt better to society’s sexual norms and, equally, to publicly expose the dangers of a too-restricted society. After all, neurosis is not simply an illness to eradicate but also a nucleus of resistance to social oppression. It is this characterization of Libido as a blind force with ‘legitimate’ targets set by society that makes psychoanalysis move between two opposite tendencies: the conservative-normative tendency and the radical-revolutionary tendency. On the one hand, psychoanalysis discerns ‘good’ sexual objects according to the norms of the time, with every deviation threatening to lead either to perversion or to neurosis. But on the other hand, psychoanalysis is the first to admit that these normative objects and activities are derived rather than original. They are the products of the time, and psychoanalysis simply describes them as they are without praising or 252

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consecrating them. Indeed, although psychoanalysis uses normative terms such as perversions, it equally shows that these perversions are more primordial than the norms from which they deviate. Psychoanalysis thus not only investigates how to attain the given sexual norms but also examines alternatives to these norms that are excluded by society and yet remain in the psyche in repressed or hidden forms. Psychoanalysis discovers a complex array of sexual patterns that often go unnoticed behind the existing norms. In this way, although sometimes unintentionally, psychoanalysis can help us to imagine how to transform or at least challenge these norms and, with them, the underlying social and political premises of the time.

Main Criticisms of Psychoanalysis This oscillation between the radical-revolutionary and the conservative-normative has led to many criticisms of psychoanalysis, some of which have concentrated on the first pole and others on the second. However, these criticisms often overlook the interdependence of the two poles and the movement and tension between them, and they therefore also miss psychoanalysis’s potential as a transformative tool. Since the criticisms that focus on the revolutionary pole are quite homogeneous, our main concern in this section will be the different criticisms concerning the conservative aspect of psychoanalysis and the ways that psychoanalysis may respond to them. From the feminist perspective, thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir (2010 [1949]), Luce Irigaray (1985a [1974], 1985b [1977]) and Jessica Benjamin (1988) have criticized Freud’s assumption that since women ‘lack’ a penis, they envy men for having one. Indeed, ‘penis envy’ is probably a social construct stemming from the popular ideas of the period in which Freud lived, reflecting the assumption of the ‘natural’ superiority of men over women. Psychoanalysis is therefore condemned for reproducing and reaffirming the current inequality of the sexes rather than aiming to eradicate it. But this situation can be viewed in two ways: on the one hand, Freud seems to blindly accept common opinion by forging the concept of ‘penis envy’; on the other hand, this very concept has helped women identify and localize what needs to be changed in society. Even if Freud and others misconceived female sexuality, this misconception was not accidental. Rather, it stemmed from psychoanalysis’s attempts to discern the neuroses of its times. These neuroses, once formulated in clear concepts, may therefore be better evaluated and cease to be a ‘problem that has no name’ (Friedan 1963). It is better to have a wrong name than not to have any name at all, and our critical task is not to immediately accept or reject psychoanalysis’s concepts but rather to assess and understand them as anchored in their time. Indeed, this anchoring may be a drawback, but it may also become a powerful tool for social change. An example of how to use rigid or ‘wrong’ categories precisely to transform them can be found in Judith Butler’s early writings (Butler 1990, 1993). Butler examines the practice of drag performance that adopts stereotypes of what it means to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and accentuates them to expose the arbitrariness underlying them. Femininity or masculinity, Butler shows, does not stem from the presence or absence of a penis but rather from various patterns of behavior, dress codes, and norms that need to be uncovered if one wishes to transgress and transform them. In this sense, Butler does not contradict psychoanalysis’s findings but actually endorses them while stressing their normative value. Moreover, by introducing ‘pervert’ performativity, Butler adheres to the primacy given by Freud to ‘sexual aberrations’. Hence, the words aberration and perversion lose their pejorative and oppressive connotations and become an invitation to explore new modes of sexuality. Indeed, even if Freud remained imprisoned in the norms of his time, he gave us the means to revolutionize, transgress, and transform these same norms. This is equally true for another set of criticisms leveled at psychoanalysis, coming from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977 [1972]).These accuse psychoanalysis of constructing 253

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oppressive familial structures such as the Oedipus complex and presenting them as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. In this way, they claim, psychoanalysis reproduces the patriarchal and capitalistic order and hinders us from finding alternative structures of kinship. Here again we find that psychoanalysis is opening itself almost too easily to criticism precisely because it dares to conceive of social constructs in libidinal terms. The psychoanalytical procedure may be interpreted as a normalization of Libido, but also the other way around: the libidinization of norms. If the nuclear family is filled with passion and Libido, then the structure of the family can no longer be stabilized to conform to other global structures, as Lévi-Strauss (1969 [1949]) tried to show; rather, the family is exposed to internal pressures that threaten to transform it from within. It is true that the taboo of incest, one of the oldest taboos of humanity, is rationalized and to a certain extent justified by psychoanalysis, but it is equally exposed by psychoanalysis in its naked arbitrariness. Because of this exposure, other forms of kinship, including those imagined by Deleuze and Guattari, can now be revealed. These forms might not be considered ‘legitimate’ by society or by psychoanalysis itself, but they are at least given the chance to find a name and therefore become potential alternatives to contemporary familial structures. Thus, psychoanalysis may be justly accused of inventing rather than revealing the oppressive structure of the Oedipus complex, but at the same time, it shakes this structure by libidinizing it, therefore introducing into it a variety of potential aberrations. Let us recall that Libido is blind in itself and therefore needs social constructs in which to act and toward which to direct itself. And yet whenever Libido actually penetrates these constructs, it doesn’t allow them to remain intact for long, changing them from within, perverting them, or simply making them different from the rigid norm that they are supposed to incarnate. No doubt, Libido was present in the structure of the family long before the advent of psychoanalysis, but its explicit introduction has allowed us to understand the difficulties behind current familial structures and to propose theoretical and practical ways to disrupt them. Finally, Michel Foucault (1978 [1976]) argues that psychoanalysis’s confessional method is just another way to control and normalize sexuality rather than liberate it. Freud’s enumeration of sexual aberrations is for Foucault part of a global attempt to rationalize the irrational and find adequate social and political structures to tame it. Psychoanalysis addresses the individual, but it actually plays a crucial role in the political and social apparatus with its ‘will to knowledge’. According to Foucault, psychoanalysis is neither liberating nor oppressive as such; it is simply another institution or force that attempts to master sexuality and gain knowledge and control over it, conserving the norms of the time precisely through its pretension to transgress these norms while endlessly talking about them. Many attempts have been made to address Foucault’s criticism of psychoanalysis, but for our purposes, it is sufficient to focus on Foucault’s claim that psychoanalysis encourages one to talk about and name diverse libidinal mechanisms. Libido thus enters into the discourse, and its power is canalized and tamed. However, as noted by de Certeau (1984 [1980]), Foucault stresses top-down processes but neglects bottom-up mechanisms. Thus, even if Libido is tamed and controlled, from the moment it enters the discourse, it necessarily transforms itself from within. Psychoanalysis is without doubt an institution that takes part in the global apparatus that seeks to gain knowledge, but by giving words to the irrational, this irrational inevitably challenges the apparatus in ways that should still be explored. Every human activity already presents a negotiation between speech and silence, light and darkness, rationality and irrationality. Rather than choosing one of these poles, psychoanalysis moves between them, and any criticism should take into account this movement in order to grasp both the transformative and the conservative aspects of psychoanalysis. 254

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Attempts at Political Reconstruction Libido is thus a revolutionary force that psychoanalysis treats in an ambiguous way, setting it free by giving it a name while also trying to tame and control it. This peculiar mixture has led not only to criticisms of psychoanalysis but also to ambitious inquiries into the nature of Libido and its potential to liberate society. Two of the most significant attempts to harness Libido to a political theory of liberation are Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959). Both focus on Libido, or Eros, as a force of life, a force that, if listened to carefully and given the right place in society, may lead to greater liberty. For both thinkers, the key to reaching this goal is to give up repression and attain a society of libidinal freedom. But here they seem to make the opposite mistake from what we have seen so far in the chapter: no longer forgetting the radical-revolutionary aspect of psychoanalysis but rather its conservative-traditional one, which is not an additional element that can be easily discarded but something that is intimately linked to the very nature of the drives. Repression occurs during a conflict between the drives and the existing social norms and constraints. Freud thought that repression was necessary to maintain a civilized society, in which every individual must give up some of his or her libidinal and destructive force (Freud 1930). Marcuse and Brown believe, however, that the amount of repression in Western society is much higher than needed.They thus explore ways to allow Libido to find a broader array of objects at the individual and the social levels. Our developed society, they argue, no longer needs the rigid constraints of the past. If we develop new social structures that allow freer libidinal investment, we will arrive at a libidinal society in which life reigns over death, since the force of life does not need to constantly draw back in the way that it does today. What is the problem with these optimistic suggestions? Why not pay attention to psychoanalysis’s radical-revolutionary aspect alone? First, following Foucault and others, we are more aware today of the latent repressive mechanisms in society. We are therefore suspicious of any suggestion of liberating ourselves from social constraints without taking into account the implicit interests behind this ‘liberation’. Foucault sees these interests as participating in the ‘will to knowledge’, but they can be equally located in the neoliberal ideology that promotes a presumably free consumer society. Second, and beyond that, Marcuse’s and Brown’s suggestions are problematic for reasons that are inherent in the nature of the drives. Indeed, as we have started to see, Libido does not work alone, and Freud always maintained the duality of his theory. Whereas in his earlier model, he contrasted Libido (object oriented) with the tendency for self-conservation (ego oriented), in his second model—his structural model—Freud contrasted Libido with the death drive; in other words, he contrasted Eros with Thanatos. The life drive, which is revolutionary, and the death drive, which is conservative, are closely related, and whenever we locate the action of the first, we should equally look for the counteraction of the second.

Eros and Thanatos The problem, consequently, is not only repression but also the duality of the drives, Libido being only one of the forces that constitute the human psyche. Indeed, Brown calls his work Life against Death, but the question is not so much how to ‘conquer’ death but rather how to acknowledge its inherent place in human life and understand its diverse modes of functioning both on the individual and on the social level. On the individual level, Melanie Klein, more than any other psychoanalyst, invested effort into elucidating the role of the death drive in human life, focusing on the early months of the infant. She therefore hardly ever used the term ‘repression’ and preferred to talk about the 255

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diverse mechanisms of the split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects. This split must sooner or later be mended to allow life to take place, and it is the role of psychoanalysis to help in the endless task of repairing the split (Klein 1952; Rosenfeld 1971). In this sense, the pretension of arriving at a society with only ‘good’ objects is doomed to fail. And yet Klein proposes that psychoanalysis is an interpersonal work of fusing the different objects, helping one to gradually overcome, although never completely, hostility and envy to attain generosity and gratitude. The question that interests us here, hence, is how to extend this work to the political and the social spheres. Freud was very concerned with this question. If we consider his ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921), we can get a first clue as to the role of Libido in society, with the dangers and promises it bears. Freud explains the dynamics of group formation, through the psychological mechanisms of suggestion and identification. The leader of the group uses his or her power of suggestion on the masses, and this power, according to Freud, is analogous to the mechanism of falling in love. The leader loves each member of the group and is loved by them in return. But this is only one dimension of the process, since thanks to this love, all members of the group can identify with each other despite their differences and repressed hostility. Libido is thus the fundamental force behind any group, but since Libido is a blind and impulsive force, on the one hand, and since Thanatos always looks for objects to attack, on the other, the sustainability of the group is constantly in question. It suffices that a doubt arises, or a mistake is committed by the leader, and the love of his or her group may vanish and, with it, the solidarity of the group members among themselves. The structure of the group is unstable, and the moods of the masses are volatile. As Freud shows, the initial hostility of people to each other may return at any minute, especially in situations of danger, when the authority of the leader becomes more fragile. One of the most common tactics used by leaders to strengthen Libido and avoid the dangers of Thanatos is to project the latter onto other groups. Freud mentions that the ‘religion of love’ is necessarily a religion of hatred of other religions or their adherents. Other theorists of identification further develop this point on the personal level, showing the necessary hostility it produces as a residue. Thus, Jacques Lacan (2007 [1949]) develops the notion of the ‘mirror stage’ as a necessary phase in the constitution of self-identity through identification with one’s mirror image. In this stage, the infant adopts a wholesome appearance that she or he calls ‘me’, yet this image is only a mirage, and the gap between it and the inner feelings of chaos and emptiness leads to growing hostility toward this image, which is often projected onto other people (Lacan 1975 [1932]). In the same way, Klein (1952, 1955) shows that identification always involves hostility toward the identified-with object.There is always a gap, difference, and remainder between the identifying person and the object of identification. Moreover, this identification is an ongoing process, and every identity is based on various other identifications, which further reinforce inner feelings of hostility because of the disparity between the contradictory objects of identification. Cosmopolitanism, in this regard, is an attitude that accepts the tension between various objects of identification, whereas nationalism demands clear and uniform objects, preferably under the figure of an authoritarian leader. The more one feels a threat to one’s identity, the more one tends to adhere to a main object of identification while projecting the hostile feelings onto external objects. These are supposed to lie outside the zone of identification and therefore become targets of attack. These targets of attack are other groups and other leaders, but importantly, these are chosen precisely because of their similarity to the original group. This similarity is ignored and denied by both sides, but it actually constitutes the main bond between these groups. It may be only a negative similarity—that is, similarity of contrasts such as between men and women or white 256

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and black—but it always involves a residue of identification, an internal element that does not fit the original sleek object of identification and that should therefore be attributed to other groups. As we have seen, hostility stems from the gap between the identifying person or people and the identified-with leader or group. This gap is thus projected toward other leaders and groups together with the consequent hostility it provokes, which explains the passionate and often-obsessional dynamics between different groups. These groups thus constitute a complicated array of love-hate relationships that are extremely difficult to untie (Sartre 1948 [1946]). Moreover, our contemporary identity politics shows that these conflicting groups are not necessarily rival nations. Many national leaders invest efforts not only into demonizing other peoples but also in fostering divisiveness between internal groups, doing so to maintain their power of suggestion and libidinal force within what they consider to be the most powerful group within the nation. It is as if Libido alone is not enough and Thanatos needs to be adopted and manipulated by leaders, but interestingly, one enemy alone is not enough either. Groups are, rather, held together by complex combinations of love and hatred among their different subgroups.

Psychoanalysis and Social Libido: The Example of #MeToo Psychoanalysis may thus help us reveal the libidinal and destructive mechanisms that stand behind group formations and group dynamics and, more specifically today, the mechanisms that enable and reinforce identity politics and populist leadership. Psychoanalysis can detect, for instance, the different ways a leader uses suggestion and love to influence his or her people, the different types of identification that are therefore created between group members, and finally the different gaps and residues of hostility that are projected onto other groups. In this way, psychoanalysis may continue Freud’s efforts to connect the analysis of individuals to group psychology. Let us examine a contemporary example of psychoanalysis’s potential and actual influence on society, which relates to sexuality: the #MeToo movement. This movement is all about Libido and the limits that should restrict it. As we have seen, Libido sooner or later always encounters social constraints, and there is an inherent clash between Libido and norms. The #MeToo movement uncovers this clash, except that, contrary to psychoanalysis, which is content with describing it, the #MeToo movement wishes to change the norms and constitute new social constraints to be set on Libido. Moreover, this movement adopts the psychoanalytical understanding that sexuality concerns not only Libido but also Thanatos, which explains how one uses sexuality to control, dominate, and abuse other people. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis’s pioneering study—namely Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895)—focuses on cases of sexual assault and their traumatic consequences for women. A few years later, Freud allegedly abandoned what he called the seduction theory, claiming that many of the assaults did not take place in reality but were instead imagined by the women. However, rather than simply dismissing the reality of these cases, Freud stressed that traumas always involve a certain distortion and oblivion, precisely because of the excessive amount of energy—libidinal and destructive—that is involved in them. Although Freud’s motives were perhaps influenced by the conservative pole of psychoanalysis, which takes social norms as they are, the #MeToo movement reverses his position precisely by adopting it. It admits that sexual assaults entail an extremely subjective experience, but rather than attributing them to the imagination, this movement calls other victims to testify in order to regain the sense of reality that is so weakened by trauma. Moreover, the #MeToo movement 257

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asks the victims to explain what made them wait so long to report the attacks—not to condemn them but, on the contrary, to show the huge difficulties that the victims must face when they wish to integrate what happened into objective reality. This collective process of testimony is similar to the work of psychoanalysis itself, which aims to introduce words, objectivity, and intersubjective bonds into the overwhelmed world of victims of trauma.The difference between the two is that the #MeToo movement demands that the victims seek not only personal help but also social and political recourse. It aims not only to describe and expose the dangers of Eros and Thanatos but also to display a united front in advocating the need to set new social constraints on them. The #MeToo movement thus recuperates Freud’s early findings while amending them and adding to them sociopolitical impact, an impact that Freud himself could not or did not wish to exploit. Many explanations have been given for Freud’s hesitant position regarding sexual assaults on women (e.g., Laplanche and Pontalis 1968 [1964], Masson 1984; Dorfman 2017), but perhaps the most profound reason for his hesitation is that psychoanalysis, which is both descriptive and therapeutic, cannot play a direct role in the setting of new norms for sexuality. Rather, it can discover individual and collective mechanisms of the drives. It exposes Eros and Thanatos and gives an account of their patterns and the ways they may be channeled toward different objects and behaviors; it also uncovers collective mechanisms such as suggestion, identification, and projection. However, psychoanalysis cannot tell either what the ‘good’ objects and behaviors are or what the objective truth-value of subjective experience is. Freud conceived of psychoanalysis as a science, but if it is one, it is the science of the potential rather than the actual. It tells us what possibilities Eros and Thanatos open up for the individual and society and what shapes they can take; but it cannot tell us how to realize these possibilities. It is for scholars, social agents, and activists to further pursue this research, trying to understand what our actual political world consists of and how to transform it.

Conclusion Let us retrace the different findings explored in this chapter. We started with the psychoanalytical notion of sexuality as based on both libidinal and destructive drives. The drives are uncontrollable forces that soon encounter objects together with the social norms and constraints that envelop them. Psychoanalysis describes this inevitable tension between impulsive powers and objects designated by society as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ones. It seeks to heal the symptoms provoked by this tension, but it takes a descriptive posture that implicitly accepts the current norms as they are without suggesting how they might be changed. This endeavor to describe the tension without qualifying either the drives or their objects as objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’ has provoked various criticisms that consider psychoanalysis to be either too conservative or too revolutionary. It is conservative since it accepts social norms as they are, but it is also revolutionary since it describes how the drives transgress and transform these norms. Moreover, this tension within psychoanalysis between the conservative and the revolutionary poles echoes the duality of the drives: Thanatos and Eros. These always work collaboratively, and a utopian vision of society tends to overlook the inherent place of destruction within human life. To understand and realize psychoanalysis’s political potential, we need to understand the complex array constituted by the drives and the diverse mechanisms that they use, such as suggestion, identification, and projection. Finally, the example of the #MeToo movement shows us how the psychoanalytical understanding of sexual traumas not only exposes the forces behind social norms but also enables this movement to transform them.

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Psychoanalysis therefore carries with it an implicit political theory, yet it cannot realize that theory itself. It is therefore often criticized as being a practice for wealthy individualistic people, but the examples given in this chapter, together with contemporary theories of thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Mladen Dolar, prove that the political potential of psychoanalysis is a treasure that is far from being fully exploited. Psychoanalysis uncovers unconscious libidinal and destructive mechanisms that are at play in our society. But since society as a whole cannot undergo a therapeutic session, it is for researchers, cultural agents, and political activists to do the work of translation: to move from the conscious to the unconscious and back, from the actual to the potential, and vice versa. If we wish to transform society, we need to understand not only what its actual norms are but also what enables these norms and gives them power, since precisely these forces are the key to social change.

Note 1. ‘[W]e were driven to the conclusion that a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation’ (Freud 1905: 231).

References Beauvoir, S. de (2010 [1949]) The Second Sex, Borde, C. and Malovany-Chevallier, S, (trans.), New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Benjamin, J. (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon Books. Brown, N.O. (1959) Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1984 [1980]) The Practice of Everyday Life, Rendall, S. (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1977 [1972]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Hurley, R., Seem, M. and Lane, H. (trans.), New York:Viking. Dorfman, E. (2017) ‘Titanic Times: Epimetheus and Prometheus Between Différance and Deferred Action’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 46(3), 61–75. Foucault, M. (1978 [1976]) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Hurley, R. (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books. Freud, S. (1953–1974) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.), 24 vols., London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1905) ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in Standard Edition, 7, 123–245. Freud, S. (1921) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Standard Edition, 18, 65–143. Freud, S. (1930) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in Standard Edition, 21, 64–145. Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1895) ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in Standard Edition, 2, 1–335. Friedan, B. (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Irigaray, L. (1985a [1974]) Speculum of the Other Woman, Gill, G.C. (trans.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985b [1977]) This Sex Which Is Not One, Porter, C. (trans.) with Burke, C. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Klein, M. (1952) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, in Riviere, J. (ed.) Developments in Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press, 292–320. Klein, M. (1955) ‘On Identification’, in Klein, M., Heimann, P. and Money-Kyrle, R.E. (eds.) New Directions in Psycho-analysis, London: Tavistock, 309–345. Lacan, J. (1975 [1932]) De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa, Paris: Seuil.

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20 HATE C. Fred Alford

Hate is everywhere. The newspapers are filled with stories of hatred. Sometimes it seems to be the prime mover of politics.Yet neither political theory nor psychoanalysis has devoted a great deal of attention to the subject. When they do, hatred becomes an abstraction, as in hatred of ‘the other’, the topic of so much popular political theorizing in recent years. As an article in The Huffington Post put it, ‘[p]sychologically, racism stems from the primordial hatred of “the other” that is deeply embedded in our mind from birth’ (Wolson 2017). My concern is more concrete: hatred among intimates, particularly the way it models political violence. Including the widely reported murder of one roommate by another at Harvard and the hatred among nations, the examples are as concrete as possible. This does not mean that psychoanalytic theory is ignored. On the contrary, it is central. Nevertheless, it is through case studies that psychoanalytic theory is made real. The use of case studies has been a common practice since Freud. Yet not all violence stems from hatred. Sometimes violence is strictly instrumental. But violence among intimates is almost never instrumental. And through identification with one’s nation, citizens may participate in the pleasure of violence against a threatening and deserving enemy. Self-righteousness is the great ally of hatred. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how citizens might act to curb the violence of groups and nations. It’s hard, but not impossible, and psychoanalytically informed insight helps.

Theoretical Perspective How does the average person think about hate? Violence is generally divided into justified and unjustified. Hate is more difficult, probably because the category of justified hate makes less sense. But it’s not nonsense. Sometimes it seems that people want nothing more than justified objects of their hatred. Nazis fill the bill. Nevertheless, violence gets far more attention than hate. Violence is visible. Hate is invisible, a feeling not an act. This, of course, does not make hatred disappear.The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein believed everyone hates—thus the need for justified objects. Awareness of hatred, including one’s own, is the first step, and once again, psychoanalytic insight helps. Hate, and the violence that so often goes with it, is a failed form of attachment. When I refer to attachment, I refer not to attachment theory per se but to that realm of experience that D. 261

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W. Winnicott called transitional space, in which transitional objects reign. The object of hatred is a perverse transitional object, insufficiently abstract, insufficiently symbolized. The object of hatred is a reified transitional object, which is in effect no transitional object at all. Transitional space is first experienced when the child is held by its mother or another caretaker (Winnicott 1971). If the mother is in tune with her child, which means that she neither crushes the child with her anxiety nor drops the child with her distraction and mental absence, the child does not have to even think ‘I feel held’. Instead, the child is free to be, which means free to begin to explore his or her environment, free to begin to experience himself or herself as unique and yet connected to another.The capacity to think of oneself as both unique and yet connected serves the individual his or her whole life long, making it possible to live in a community without feeling like an alien or drone. Transitional objects make possible the move from mother’s arms to the larger world. Blankies and teddy bears are the first transitional objects. For adults, culture and religion serve a similar function. Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us . . . that we will never ask the question ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The decision is not to be formulated. (Winnicott 1971: 12) My argument does not rest on Winnicott alone, because his theory does not leave a large enough space for hatred. Melanie Klein’s (1975c) study of envy helps make sense of the desire to destroy who or what one loves or admires. Although Winnicott and Klein are incompatible overall, Klein helps explain the intensity of hatred, how hate makes a world. In the final analysis, hatred is a way of being. In that respect, hate makes implicit metaphysical (what is the ultimate reality?), epistemological (how do I know it?), and theological (do I belong here?) claims about the world.

Murder of a Roommate On the morning of May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior at Harvard, stabbed her roommate, Trang-Ho, 45 times while Trang-Ho lay sleeping in her bed in their Harvard dormitory. By the time police arrived, Sinedu had hanged herself in the bathroom. Unlike most killers, the Ethiopian student left a detailed diary of her emotional state in the years leading up to the killing. Unlike her roommate, Sinedu was not a popular student. She had difficulty finding a roommate and was elated when Trang-Ho agreed to share a suite with her. But they did not get along, in part because Trang-Ho’s boyfriend frequently slept over, and Trang-Ho was looking for another roommate. Sinedu found the humiliation intolerable. You know what I fear? I fear that shitty cringing feeling that accompanies me. . . . Should my rooming thing does [sic] not work out in a way that makes me hold my head high & speak of it proudly. (Thernstrom 1996)1 If she could have, Sinedu would have inflicted this terrible cringing feeling on her roommate. Only that, it seems, would have made her feel better, and that, she knew, was impossible: ‘Our situations would never reverse, for me to be the strong & her to be the weak. She’ll live on 262

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tucked in the warmth & support of her family while I cry alone in the cold’. It was a situation made worse, or at least more pathetic, by the way so many seemed to confuse them, regarding the roommates as virtually identical non-Western exotics. Even at the memorial service, Harvard’s minister could not seem to keep victim and executioner straight, referring to both as victims, asking the Lord to forgive them both. Accounts in the media made them sound like twins, foreign-born pre-med biology majors. Unable to become Trang-Ho, unable to trade places with her, Sinedu decided to kill herself while taking Trang-Ho with her. Only that would feed her hatred: ‘The bad way out I see is suicide & the good way out killing, savoring their fear and [then] suicide. But you know what annoys me the most, I do nothing’. Milan Kundera (1990: 24), in his novel Immortality, has one of his characters say that ‘hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary’. What Kundera’s character fails to understand is that this is just what is wanted: hatred allowing us to pretend that what we want is to be free but never giving us the chance. In hatred, we transform interpersonal bonds into bondage and relationships into prisons. For a little while, hate allowed Sinedu to come in out of the cold as she cocooned herself in the warmth of her hate. Sinedu’s strategy didn’t work for very long; it usually doesn’t. Hatred culminates in violence when the one who hates comes suddenly and late to reality, recognizing that the intensely desired fusion is impossible. By then, however, the one who hates has given up so much of herself or himself to the desire to be the other that there is no going back. The self of the hater has been depleted, and no return is possible, only the perverse satisfaction that the one who is hated will share annihilation, fusion in death. Hatred is a relationship with others, and it is a relationship with oneself, which is but another way of saying that in structuring our relationships with others, we are at the same time structuring our psyches, ourselves. That, I take it, is a noncontroversial assumption (at least when stated so generally), the foundation of object relations theory in psychoanalysis. Our relationships with others are not mirrored, or reflected, in psychic structure; the connection is subtler than that. But the principle remains, as intrapsychic relationships resonate with extrapsychic ones. Much violence among humans takes place outside the bonds of attachment, or so it seems. Sometimes modern warfare seems more about the conflict of economic and political systems, aided by machines, than humans killing humans. In fact, through the power of projective identification (that is, the power to identify with the victim), most violence has the quality of attachment. The way the mass media covers warfare, bringing scenes of death and destruction into our living rooms, only intensifies this identification. This case study concerns violence among intimates. It would be mistaken, however, to conclude that what is discussed here is a rare form of violence. In most respects, it is the norm, even if the intimacy is only in the mind, the product of fantasy, where all intimacy is created and preserved. We are almost always attached to our victims.

Psychoanalysis of Hate Freud (1915: 138) defined hatred as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. What Freud calls the death drive (Todestrieb), what has come to be called Thanatos, is not hatred, but something more and less: more destructive perhaps, but less intensely involved with the object, the source of unhappiness. Nevertheless, it may be useful to think of Thanatos, the death drive as Freud called it, as the origin of hatred, particularly the hatred that leads to violence. Thanatos is not merely the instinct of destruction. It is the more general impulse toward death, which Freud understands as having the quality of nirvana: total cessation of stimulation. Darkness, night, stillness, and death are related in their absence of tension and conflict: ‘All 263

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instincts tend toward the restoration of an earlier state of things’, says Freud (1920: 36–42), and the earliest state of things is a state of tensionless nonexistence: the inertia at rest of nonbeing. It is, by the way, unnecessary to see Thanatos as a death drive—that is, as an instinct. Thanatos may have more the quality of a raging protest against pain, a protest that makes no distinction between subject and object, cause and effect. As Herbert Marcuse (1962: 119–126) argued in Eros and Civilization, his philosophical reinterpretation of Freud,Thanatos is a protest against the agony of existence. The more painful existence, the more attractive the annihilation of death. The mark of Thanatos is that it hardly cares whose death: yours, mine, ours.To Thanatos, they are all the same. To see hatred as rooted in Thanatos, and Thanatos in pain, is not to minimize its destructiveness but only to point out that it is a destructiveness of a certain type, one that would end all tension with the other by obliterating the other along with the self, fusing in the nothingness of the All (Freud 1920: 32–37). Thanatos is the rage to obliteration: of self, of other, of tension with the other, of tension in the self. Among these, Thanatos makes no distinction. Thanatos is obliteration as fusion, coming close to what Germans calls Liebestod, Romeo and Juliet united for all eternity in death. This is not so far from what Sinedu wanted. Melanie Klein (1975a) is one of the few psychoanalysts to take Thanatos seriously, though in Klein’s account Thanatos loses its quest for nirvana, becoming tantamount to primal hatred. For Freud’s Eros contra Thanatos, Klein substitutes love contra hate: the eternal conflict that makes the world go around. Klein rarely, if ever, writes about hate except as it is at war with love. For Klein, hate is most frequently encountered as a paranoid fear of aggression, one’s own hatred projected into the world. The key problem of mental life for Klein (1975b) is to separate one’s love and hate sufficiently in early life to be able to integrate them later. Otherwise, we shall be eternally confused as to what is good and what is bad, and so likely to confuse love and hate. While envy is not the root of hatred for Klein, it is hatred’s most pernicious expression. The envious person hates the good because it is good, because it is separate, whole, and beyond the ability of the hateful one to possess, an emotion that the envious one cannot bear because it makes him or her feel so empty and cold. Envy hates the good because good alone is truly selfsufficient, needing and wanting nothing from the envious one (Klein 1975c). Envy is precisely what Sinedu expressed in her diary, destroying Trang-Ho because she was cocooned in a goodness Sinedu could never enter, let alone possess. While Klein’s account is enormously fruitful in placing envy and hatred at the center of psychic life, she pays less attention (particularly in her earlier works) to the relationships in which these passions are embodied, relationships that structure psyches, defend psyches, and give life meaning. Otto Weininger (1996: 12–21) is helpful in this regard, pointing out that we frequently turn the death instinct against ourselves, destroying our vitality, separateness, and creativity in order to maintain a relationship with a loved one, especially a parent. Most of us murder a part of ourselves, rather than another person. It is a supreme ethical difference, but perhaps not such a momentous psychological distinction. Seen from this perspective, hatred is self-chosen bondage to another, bondage serving to structure the psyche—as though slavery were the only alternative to psychic fragmentation. Hatred is self-structure on the cheap. In this regard, hatred is a more complex relationship than is often appreciated. Hatred is not the opposite of love, love’s eternal enemy. Hatred is the imitation of love, creating and preserving imitations of those love relationships on which psychic structure depends. Otto Kernberg (1995: 69) puts it this way: The underlying mechanism [of hatred], I am suggesting, is the establishment of an internalized object relationship under the control of structured rage, that is hatred. . . . Hatred consolidates the unconscious identification with victim and victimizer. 264

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Some may object to the term psychic structure, as though the term must reify an entity that does not exist. With the term structure, I mean nothing more, or less, than history, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives and thus give them continuity and purpose. The structure created by hatred is history, the history of our hatreds, narratives of our malevolent attachments that help hold self and world together. Like most stories, they acquire a pattern. Self-understanding means understanding the pattern of our stories.

Hatred and History The history of one’s hatreds constitutes the single most important, most comprehensible, and most stable sense of identity for many people and for more than one nation. Roger Lewin (1996: 298–299) writes about a man in his thirties who had as his defining passion in life a hatred of his father: His world was utterly patricentric. . . . Intense hatred against his father represented the conflict over how and whether to break free not only of his father but also of an identification with his mother that was so global, so extensive, so infiltrative as to amount to a virtual merger.The intensity of the hatred was in proportion to the internal feeling of helplessness and hopelessness over achieving a new status of increased autonomy and personal scope not only in the external world but also in the internal world. Consider the functions served by hatred in this one case. It energizes the self, keeping feelings of helplessness and hopelessness at bay while imprisoning the self in its hatred in a way that is experienced as preferable to the terror of freedom, preventing a complete fusion with mother through a partial fusion in hatred with father. Nor do these functions exhaust the meaning of hatred. Hatred is itself a comfort, a nursemaid: ‘As he nursed this monumental grudge against his father, it nursed him, too, reducing him to the status of a suckling without any greater range of initiative than an infant’ (Lewin 1996: 299). What a fascinating idea, ‘nursing one’s hatred’, harboring it, taking care of it, so that it will take care of you. It can even make life seem worth living, a mighty hatred as something worth existing for. It is the same thing that the authors of one of the relatively few psychoanalytic books devoted to the topic, Birth of Hatred, understand (Akhtar et al. 1995). Hatred has an emergent quality, taking on a life of its own, almost as if it were the child of one who hated, though perhaps the term nursing puts it better. We nurse our hatred until it takes on a life of its own. Although the connection of hatred appears vitalizing, in the end hatred corrodes the ego, wearing away the self. It corrodes because hatred is built on a lie. The lie of hatred is that it can connect us with others as love does without risking love’s vulnerability and heartache. Hatred is not the opposite of love. Hatred is the imitation of love, love in the realm of malevolence. ‘Evil be thou my Good’, says Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (4, 110), capturing something of this reversal: how evil, defined by Klein (1975c) as hatred of the good, itself becomes a kind of good. Hatred has many qualities analogous to love, establishing a connection between the hater and his or her world, giving meaning and purpose to his or her life, and so providing an experience of transport and transcendence, being lifted up by one’s hate to a higher and purer realm. In the end, however, hatred empties the self, unlike most expressions of love (romantic, parental), which enlarge the ego to incorporate the beloved. Hatred chains the individual to those whom he or she hates, so that even when the hated one dies, the fetters remain. It may seem as if hate is the opposite of love, but it’s not. Indifference is the opposite of love. A hated person rarely becomes a loved one, but a loved person may become the object of hate.This preserves the relationship, at 265

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least from the perspective of the one who hates, but the ego of the hateful one shrivels, bound to another but depleted by the relationship.

Hate as Metaphysics and Epistemology Hatred, it seems, is a way of being in the world. Like all ways of being, it contains within itself an implicit metaphysics and epistemology: a theory of ultimate reality (metaphysics) and a theory of how that ultimate reality may be known (epistemology). Klein argues that this ultimate reality is the mother’s body and that it may be known (at first) only through intrusion and destruction: The sadistic phantasies directed against the inside of [the mother’s] body constitute the first and basic relation to the outside world and to reality. Upon the degree of success with which the subject passes through this phase will depend the extent to which he can subsequently acquire an external world corresponding to reality. (Klein 1975b: 221) Winnicott (1989: 223–227) makes a related argument about the ruthless use of the other, in order to establish the independent existence of self and other. Hate itself is not bad. In the young child, it may serve as a developmental stage. As the hated one survives the child’s attacks, the child learns that the parent or caretaker is strong enough to rely on and so be left behind for longer and longer periods of time. Hate in adults is rarely productive. What is the relationship between sadism and hatred? One might argue that sadism is the vehicle of hatred, its medium, but that would not be giving hatred its due. Hatred is the persistence of sadism over time. Hatred is the structuralization of sadism, sadism with a history and a story. This is the attraction of hatred, why so many cling to it, like Lewin’s patient, who clung to his hatred of his father as if there were no tomorrow. Hatred links past and present with the future and so offers us tomorrow. It is a tomorrow exactly like today, but perhaps that is hatred’s attraction. Hatred makes hopelessness meaningful and thus bearable. While Klein states that the sadistic epistemological goal is to know the inside of the mother’s body, this is not the whole story, not even for Klein. Klein (1975a) also writes about another epistemological goal: to know the answer to the question that cannot be uttered. Am I part of something larger, or am I alone? In this sense, hatred is also an implicit theology. What if the secret isn’t a secret at all? What if the secret is simple? That is, we are all, each one of us, so terribly alone in the world, so alone that sometimes the only way we can make contact is through our hate and rage at being so alone—warmth by friction, as Lewin puts it. Could the root of hatred be the desire to eat rather than to see, to possess rather than to relate? We are so scared that if we let go, we shall have nothing. Because we fear we are so evil and destructive, we deserve nothing.

Hate and Bodies Hatred traps us in a world of bodies—not bodies that point beyond ourselves to the richness of the world, the world suffused with erotic energy and promise.This is how romantic love experiences bodies.This is how Plato writes about the bodies of lovers in The Symposium. Rather than non-body symbolizing body, the direction in which artistic creativity flows (think of a voluptuous vase), body comes to symbolize a world reduced to its bare essentials: pain and power. Symbolize is a misleading term, however, suggesting a degree of abstraction absent in intense hatred. Hannah Segal (1981: 137–138) calls it the symbolic equation, the symbol confused with 266

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the object to the point of becoming the object. Her example is of a man who could not play the violin because it meant masturbating in public. ‘In such a state of mind the ego is confused with the object through projective identification; it is the ego which creates the symbol; consequently, the symbol is also confused with the object’ (Spillius 1988: 153–154). Hatred does not, it seems, trap us inside bodies, the world with which Melanie Klein was most concerned. The surface of bodies, the body per se, is more important than Klein evidently imagined. In The Primitive Edge of Experience, Thomas Ogden (1989: 4–5) writes of the autisticcontiguous position, which precedes (or, rather, is the earliest version of) Klein’s paranoidschizoid position. In the autistic-contiguous position, experience is generated from the contact between two bodies, two skin surfaces that feel like one. Imagine, says Ogden, that while sitting in your chair, you felt neither your buttocks nor the chair, but simply ‘impression’. That would be something like autistic-contiguous experience, one that can hardly be symbolized, but only wordlessly experienced as either the joy of fusion or the dread of dissolution. It must be to autistic-contiguous experience that the Tao Te Ching refers to when it characterizes the ultimate reality as more than one less than two. Seen from this perspective, the epistemological problem is not that we lack confidence in our answers. The problem is the inability to formulate the questions. The question is so important because the question is itself the form within which we frame and contain our ineffable angst. The ability to formulate questions such as Why do I hurt so much? Why am I not you? or Why was I born if it was not forever? is already the answer. But only if we understand that the question is not so much a search for an answer as it is a search for a form and frame to express the anxiety in the first place and thus make it less dreadful by containing it. The question is the answer, a far better one than broken bodies. Since Plato’s Symposium, the West has known the connection between the pursuit of beautiful bodies and the pursuit of knowledge. Plato calls it the ladder of love—from the love of beautiful bodies to the love of beautiful Ideas (Symposium 211c). The term which Plato uses to characterizes intellectual intercourse with the Ideas, suneinai, may be used to refer to sexual intercourse as well (Symposium 211d6). Our considerations support this connection between bodies and ideas, but with a caveat. For Plato, the goal is to leave bodies behind, as though we could kick away the ladder once we climb it to the stars. Awareness that words are substitutes for bodies should not lead us to devalue bodies, only to revalue them. Without words, bodies must become the objects of all our hatred and all our desire, too great a burden for any body to bear. Or as Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1994: 235) puts it, ‘symbol formation derives from the need of the child to protect his object, or parts of the object, from the effects of his attacks’. We speak and write and do philosophy, among other activities in the symbolic realm, to protect those whom we love from our unutterable wrath. It is this that Sinedu could not do, treating Trang-Ho’s body as if it were the mirror image of her diary, an account of loss, abandonment, and rage.

Intimates, Bystanders, and Nations In what way does the hatred present in politics trap its participants? It traps them in relationships that are the imitation of community, as the bonds of common affection are transformed into bondage: to those who hate with us and to those we hate. Humans are creatures of attachment. Love is not universal, but attachment—connection with others—is. That humans are creatures of attachment is the foundation of object relations theory, but that really puts it too narrowly. It is an insight that begins with Aristotle’s definition of humanity as zoon politikon (Politics 1253a1–1253a3), a political animal, realizing himself or herself only in a community of others. 267

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Hatred too creates communities: the community of those who hate the same other and the community among those who hate each other. Or as the Eumenides in Aeschylus’s Oresteia put it when encouraging the Athenians to unite, ‘Let them hate with a single heart. Much wrong in the world thereby is healed’ (Eumenides: lines 986–987). Much wrong is healed, and as much or more will be done to others. The Oresteia was Klein’s (1975d) favorite Greek tragedy, the subject of a late essay of hers (Alford 1990: 130–134). Hatred as a political force has received far less attention than love and fear, its emotional complements. Love, we learn early, may be translated into patriotism and loyalty, fear into obedience and the corruption of national spirit in diverse ways, from militarism to appeasement. But what of hatred? What is needed is not a new subdiscipline, such as the political theory of hatred. What is needed is a better understanding of how hatred infiltrates and corrupts all the political virtues, such as patriotism, community, loyalty, tolerance, and citizenship. What is needed is an analysis of how each of these virtues has its dark side, its correlate rooted in hatred, as when loyalty to one’s own nation depends on hatred of others or when love itself depends on the shared hatred or exclusion of others: not just the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but also I love you because we both hate the same person (or nation). No need for another psychological explanation of the Holocaust. One should not reduce the Holocaust to the psychology of its perpetrators. Still, it would be naïve to ignore the hatred of those who perpetrated the Holocaust. Indeed, this was the (not always explicit) attraction of Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) surprise bestseller, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. For many years, structuralists, functionalists, and others have explained the Holocaust in terms of bureaucratic imperatives, the ‘banality of evil’, and so forth. No, says Goldhagen: Germans killed Jews because they wanted to, because it gave many Germans pleasure.What kind of pleasure? The pleasure of hatred and destruction. As Alice Miller puts it, I know a woman who never happened to have any contact with a Jew up to the time she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. She had been brought up very strictly. Her parents needed her to help out in the household after her siblings (two brothers and a sister) had left home . . . Much later she told me with what enthusiasm she had read about ‘the crimes of the Jews’ in Mein Kampf and what a sense of relief it had given her to find out that it was permissible to hate someone so unequivocally. She had never been allowed to envy her siblings openly for being able to pursue their careers . . . And now, quite unexpectedly, there was such a simple solution: it was all right to hate as much as she wanted; she still remained (and perhaps for this reason was) her parents’ good girl and a faithful daughter of the fatherland. (Miller 1983: 64) Pleasure in hatred and destruction is not the answer to the question, why genocide? There is no one answer, only answers. I emphasize the pleasure in hatred because it has received relatively little attention. Seeing the world in this dark way has its advantages: it tells us something we can do. Focusing on the generally secret and denied pleasures of hatred and destruction makes bystanders more important, especially early on. Bystander is an inclusive category: it includes native populations who are not targets, and it includes other nations. The attitude of bystanders can make a difference. It can confront those who have embarked on a policy of organized hatred and destruction with doubts. Silence, on the contrary, only encourages murder, as do weak words. Those who practice annihilation share a guilty secret, the pleasure of destruction. Likely they feel a satisfying closeness with those who share their guilty secret. Guilty secrets bind us more tightly than 268

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any passion but romantic love. In what is otherwise a severely academic work, even Goldhagen (1996: 339) allows himself to fantasize about this closeness, imagining the intimacy between the men and women who worked as concentration camp guards: What did they talk about when their heads rested quietly on their pillows, when they were smoking their cigarettes in those relaxing moments after their physical needs had been met? Did one relate to another . . . the rush of power that engulfed her when the righteous adrenaline of Jew-beating caused her body to pulse with energy? In these circumstances, the most important—and most difficult—thing is to break into this secret world. Bystanders offer the best hope, but they must act. Faced with overwhelming force, Danes, Italians, and Bulgarians all successfully resisted the Nazis, saving tens of thousands of Jews. Danes resisted openly, sending the vast majority of Danish Jews to safety in Sweden. Italians resisted tacitly, sabotaging orders, saying yes and doing no. The result was that less than 10 percent of Jews living in Italy (about 100,000) were deported to the death camps. Bulgarians fell somewhere in the middle, both in their strategy and its outcome. Of the Jews living in Bulgaria, 82 percent survived the war.Why was local resistance so effective in these cases? Not only did the Nazis have the power, but they had also shown over and over again that they were willing to divert resources from winning the war to killing Jews. The reason resistance worked, says Hannah Arendt (1964: 175), is that ‘local German officials became unsure of themselves’. They came to doubt their own cause; they became unreliable. The goal of the bystander is to increase doubt by speaking to the secret, the shared pleasure in hatred and destruction. One speaks to this secret in a simple and straightforward manner: We see what is going on. We know what is happening. We are taking names and keeping records. There will be consequences. It is neither necessary nor desirable that bystanders interpret the acts they observe as ones of sadism and pleasure in destruction. Mass murder is not a teachable moment. All that is necessary is that bystanders make their presence known while showing that they are paying attention and that they will remember. The practitioners of violence and destruction expect verbal resistance. Frequently they fantasize not only that the outside world does not care but that it secretly agrees, as Joseph Goebbels put it in his diary entry of 13 December 1942: ‘I believe that the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff ’ (Staub 1989: 158). Bystander reaction must be early and definitive. The more blood that has been shed, the more the perpetrators become committed to their deeds. This was the great failure in Argentina. The world had tolerated torture and murder in South America for years. Why shouldn’t the Argentine military believe that what they were doing, ‘disappearing’ 30,000 or more of its citizens during its ‘dirty war’ (1976–1984), was acceptable to the world? It was. The suggestions I have made regarding the role of bystanders is not new. It is by now part of literature on genocide and its prevention. What I hope I have done is explain something of the power of bystanders, which stems not just from the perpetrators’ fear of being observed, but from how observation has the potential to intervene in two guilty secrets: the pleasures of hatred and destruction and the pleasures of fraternity among the destroyers, a fraternity of those who ‘hate with a single heart’, as Aeschylus put it. 269

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Bystanders need not mention the guilty secret to be effective. They must observe publicly and openly, so that the perpetrators are not left alone to cultivate their shared pleasure, which may include the fantasy that the whole world secretly shares their delight in destruction. Perhaps sometimes it does.

Conclusion Once we begin to see hate in terms of its functions, we can see hate everywhere. That is not always a comfort. Consider the myriad functions of hate: Hate is a reliable source of attachment, a substitute for love. Hate is psychic structure on the cheap: hatred organizing the psyche over time via the narrative of one’s hatreds, thus preventing psychic fragmentation. Hate gives meaning to life. Nursing our hatred provides comfort and satisfaction. Acting out our hate is a source of pleasure, that of domination and control. Sadism is the pleasure of hatred. Hate is sadism stretched out over time. Hate envies the self-sufficiency of the good and thus is similar to Milton’s Satan: ‘Evil be thou my Good’. Hatred is a mode of being in the world. Hate binds us in a community with others who hate, a community whose intimacy is intensified by the guilty secret that all those who hate share: there is pleasure in destruction. If we can bear to know all this, then we shall have learned not only some terrible truths about the world but also something about hate that may from time to time allow us to mitigate its effects. Likely this knowledge will not lessen the sheer amount of hate in the world. Nevertheless, knowing the secret fraternity of those who hate may allow us to intervene in their guilty pleasures and so short-circuit their satisfaction. The price of this intervention, which will only infrequently be effective if history is any guide, is that of a terrible knowledge, one that connects the terrible things nations do with the terrible things that each one of us has at some point imagined doing to another person.That connection is hatred, which like Thanatos is a principle that connects the individual with world history. It is not a connection to be proud of.

Note 1. There are many accounts of the murder-suicide; I rely primarily on Thernstrom (1996).

References Classical sources given in the form that is usual in classical studies are not repeated here. Akhtar, S., Kramer, S. and Parens, H. (eds.) (1995) The Birth of Hatred: Developmental, Clinical and Technical Aspects of Intense Aggression, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Alford, C.F. (1990) ‘Melanie Klein and the Oresteia Complex’, Cultural Critique, 15, 167–190. Arendt, H. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York:Viking Press. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1994) ‘Brief Reflections on the Disappearance in Nazi Racial Theory of the Capacity to Create Symbols’, in Richard, A.K. and Richards, A. (eds.) The Spectrum of Psychoanalysis, Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Freud, S. (1915) ‘The Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14, 109–140, London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

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Hate Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 18, 3–66. Goldhagen, D. (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf. Kernberg, O. (1995) ‘Hatred as a Core Affect of Aggression’, in Akhtar, S., Kramer, S. and Parens, H. (eds.) The Birth of Hatred: Developmental, Clinical and Technical Aspects of Intense Aggression, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 53–82. Klein, M. (1975a) ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex’, in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, New York: The Free Press, 186–198. [Volume 1 of The Writings of Melanie Klein]. Klein, M. (1975b) ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’, in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945, New York: The Free Press, 219–232. Klein, M. (1975c) ‘Envy and Gratitude’, in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963, New York: The Free Press, 176–235. [Volume 3 of The Writings of Melanie Klein]. Klein, M. (1975d) ‘Some Reflections on “The Oresteia” ’, in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946– 1963, New York: The Free Press, 276–299. Kundera, M. (1990) Immortality, New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Lewin, R. (1996) Compassion, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Marcuse, H. (1962) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, New York:Vintage Books. Miller, A. (1983) For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Ogden, T. (1989) The Primitive Edge of Experience, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Segal, H. (1981) Melanie Klein, New York: Penguin Books. Spillius, E.B. (1988) ‘Introduction to “On Thinking” ’, in Spillius, E.B. (ed.) Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice, vol. 1, London: Routledge, 153–159. Staub, E. (1989) The Roots of Evil:The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thernstrom, M. (June 3, 1996) ‘Diary of a Murder’, The New Yorker, 62–71. Weininger, O. (1996) Being and Not Being: Clinical Applications of the Death Instinct, Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Winnicott, D.W. (1971) ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, in Playing and Reality, New York: Routledge, 1–25. Winnicott, D.W. (1989) Psycho-Analytic Explorations, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wolson, P. (2011) ‘America’s Racism: Hatred of “The Other” in the 2008 Presidential Election’, 25 May, www. huffingtonpost.com/peter-wolson/americas-racism-hatred-of_b_135366.html (accessed 1 October 2017).

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Advancing a psychoanalytic perspective on racism is necessarily to engage a long-standing tradition of critique. To be sure, the popular wisdom that opposes the use of psychoanalysis as a means of social critique has much of value to tell us. It benefits us to be reminded of the charge against psychoanalysis that it is ‘a discourse of modernist, bourgeois, European origins’ that has all too often ‘tended to describe psychology in terms of universal frameworks, . . . [ignoring] cultural and historical specificity’ (Bergner 1999: 222). By making universalizing assumptions of this sort, by perpetuating Western presumptions and remaining unaware of its own ideological complicities, psychoanalysis has been applied in ways that have legitimated versions of oppressive politics (Cohen 2002; Winnubst 2004). Take, for example, Frantz Fanon’s 1 (1986 [1952]) angry dismissal of Mannoni’s (1990 [1950]) Prospero and Caliban, a text that he thinks exemplifies how psychoanalysis perpetuates a series of racist ideological assumptions.2 Critiques of this sort—against psychoanalysis as a universalizing conduit of particular ideological values—have been well documented, particularly within postcolonial theory (Khanna 2003; Macey 2000) and critical studies of race, gender, and class (Abel 1990; McClintock 1995; Pajaczkowska and Young 1999; Rustin 1991), two areas where the call for a rehabilitated psychoanalytic social theory has also been at its strongest. This much we can concede: a decontextualized psychologization of racism has been a recurring tendency in many psychoanalytic approaches. We might accept the point that psychoanalytic conceptualizations reduce racism to the psychological problematic of intolerance, thereby depoliticizing—even implicitly naturalizing—such phenomena and eliding issues of inequality, exploitation, and injustice.3 Žižek helpfully outlines the charge of psychological reductionism (against psychoanalytic explanations of racism) as follows: ‘a way of explaining racism that ignores not only racism’s socioeconomic conditions but the sociosymbolic context of cultural values and identifications that generate racist reactions to the experience of ethnic otherness’ (Žižek 1998: 154). Importantly, however, to adopt a psychoanalytic perspective is not necessarily to relegate discussions of racism to the register of the (intra)subjective. Nor is it necessarily to condemn the study of racism to personality variables, to the mechanisms of a depth psychology. It need not, furthermore, approach racism only within a psychological vocabulary of deviancy or reduce racist phenomena to issues of individual psychopathology. Earlier psychoanalytic engagements with racism have, admittedly, been guilty of such reductions, viewing racism as the effect and expression 272

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of internal psychological dynamics or attempting the ‘pseudo-concrete’ application of specific clinical categories (paranoia, compulsive neurosis, hysteria, etc.) to racist phenomena (Žižek 1998). As a selection of some of the recent, more innovative psychoanalytic engagements with racism makes clear (George 2016; Seshadri-Crooks 2000; Žižek 1993), psychoanalytic critique need not succumb to the pitfalls of decontextualization and psychological reductionism. Such applications of psychoanalytic theory have remained attentive to the interpenetration of psychological and sociohistorical factors, focusing on the ‘complex and often painful transactions between the psychic and the social’, in the words of Pajaczkowska and Young (1999: 198).These are approaches that remain aware that the operations of the unconscious occur neither in a historical vacuum nor beyond the reach of the structural factors of oppression.

Racism Beyond Social Construction So despite the salience of the above critiques, there is nevertheless a crucial reason why we need to use psychoanalysis in accounting for racism. As a series of authors have recently concluded, we cannot explain prejudice and bigotry merely as sets of representational content, as exclusively effects of asymmetrical social structure, or as outcomes of conscious beliefs and political effects (Seshadri-Crooks 2000; Žižek 1998). Racism’s irrational forms, for Lane, ‘elude explanation by sole reference to either conscious precepts or social history’ (Lane 1998: 2). Similarly concerned with the limits of constructionism and historicism, Shepherdson questions whether issues of ‘race’ can be adequately grasped as only a matter of ‘discursive effect or . . . purely through symbolic formation’ (Shepherdson 1998: 44).The full significance of the concept of ‘race’, he argues, remains irreducible to the analysis of historical and discursive context; to understand racism, we need an awareness of the psychical and libidinal tenacity of ‘race’. Winnubst asserts that psychoanalysis provides the tools with which to answer ‘what social constructionist approaches assume but never adequately account for’, namely the fact of ‘how race attaches to individual bodies and psyche . . . while simultaneously operating through a trans-social logic’ (Winnubst 2004: 43). Psychoanalysis, she proclaims, provides opportunities to articulate how race is historically and socially constructed and yet, nevertheless, individually embodied and experienced. Clarke similarly expresses reservations about the recent preponderance of sociological/discursive analyses of racism, many of which fail to address ‘the affective component of hatred . . . the sheer rapidity, the explosive, almost eruptive quality of ethnic hatred . . . the visceral and embodied nature of racism’ (Clarke 2003: 2–3). As Foster insists, psychoanalysis has been more successful than sociological and social psychological attempts ‘at explaining the symbolic and emotional intensity, the apparent “madness” and the deep resistance to change which are all so characteristic of racism’ (Foster 1991: 2).The psychoanalytic theorization of racism, we might say, remains an unfinished project. What approach within contemporary psychoanalysis might therefore best enable us to theorize racism as at once discursive and sociohistorically constructed and yet visceral and embodied affect? The argument developed here is that a Lacanian perspective that emphasizes racism’s links to jouissance—to the intensities of the obscene libidinal modes of enjoyment (Miller 1994; Žižek 1993, 1997, 2005)—best enables us to think of racism as both a sociohistorical formation and a potent affective form.

Hatred of the Other’s Enjoyment So, what is it, from a Lacanian perspective that most directly fuels racism? Žižek (2016) offers a ready response: the fact of different modes of jouissance/enjoyment and, more directly yet, the 273

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perception that my enjoyment has been stolen by the other. Žižek is here clearly influenced by the account developed by Jacques-Alain Miller: Racism . . . is precisely a question of the relation to an Other as such, conceived in its difference. . . . [R]acism calls into play a hatred that is directed . . . toward what grounds the Other’s alterity . . .[their] jouissance. . . . It is not simply a matter of an . . . aggressivity that . . . is directed at fellow beings. Racism is founded on what one imagines about the Other’s jouissance; it is hatred of the particular way, of the Other’s own way, of experiencing jouissance . . . what is really at stake is that he takes his jouissance in a way different from ours . . . the Other’s proximity exacerbates racism: as soon as there is closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance. (Miller 1994: 79–80) Lacan’s original formulation of these ideas—in a filmed interview in 1973, subsequently published as Television (1990)—was considerably more elliptical. Asked by Jacques-Alain Miller why he was predicting a resurgence of racism in the era of multiculturalism, Lacan responded, With our jouissance going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies—unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving this Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of his as underdeveloped. (Lacan 1990: 32) Lacan continues, underlining ‘the precariousness of our own mode of enjoyment’ which, he claims, today necessarily ‘takes its bearings from the ideal of . . . plus-de-jouir’—that is, from the excess of enjoying/end of enjoying associated with the Other (Lacan 1990: 32). Slavoj Žižek takes up these ideas in a more accessible way in a recent (2016) text on European fears of immigrants: What, then, is the factor that renders different cultures . . . incompatible, what is the obstacle that prevents their . . . harmoniously indifferent co-existence? The psychoanalytic answer is [that] . . . different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other. . . . [In inter-cultural contact] the subject projects . . . its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: in jealousy, the subject creates or imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what we can call political jealousy: from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. (Žižek 2016: 75) What Miller and Žižek both make clear is that forms of excess stimulation (the ‘negative pleasure’ of jouissance) underlie and propel symbolic and political constructions of otherness. Such different cultural modes of enjoyment are, moreover, fundamentally discordant. Furthermore, the difficulty that we have in realizing ‘full’ enjoyment—something that is impossible in Lacanian theory for ‘castrated’ speaking beings—is dealt with by imagining, fixating upon, the supposedly unimpaired and inevitably disturbing enjoyment possessed by cultural others. 274

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These theoretical postulates perhaps require an illustrative example. Journalist Johann Hari (2015) has argued – particularly in his recent (2016) Chasing the Scream – that the so-called war on drugs was motivated not so much by the need to uphold law and order, still less by any concern with the lives and welfare of addicts, but rather by a far less morally defensible agenda: The argument we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction. . . . We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons that this war was launched. . . . But they were not. . . . The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched the war—was that blacks, Mexicans and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, menacing white people. (Hari 2015) The agenda here seems to have been driven by anger that such minority groups were ‘forgetting their place’, by fury at the fact that such groups were indulging in alien and potentially contaminating forms of enjoyment. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, so Hari tells us, detested jazz. Jazz was to him a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. . . . The lives of jazzmen, he said, ‘reek of filth’. (Hari 2015) Jazz music, to Anslinger, was inseparable from the evils of alcohol and drug abuse, and his vendetta against narcotics soon became focused on the jazz world. Hari’s research suggests therefore that Anslinger was profoundly troubled by such illicit modes of enjoyment (of drugs and jazz music) and that the war on drugs was motivated largely by such a hatred of enjoyment. This example highlights at least one clear strength of the Lacanian conceptualization of racism offered by Miller and Žižek. Cultural otherness is not merely discursively constructed but is experienced, ascertained within the register of the senses and at the level of affect, sensuality, and fantasy. Within this Lacanian account, otherness comes to be marked by disturbing sensualities that not only ‘prove’ difference but enforce and amplify it at an immediate and visceral level of comprehension. As Žižek (2005) stresses, it is ‘their’ music, ‘their’ food, ‘their’ patterns of physical enjoyment that offend us. The dimension of physical, bodily, and affective experience is thus foregrounded in a way that contrasts with standard social psychological accounts that portray racism as the result of attitudes, cognitive functioning, social representations and/or stereotypes, and so on. There are nonetheless a series of evident problems with the descriptions offered by Miller and Žižek. From a sociologist’s or historian’s perspective, the (psychological) reductionism in the two foregoing extracts can only appear staggering.The complex sociological, economic, and sociohistorical variables underlying distinctive historical forms of racism are, so it seems, brushed aside in favor of a generalizing psychoanalytic formula. Racism equals a response to the perception that the (perversely enjoying) Other has stolen our enjoyment. The depoliticization—the implicit psychologization and naturalization—inherent in such a move is surprising inasmuch it is something that Žižek (as we have seen) has strongly critiqued. What must be added to this account if it is to effectively surmount such shortcomings, shortcomings which echo longstanding historical criticisms of psychoanalytic conceptualizations of racism? 275

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Excess, Transgression . . . and Law What then is jouissance? Jouissance is a type of painful arousal poised on the verge of the traumatic— an ‘enjoyment’ that stretches the subject beyond the bounds of the pleasurable. Always composite, never an unalloyed pleasure, jouissance always veers off into excess, be it by virtue of the thrills of transgression or simply by means of its indulgence in what is potentially traumatic, linked to pain. Such ‘negative pleasures’ are the result of gratification pursued beyond the pleasure principle. A further illustration proves helpful here. In Shane Meadows’s (2007) film This is England, there is a scene in which a group of young skinheads attend a rally of the neofascist British National Party. At the crescendo of a particularly hate-filled speech, they become impassioned, inflamed; they start angrily gesticulating, shouting their support for the orator, building to a climax of political fervor. There is something almost sexual in their reaction, in how they ‘get off ’ on their hateful anger, an orgasmic quality to the intensity of their reaction that the concept of jouissance perfectly captures. Two important qualifications should be noted here. Jouissance is not—as is sometimes assumed—unconscious, certainly not so in the Lacanian sense of ‘the unconscious . . . structured like a language’ (Lacan 2006: 737). Jouissance, that is to say, is not rendered via the primary process of dreamwork operations of disguise highlighted by Freud (1900) in The Interpretation of Dreams (condensation, displacement, symbolism, and dramatization), which Lacan understands as rhetorical functions, functions of language. Although not at the foreground of consciousness, and typically unacknowledged by the ego, such libidinal intensities are very much present in the aroused bodily state of the subject. Enjoyment should not, however, be seen merely as an order of affect. We can turn here to Lacan, who stresses that ‘jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need, but as the satisfaction of a drive’ (Lacan 1992: 209). So, whereas need remains within the parameters of biological/‘instinctual’ requirements, the drive exceeds such parameters; inasmuch as it is highly variable, it can never be satisfied; it is enjoyed beyond the parameters of health or pleasure and does not aim at an object but circles forever around it. Thus, any drive impulse—be it ‘blind’ physiological sensation or a more overly ‘goal-directed’ activity—can serve as the basis of jouissance. As Miller puts it, ‘an automatic jouissance is attained by means of the drive’s normal course’ (Miller 2000: 24). Moreover—and Miller is again instructive here—to understand the concept of jouissance in Lacan is to understand ‘that it concerns at the same time libido and death drive, libido and aggression, not as two antagonistic forces external to one another, but as a knot’ (Miller 1992: 25–26). This calls to mind Freud’s observation that ‘even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction’ (Freud 1924: 426). Jouissance thus entails an ‘erotic of transgression’: overstepping a boundary, the fact that something illicit is involved, increases the subject’s enjoyment enormously. This is axiomatic for Lacan: the making of laws produces the very conditions of possibility for enjoyment. The illicit gratifications of racism are thus hugely increased in an era when racism is explicitly prohibited. A scene in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap nicely dramatizes the relationship between racism and the liberal anti-racist attitude that so often accompanies it: She was usually courteous to taxi drivers. They were invariably immigrant men, and she told herself that in treating them with respect and dignity she was separating herself from the immense sea of indifferent racist[s]. . . . But she felt neither courtesy nor respect at this moment. Fuck him, she thought sourly, ignorant fundamentalist Muslim pig. She received an illicit thrill from the jolt of hatred. (Tsiolkas 2008: 62) 276

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An attitude condemning racism is thus in fact perfectly compatible with the enjoyment of racism. The two are dynamically interrelated and mutually reinforcing, and this stands to psychoanalytic reason: the more a subject deplores and rejects racist thinking, the more perverse the enjoyment at succumbing to such thoughts. One is reminded of the logic of the superego: the more one adopts a stringent moral position, the more severely one’s superego punishes oneself for failing to adhere to it. This underscores how jouissance positions subjects: in a necessarily conflicted way, between contrary vectors of subjective (conscious, ego-based) meanings and ideals and the perverse fulfillments of jouissance. The foregoing provides a methodological guideline for where we might locate jouissance within a social or discursive field: on the underside of a set of symbolic ideals (ego ideals in psychoanalytic terms). Enjoyment feeds on the symbolic laws and ideals that define a society. So, as opposed to characterizations that suggest that jouissance is wholly beyond the ambit of the symbolic, we should stress that enjoyment is not ‘extra-discursive’ in any absolute sense. While, granted, it is an instance of the Lacanian ‘real’ in that it can never be fully domesticated by or encapsulated in language, it remains always in an intimate relation with—indeed, is parasitic on— the broader remit of symbolic laws and norms. Racist enjoyment, then, far from being reductively individual, ‘intrapsychic’, or ‘merely psychological’, is always in this sense minimally symbolic and thus also social and political. Forms of enjoyment, then, most certainly ideological forms, are always societal—always ‘discursive’—in that they overstep the bounds that define what is acceptable in a given discourse or social sphere. This, as Freud (1905) knew, is the reason that rude or offensive quips are overrepresented in the realm of jokes: their enjoyment factor relies precisely on their violation of implicit laws of decency or propriety. We can take this argument a step further: jouissance is necessarily related to law. From a Lacanian standpoint, the symbolic law, if it is to be effective, relies on the obscene gratifications afforded to those who are loyal to it. An excessive commitment to a given symbolic responsibility— the disciplinarian teacher who savors dishing out punishments, the overzealous judge who revels in delivering harsh sentences—provides both a viable channel and justifying rationale for jouissance. It is for this reason that the superego, for Lacan, must be seen as inducing jouissance. The superego enjoys by producing thrilling intensities (of hate, punishment, retribution) that accompany the enactment of symbolic law. The superego can thus be seen as what effectively binds law and enjoyment. It ensures that the symbolic ego ideals of a society—of the Other—are effectively implemented and taken up as passionate investments.This may seem counterintuitive. After all, jouissance, as we have seen, involves transgression as a condition of possibility: this is what constitutes the perverse dimension of enjoyment. However, although jouissance is transgressive, it is nevertheless an ally of the superego inasmuch as it entails the dimension of libidinal reward. The implementation of law invariably involves a type of ‘jouissance payment’. This provides us with a psychoanalytic perspective on the long-standing problematic of ‘voluntary servitude’. Why is it that we are so loyal to existing structures of power? Because we enjoy the libidinal payback that we feel is due us as a result of a broader sacrifice of jouissance. Jouissance is the ‘libidinal bribery’, as Žižek (1994) notes, the ‘wages of servitude’ offered to those who serve the law (even if in excessive ways). Consider the type of popular anti-racism that pervades much British tabloid journalism: by aligning ourselves with such a perspective, we are obliged to root out our own prejudices and to give up on the pleasures of ethnic hating, only to be rewarded by being allowed to hate racists. We may thus agree with Evans when he notes that all the jouissance that is sacrificed by the subject ‘collects in the superego whence it can return in the form of evil’ (Evans 1998: 12). 277

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The Theft of Enjoyment Jouissance exhibits an odd characteristic: it is never more real than when we have been dispossessed of it. Enjoyment, that is to say, comes most forcefully into being when it is about to be snatched away by others or—worse yet—when it is experienced as precisely the illegitimate and invariably malignant possession of the other. Put differently, jouissance seems most typically to exist in an already-stolen or precarious state; it takes only form on the horizon of castration. Jouissance, insists Macey, ‘is not . . . a category of pure subjectivity’; it implies ‘a dialectic of possession and enjoyment of and by the other’ (Macey 1988: 203). Given the neurotic subject’s presumption that they have surrendered a crucial quantity of enjoyment—an effect of socialization, of the symbolic overwriting the bodily experience of drives—they maintain a preexisting condition of resentment toward enjoying others. This helps us understand Vighi’s initially puzzling description: jouissance, he says, is a type of libidinal excess, most typically experienced as a lack. This experience of surplus, he insists, corresponds to a void: ‘every enjoyment is structured around a lack . . . a paradoxical lack of enjoyment’ (Vighi 2010: 25). Given then that attributions of enjoyment invariably spring from the experience of lack, then it is hardly surprising that this lack should be allocated a cause and, accordingly, a suspect who is responsible for this lack. The existence of jouissance, then, always already implies the role—or more accurately, the fantasy—of a culprit, someone who enjoys more than I or who is poised to steal the little enjoyment that I do possess. So, what even the most elementary experience of jouissance necessitates is a type of hating object relation, a conflicted mode of intersubjectivity, which preexists the racial/cultural/social other who will be assigned a position in this negative interpersonal dialectic. The construction of otherness is not, in other words, simply an effect of social construction. It involves also a libidinal component, a ready-made form of resentment, which is awaiting a blameworthy subject on whom the attribution of an excessive enjoyment can be pinned. This facet of jouissance as subjective lack preempted by the libidinal excess in the other is illustrated by Stavrakakis in the realm of the ‘national fantasy’. Stavrakakis argues that the various spectacles of jouissance by means of which we constitute our ‘national ways of enjoyment’— including international sporting encounters and various feasts, celebrations, and festivals of excess—are always in some way lacking: No matter how much we love our national ways of enjoyment, our national real, this real is never enough, it is already castrated, it is the real staged as staged in fantasy, in national myths and feasts. This is never enough; there is a surplus that is always missing. Within the national fantasy, this loss can be attributed to the existence of an alien culture or people: the enjoyment lacking from our national community is being denied to us because ‘they’ stole it. They are to blame for this theft of enjoyment. . . . What is not realised within such a schema is the fact . . . that we never had at our disposal the surplus enjoyment that we accuse the Other of stealing from us. (Stavrakakis 1999: 156) Social groups, in other words, are always ready to redirect their perceived lack (their ‘jouissance incapacity’) onto others. As we have seen, such an operation entails a ready-made object relation of resentment, one which necessarily predates the other, who retroactively 278

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becomes intensely blameworthy for this predicament. Such a psychical event can be characterized as an instance of extimacy: We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. . . . [T]his theft of enjoyment . . . is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other of my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment.There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own. (Miller, qtd. in Žižek 1993: 203) So the problem is not simply that there are different cultural and thereby incongruous modes of jouissance that lack a common measure. The Other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance, which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy. (Žižek 2016: 75) Here, though, we confront a problem anticipated in our foregoing overview of historical critiques of psychoanalysis. This description veers perilously close to a type of psychological reductionism. It seems, once more, to rely on the psychological notion of racism as caused by projection—a conceptualization that Žižek has proved highly critical of: the standard theory of ‘projection’, according to which the anti-Semite ‘projects’ on to the figure of the Jew the disavowed part of himself, is not sufficient: the figure of the ‘conceptual Jew’ cannot be reduced to the externalization of my (anti-Semite’s) ‘inner conflict’; on the contrary, it bears witness to (and tries to cope with) the fact that I am originally decentred, part of an opaque network whose meaning and logic elude my control. (Žižek 1997: 9) Racism, then, following Žižek’s Lacanian critique, is not most fundamentally about psychological rivalries or the need to displace onto another what one disavows about one’s self (it is worth noting that Žižek does not completely reject this thesis, noting merely that it is not sufficient).This is where the distinctively Lacanian—and sociopolitical—component of the argument comes to the fore. Racism is to be understood as a response to the ‘real’ of enjoyment—be it at an individual level (in respect of finding a way to relate to one’s own ‘stolen’ jouissance) or at the societal level (as an attempt to account for the multiple contingencies, conflicts, and deadlocks of a given society). We might say that this Lacanian account thus ventures a reconceptualization of the familiar psychodynamic notion of racism-as-projection. In this approach, structural impasse is translated into the other’s inherent blameworthiness. A form of subjective or societal incapacity is thus transformed into the certainty that some troubling substance of enjoyment has been illicitly possessed by the Other. This paradoxical quality of jouissance as simultaneously surplus and lack alerts us to the presence of the Lacanian object petit a, the object cause of desire. This unfathomable and disturbing element, which simultaneously seems to embody what is most objectionable about the other 279

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despite its ability to migrate across various features is an exemplary instance of the objet a. Why does this concept advance a Lacanian account of racism? For a simple reason: the objet a is precisely the subject’s lack (or incapacity) as materialized in an excessive and troubling feature of the other.This helps us explain how racism can be understood both as an instance of jouissance (the pleasures of hating) and as the perceived theft of enjoyment. Jouissance thus exists both at the experiential level of the libidinal intensities of a given community (i.e., how they enjoy, what they consider to be their most prized libidinal possession) and at a projected fantasmatic level (i.e., what is most offensive and malignant about the enjoymentthieving other). Upon reflection, it becomes apparent that these two aspects of enjoyment as possession—‘our’ libidinal treasures and what fundamentally embodies ‘their’ otherness—are two different inflections of the same fantasy.There is, on the one hand, the narcissistic jouissance of the appealing fantasy object that (we believe) makes us special and which encapsulates what is most precious about us (our traditional, cultural, and/or religious way of life). And then there is the vexing feature of the other—typically something superabundant and exaggerated—which positivizes my own lack in a threatening feature possessed by them. More succinctly put, ‘the objet petit a—the surplus enjoyment [of the other]—arises at the very place of [one’s own] castration’ (Žižek 1997: 58).

The Frame of (Ideological) Fantasy As I hope is by now clear, the modes of racist jouissance that we have been discussing cannot be dismissed as merely the idiosyncratic psychological quirks of individuals (which is not to say that there won’t be considerable latitude in how these modes of enjoyment are experienced by individuals).There is a certain regularity, a type of narrative cohesion, that pertains to racism as a particular arrangement of enjoyment. In a helpful paraphrasing of a series of Lacan’s comments in the early 1970s on jouissance and emerging trends of racism in multicultural societies, Evans stresses that jouissance is not merely a private affair but is structured in accordance with a social logic . . . this logic changes over time . . . jouissance is as much a problem for society as it is for the individual . . . in Lacanian terms, different cultural groups have different ways of collectively organizing their jouissance. (Evans 1998: 20–21) Jouissance, in its social modalities is, in other words, necessarily framed by (ideological) fantasy. To make this more apparent, we might refer here to the field of sexuality. We might say that sexual enjoyment is not formless, surely, but is organized precisely by fantasy (scenarios designating who or what is desirable, defining the parameters of enticing as opposed to traumatic forms of sexual interaction). Social modes of jouissance such as racism are no exception to this rule. They, likewise, are not formless; they occur within precise symbolic coordinates, and they assume narrative forms defined by a particular force of arrangement—precisely that of ideological fantasy. This is something that Fanon (1986 [1952]) implicitly understood in his analysis of colonial racism. Although he offers a compelling account of racism as formation of affect (in his model ‘negrophobia’), this was necessarily anchored and conditioned by an analysis of the recurring tropes and themes of a distinct sociohistorical, discursive context (that Fanon dubbed the European collective unconscious). Racist jouissance is thus never a merely spontaneous individual psychological reaction. Modes of enjoyment don’t float free of the symbolic domain. There is no such thing as a 280

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stand-alone (or purely affective) instance of racist jouissance. There are only distributions, patterns, arrangements of racist enjoyment that are structured by fantasy. Let’s return to an earlier qualification: while jouissance is not itself unconscious, the framework that attaches it to meaning need not itself be wholly conscious. Or, to approach the same issue from a different perspective, insofar as groups share fantasies about themselves (regarding what is most precious about themselves, what is the greatest ‘castrating’ threat), they have shared modes of jouissance. The arguments in this chapter provide us with a riposte to charges of the psychological reductionism leveled against the idea of racism as the theft of enjoyment. Enjoyment is, in effect, a sociological rather than a psychological notion inasmuch as it is always thoroughly embedded within a given sociohistorical context. As we have seen, moreover, in respect of the superego and law, jouissance emerges alongside—as the apparent underside of—social norms, moral values, and symbolic ideals. Enjoyment is thus an inherently societal or symbolic concept. Or, to put it in in ‘Lacanese’, enjoyment arises from the field of the signifier. Pointing out the connection to law and social ideals helps remind us that in Lacanian terms, the law needs jouissance to function. Bearing this in mind, we can assert that a racist social structure depends on the mobilization of jouissance. Racist enjoyment, then, like other social modes of jouissance, is not merely framed or conditioned by given social structures; jouissance in fact extends, enforces, and drives those very social structures.

Conclusion Historically, psychoanalytic theorizations of racism have exhibited both clear strengths and a series of recurring weaknesses (many of which involve depoliticizing or reducing racism to primarily psychological phenomena). The Lacanian notion of racism as enjoyment represents—as has been argued here—something of a different tack within this history of critique. It connects the passionate, embodied, ‘sensuous’, and libidinal facets of racism (experienced as enjoyment) with the sociohistorical, cultural, political, and ‘moral’ dimensions of racism (the symbolic aspect of fantasmatic structure, the superegoic quality of jouissance). In thinking of racism as jouissance (or as the theft of enjoyment) we have taken a series of decisive steps away from thinking of jouissance within the domain of the psychological.We have likewise moved beyond the presumption that psychoanalytic conceptualizations of racism are invariably psychologically reductionist. The connection between enjoyment, on the one hand, and law, social norms, and ideals, on the other, makes it clear that jouissance is never merely a function of personal identity. This connection to social norms and ideals—and, just as importantly, the superego facet of jouissance—brings to light an aspect of racism that is often overlooked. Racism is not merely—as much psychological thinking may have it—a set of affective responses, a collection of intersubjective relations, or a composite array of attitudes and prejudices. Racism pivots also on a series of ideological values that, crucially, involve a potent ‘moral’ dimension. This dimension is absent in popular impressions of racism as ignorance, unfounded hate, or intolerance. While racism may indeed be all of these things, it is also a type of indignation; it involves a sense of laws, societal (if racist) norms and ideals that have been violated. This is something we can perhaps credit Adorno et al. (1950) for intuiting in their theory of the authoritarian personality: racism often takes the form of a distorted and jouissance-infused (or superegoic) type of ‘morality’. True enough, the postulate of racism as theft of enjoyment does initially strike one as inattentive to socioeconomic and historical detail.There is, however, a justification for the formulaic nature of this hypothesis. Indeed, this is a hallmark of Lacan’s ‘formalism’: a given formula must 281

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remain void of positive content if it is to accommodate the empirical texture of diverse subjects or contexts. Differently put, as an applied concept, a variable of social analysis, enjoyment must remain empty of any essential contents precisely because of the malleability of what different (groups of) people ‘get off ’ on at different sociohistorical sites. The theft-of-enjoyment hypothesis should not therefore be seen as a total explanation; presumably, neither Miller nor Žižek would claim that this is the case. This hypothesis, by contrast, is—or should be—just that, hypothetical, an exploratory device that focuses our attentions on specific facets of the analytical field (perhaps most particularly those elements that have been disproportionately invested in enjoyment and made particularly volatile as a result). So, rather than a one-size-fits-all transhistorical formula, the racism as theft-of-enjoyment hypothesis should be used in a heuristic manner. At its most useful, it is a provisional analytical frame that challenges the analyst of racism to identify the various interconnected components of its libidinal economy (e.g., the superegoic functioning of social law, the narrative frame of ideological fantasy, instantiations of objet a, a group’s narcissistic self-attributions, the stolen libidinal object, the resented thief of jouissance, etc.). For some, of course, methodological problems persist: even such an empty and ostensibly ‘deessentialized’ formula presumes too much.The pattern of libidinal dynamics implied can be seen as a conceptual template that impedes the work of a more explorative analysis. Engelken-Jorge, for example, argues that Lacanian theories of enjoyment involve a recurring ‘psychologistic bias that impoverishes the sociological imagination’ (2010: 69). Let me add just this: if libidinal enjoyment is what most powerfully binds subjects to a given ideology (Glynos 2001; Stavrakakis 2007; Žižek 2002), then to neglect this variable in favor of apparently more detailed and contextualized historical or socioeconomic analyses is to make a serious error of omission.4 More bluntly put, to omit analytical attentions to jouissance is to risk not having understood at all the psychical and historical tenacity of racism.

Notes 1. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary. He was the author of Black Skin, White Masks (1986 [1952]), a psychoanalytically inflected study of the psychopathology of colonization, which has quite rightly attained a canonical status in the field of postcolonial studies. Having explored the psychoanalytic dimension of Fanon’s work elsewhere (Hook 2011), I have opted not to foreground his theorization of racism here. Nonetheless, Black Skin, White Masks proves a recurring reference in this chapter. Fanon’s importance to psychoanalytic accounts of racism—such as the one developed here—that retain a properly historical and sociopolitical sensibility is immense. Fanon’s use of psychoanalysis was original, strategic, and highly critical. While refashioning some psychoanalytic ideas—notions of neurosis, the collective unconscious, desire, and identification, for example—to the ends of his own inventive critique, he nonetheless advanced a powerful critique of the tendency of psychoanalytic clinicians (such as Octave Mannoni) to reduce matters of brute colonial oppression to an analysis of intrapsychic motivations. 2. Fanon opposes Mannoni’s view that only certain groups can be colonized, just as only certain others can become colonizers, according to the deep psychical processes characteristic to each (i.e., the inferiority complex that drives colonizers to colonize, and the dependency complex that makes certain colonized people accept colonial conditions). 3. See Dalal (2001) for a definitive critique of such trends in the history of psychoanalytic conceptualizations of racism; see also Cohen (2002) and Frosh (1989) for extensive overviews of the psychoanalytic theorizations of racism. 4. As Žižek stresses, if political change is to occur, it is never enough simply to insist on a change of language, to prohibit certain terms of representations (although this can admittedly be a crucial step in the right direction). What is more crucial to change is the modes of enjoyment anchoring and animating that ideology.

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References Abel, E. (1990) ‘Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis?’ in Hirsch, M. and Fox Keller, E. (eds.) Conflicts in Feminism, New York and London: Routledge. Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Nevitt Sasnform, R. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper & Brothers. Bergner, G. (1999) ‘Politics and Pathologies on the Subject of Race in Psychoanalysis’, in Alessandri, A. (ed.) Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, New York: Routledge. Clarke, S. (2003) Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism, New York: Palgrave. Cohen, P. (2002) ‘Psychoanalysis and Racism: Reading the Other Scene’, in Goldberg, D.T. and Solomos, J. (eds.) A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, Malden: Blackwell. Dalal, F. (2001) ‘Insides and Outsides: A Review of Psychoanalytic Renderings of Difference, Racism and Prejudice’, Psychoanalytic Studies, 3, 43–66. Engelken-Jorge, M. (2010) ‘The Anti-Immigrant Discourse in Tenerife: Assessing the Lacanian Theory of Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 15(1), 69–88. Evans, D. (1998) ‘From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance’, in Nobus, D. (ed.) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, New York: Other Press. Fanon, F. (1986 [1952]) Black Skin,White Masks, London: Pluto. Foster, D. (1991) ‘ “Race” and Racism in South African Psychology’, South African Journal of Psychology, 21, 203–210. Freud, S. (1900) ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volumes IV–VVI, London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1905) ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume VIII, London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1924) ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth. Frosh, S. (1989) Psychoanalysis and Psychology: Minding the Gap, London: Macmillan. George, S (2016) Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity, Waco: Baylor Press. Glynos, J. (2001) ‘The Grip of Ideology: A Lacanian Approach to the Theory of Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 6(2), 191–214. Hari, J. (2015) ‘The War on Billie Holiday’, The Guardian, http://inthesetimes.com/article/17536/ the_war_on_billie_holiday. Hari, J. (2016) Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, London: Bloomsbury. Hook, D. (2011) A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid, London and New York: Routledge. Khanna, R. (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press. Lacan, J. (1990) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, London and New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, Porter, D. (trans.), Miller, J. A. (ed.), New York & London: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006) Ecrits:The First Complete Edition in English, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lane, C. (1998) ‘The Psychoanalysis of Race: An Introduction’, in Lane, C. (ed.) The Psychoanalysis of Race, New York: Columbia University Press. Macey, D. (1988) Lacan in Contexts, London:Verso. Macey, D. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life, London: Granta. Mannoni, O. (1990/[1950]) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press. Meadows, S. (dir.) (2007) This is England. Warp Films/Film Four Productions. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London and New York: Routledge. Miller, J.A. (1992) ‘Ethics in Psychoanalysis’, Lacanian Ink, 5, 13–28. Miller, J.A. (1994) ‘Extimité’, in Bracher, M., Alcorn, M.W., Cortell, R.J. and Massardier-Kenney, F. (eds.) Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, New York: New York University Press. Miller, J.A. (2000) ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’, Lacanian Ink, 17, 10–47. Pajaczkowska, C. and Young, L. (1999) ‘Racism, Representation, Psychoanalysis’, in Donald, J. and Rattansi, A. (eds.) ‘Race’, Culture and Difference, London: Open University Press. Rustin, M. (1991) The Good Society and the Inner World, London:Verso.

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Derek Hook Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2000) Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, London and New York: Routledge. Shepherdson, C. (1998) ‘Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation’, in Lane, C. (ed.) The Psychoanalysis of Race, New York: Columbia University Press. Stavrakakis,Y. (1999) Lacan and the Political, London and New York: Routledge. Stavrakakis,Y. (2007) The Lacan Left, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tsiolkas, C. (2008) The Slap, London: Penguin. Vighi, F. (2010) On Žižek’s Dialectics, London and New York: Continuum. Winnubst, S (2004) ‘Is the Mirror Racist? Interrogating the Space of Whiteness’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 30(1), 25–50. Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London and New York: Verso. Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, London and New York: Routledge. Žižek, S. (1998) ‘Love Thy Neighbour? No,Thanks!’, in Lane, C. (ed.) The Psychoanalysis of Race, New York: Columbia University Press, 154–175. Žižek, S. (2002) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2005) Interrogating the Real, London: Continuum. Žižek, S. (2016) Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbour, London: Penguin.

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22 NATIONALISM Amanda Machin

Confounding expectations to the contrary, nationalism remains an obdurate force in the contemporary world, sculpting the social and political landscape with its various demands and its vicissitudes. It may have seemed that the salience of this most ambiguous of projects was discernibly paling, that it was inevitably hemorrhaging relevance and power, and that any assertion to the contrary was wholly risible. After all, are we not all cosmopolitans now? Have we not learned to see ourselves as global citizens, equipped with robust human rights, able to transcend rudimentary political borders and ostensibly archaic claims? And yet in defiance of such promises of global belonging, nationalism retains its grasp on our imaginations and our politics, continuing to promote the subsisting salience of a nation in particular or nations in general. Nationalism thus surely demands analysis. And yet it continues to defy adequate comprehension within dominant political theories. Some theorists may acknowledge the potency of nationalist identifications, but few adequately explain them. Benedict Anderson writes that ‘nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love’ (Anderson 1991: 141), and Anthony Smith acknowledges their ‘emotional and political power’ (Smith 1991: 18), but neither theorist can offer the conceptual tools for grasping the nature of this affective hold and its implications. The strength and resilience of the nation and the passions of nationalism are too often presupposed but underanalyzed; as a result, the nation is reified and mystified (Eller and Reed 1993: 192; Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006: 146; Finlayson 1998: 146). The result is often a convenient essentialism. On the one hand, nationalism is reduced to various contingent structural conditions, such as industrialization (Gellner 1983) preparations for war, fiscal reorganization, and capitalism (Giddens 1985). But none of these conditions is universally valid, and all ultimately fail to explain its persistence beyond these conditions (see Machin 2015: 17–23). The tendency is to focus on the contingency of nationalism as an ‘invented doctrine’ (Kedourie 1993; Hobsbawm 1990). But what accounts for the longevity of this ‘invention’? As Yannis Stavrakakis complains, ‘more emphasis is placed on the production of nationalism under specific historical conditions than on its reproduction, that is, on the remarkable continuity marking the identification with nations’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 189). On the other hand, where the robustness of emotional attachments to the nation is taken seriously, theorists tend to rely, problematically, on the notion of an essential human ‘need to belong’. Such explanations implant in the human individual an innate need for security, without explaining why this need exists (see Machin 2015: 13–17). Alan Finlayson remarks that ‘many 285

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theories of nationalism rest on an untheorised claim about the intrinsic needs and feelings of human beings’ (Finlayson 1998: 145). Whether or not this need is seen as a positive or negative characteristic, this sort of explanation is an easy way of sidestepping the details of the sociopolitical conditions of nationalism and the human subjects who are implicated and impacted by it and by whom it is reproduced and resisted. Such reductive essentialism avoids crucial questions: Is the apparent salience of national identity inevitable and universal? In what way can the premises of nationalism be negotiated, challenged, or manipulated? What precisely are the dangers of nationalism, and can they be eradicated? In short, if, as Sigmund Freud observes, ‘a group is clearly held together by a power of some kind’ (Freud 1964 [1921]: 92) then of what, exactly, does this power consist, and what are its consequences? This chapter contends that psychoanalysis provides a rich resource for comprehending nationalism and for tackling such questions. Psychoanalysts such as Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan have contributed important insights to the nature of collective identification. Lacan in particular offers a valuable framework for understanding the potency of nationalist identification. The starting point of the chapter is the psychoanalytical insight that identity is not simply a categorical membership but rather a matter of an ongoing process (Vanheule and Verhaeghe 2009). The process in which identity is constructed through interaction with social reality is inevitable, nonrational, and passionate. The construction of identity involves affective investment: ‘Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person’ (Freud 1964 [1921] 105). As Klein and Lacan point out, identification occurs not only with other people but also with objects and images. I suggest that nationalism offers the image of the nation as an ambiguous and contingent and yet powerful and enduring object of identification; a unified and harmonious imaginary community. This psychoanalytic picture can help us understand three aspects of nationalism: its apparent eternity, its force, and its ambivalence. The chapter proceeds by examining each of these aspects. It suggests, first, that nations appear ‘always already’ because of how identification anticipates the very objects it constructs; we identify with an image of ourselves that seems to preexist the identification that produces it. Second, it considers how nationalism is bound up with desire and enjoyment; psychoanalysis brings the force and ‘stickiness’ of national identification to the fore (Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006; Stavrakakis 2005). However, although national identification allows an individual to locate herself or himself as part of a collective, it always involves an ambiguous emotional tie that incorporates both love and aggression. In Freud’s words, ‘Identification . . . is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal’ (Freud 1964 [1921] 105). Third, then, the chapter warns that the imaginary nation that is ‘ours’ can never be exactly ‘us’ and is ultimately unsettling and alienating; ‘we’ are always threatened by dispossession. This means that nationalist fantasy is ever prone to construct a national scapegoat or traitor who is the target of hostility and blame. A psychoanalytical account thus draws our attention to the dark side of nationalism that is always liable to rupture the very unity it offers. And yet, at the same time, it should not be forgotten that the possibility of its disruption indicates the potential for its reinvention.

Nationalist Images and the Mechanism of Identification Nations are often taken for granted as a ‘natural’ feature of the world, something that has always been there, a category to which we unquestionably belong. But, of course, as many scholars point out, they are an entirely contingent invention of the modern world. French historian and 286

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philosopher Ernest Renan recognized this; in his famous lecture of 1882 ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ he noted that the ‘founding moment’ of the nation is a brutal enforcement, through invasions, conquests and massacres: ‘unity is always effected by means of brutality’ (Renan 1990: 11). Nation is the result of violent intervention in the lives, minds, and language of a population. Yet this founding moment goes unacknowledged: nationalist myth replaces its contingent and violent birth with a past that reaches innocently back to before the very origins of society. The founding moment of a nation is forgotten, becoming banal rather than brutal, becoming the mundane background to our everyday lives (Billig 1995). Benedict Anderson notices, however, that Renan’s description of how nations forget past wars and massacres actually presupposes that, at the same time, they also remember them (Anderson 1991: 199–201). Renan assumes that his audience is aware of the very events he says must be ‘forgotten’. The point is rather that we remember past violence not as clashes between different peoples but as moments in a unitary nation’s history. Members of a nation, Anderson explains, are regularly reminded of the ‘antique slaughters’ they are supposed to have ‘forgotten’—but they are reminded of them as ‘family history’. The founding moment of nation, then, is not really forgotten but rather remembered in a way decided in the present, by contemporary nationalist movements and other prominent narratives. It is not that the founding moment of nation determines the story of nation but rather the other way around. And yet if the origin of the nation does not lie in the past but in the present (if it is, in Renan’s words, a ‘daily plebiscite’), then what is the origin and the secret of its ongoing reproduction? Anderson famously describes nations as imagined communities, because as he points out, this community is not constituted by the close concrete bonds of a village or a tribe. Rather, certain structural developments in modernity precipitated the emergence of a form of consciousness encouraging individuals to identify themselves as part of a national collective: ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1991: 6). The invention of the printing press and its production of the newspaper as a one-day bestseller meant that readers could imagine the existence of others who were engaging with the same text at the same time and participating in an ‘extraordinary mass ceremony’ (Anderson 1991: 35). Combined with the emergence of ‘print languages’, this helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of a national consciousness. But structural changes do not take us far in understanding the emotional bonds of nationalist identification. Psychoanalysis, I suggest, can extend this depiction of a shift in consciousness, by probing the unconscious and libidinal investment in this imagined community. Freud describes the process of identification as the formation of a libidinal bond. He explains that the libido invests itself in objects that will provide satisfaction (Freud 2005 [1915]: 17). ‘If an object is a source of pleasurable sensation there arises a motor impulse to bring it closer and incorporate it into the ego’ (Freud 2005 [1915]: 28). Identification is a particular form of libidinal bond: ‘Identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object . . . in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object tie, as it were by means of the introjection of the object into the ego’ (Freud 1964 [1921] 107–108). For Klein, too, it is the investment of libidinal energy (cathexis) in objects (or rather the primal object, the mother’s breast or the bottle) that forms the core of the ego and is fundamentally important for the individual’s future life (Klein 1975 [1957]: 176). If the infant successfully cathects the breast, ‘this can restore the lost prenatal unity with the mother, and the feeling of security that goes with it’ (Klein 1975 [1957]: 179). For Klein, as for Lacan, identification and the emergence of the ego can be understood in connection to ‘the universal longing for the pre-natal state’ (Klein 1975 [1957]: 179). Identification, as it is understood by psychoanalysis, is 287

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thus not a conscious choice of a rational individual but a result of the nonrational desires and emotions of a subject constituted by, and enmeshed within, the unconscious. In his discussion of identification, Lacan posits the existence of the mirror stage, a period occurring early in life as the infant starts to see their own image reflected and comes to identify with it. It is when the infant becomes aware of their body as a ‘unity’ or ‘gestalt’ that the ego is formed: ‘the Ideal-I . . . situates the agency of the ego . . . we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification . . . the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’ (Lacan 2001 [1966]: 2). The infant is total and unified in only an external image. Their perception of themselves in the mirror, ‘leads to a joyful but mistaken perception of bodily unity as the site of a unified self ’ (Frosh 1987: 133). The object of identification is an illusionary unity; prenatal unity cannot be restored. Identification is thus both a pleasurable and an alienating experience, because the child can never be the whole and complete ‘gestalt’ that the image appears to be: ‘this Gestalt . . . symbolises the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination’ (Lacan 2001 [1966]: 3). The unified image can never eradicate the infant’s real awkwardness and lack of coordination. The mirror stage doesn’t come to an end after childhood; the individual continues unceasingly to look for the missing unity. Imaginary identifications are repeated throughout life. As Malcolm Bowie explains, ‘the moment of self identification represents a permanent tendency of the individual: the tendency which leads him throughout life to seek and foster the imaginary wholeness of an “ideal ego” ’ (Bowie 1979: 122). Identifications occurs not just with the unified gestalt of the body in the mirror but also with other images that purport to offer us the unity and completeness that we are missing. Nationalism can be understood to offer such an imaginary unity. Antony Easthope argues that the nation can be seen as an image reflected by culture, an image in which we see ourselves as we wish to be, an image that offers us the wholeness and permanence that we are missing (Easthope 1999: 15). The image of the nation seems to be already there, waiting in our social reality, mirrored back at us in our language and culture and history, yet we find ourselves there only because we want to: ‘in such an alluring plenitude, the unified mirror of national identity, subjects want to find themselves reflected, identifying themselves in it and so with each other’ (Easthope 1999: 46). This, then, is the imaginary community of the nation and its strange, ‘always already’ chronology. The nation seems to exist before identification, but of course the ‘we’ of nationalism is imagined. The nationalist ‘we’ is brought into being only through our identification with what it offers us. Jane Gallop scrutinizes the problematic temporality of the mirror stage, explaining that the mirror stage consists of both a retroactive construction and an anticipation of the self. Separately, these disturbances of temporality could be grasped, but the entanglement makes the lines of cause and effect impossible to sort out: The specific difficulty in thinking the temporality of the mirror stage is its intrication of anticipation and retroaction . . . the self is constituted through anticipation of what it will become, and then this anticipatory model is used for gauging what was before. (Gallop 1985: 81) The mirror stage ‘is a turning point in the chronology of a self, but it is also the origin, the moment of constitution of that self ’ (Gallop 1985: 78). The mirror image is a ‘totalizing ideal’ that orients the self. So it seems as if what precedes the mirror stage is an un-totalized, fragmented corps morcele. However, what seems to be prior exists only after: ‘what appears to precede the mirror stage is simply a projection or a reflection. There is nothing on the 288

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other side of the mirror’ (Gallop 1985: 78). Gallop emphasizes that this corps morcele is itself a construction of the mirror. This twisted logic fits exactly what is occurring in the remembered forgetting and forgotten remembering of nationalism. For we might think that before national identification, the nation is composed as a corps morcele—a fragmented non-totalized collectivity that comes to see itself as unified. But to see the nation as preceded by a fragmented nation in waiting is to read the nation back into history—as if it had always been there, in the fabric of reality, between the lines of history. Yet a nation is not created at a point in the past; it is created continuously over and over again at the present moment, in multiple everyday situations, both routine and remarkable. The mirror that might be thought to reflect the objective past is always already tinted with the nation’s image. The nation is there because it is expected and desired; retroactivity is intermingled with anticipation because those who look into the mirror are identifying with something they already desire. Stavrakakis describes the imaginary unity of the image in the mirror as the product of ‘captivation’: ‘a power relation between the infant and its image’ (Stavrakakis 1999: 18). The question that arises, however, is why it is that nations are particularly captivating. What further insights might a psychoanalytic account reveal about nationalism? As will be considered in the next section, nationalist discourses are particularly able to provoke and sustain desire and enjoyment.

Nationalist Desire Identification, we have seen, can be understood to be partially the work of the libido, an energy or drive or desire, emerging from the interaction between the psychic and the physical dimensions of the human subject (Freud 2005 [1915]: 14–16). Desire is inevitably obstructed by reality. The pursuit of pleasure is frequently frustrated. As Klein explains, not only do desires go unfulfilled but this frustration may also contribute to the healthy development of the individual (Klein 1975 [1957]: 186). Whereas for Klein, enjoyment allows this frustration and its concomitant ‘destructive impulses’ to be mitigated (Klein 1975 [1957]: 187), for Lacan, enjoyment and desire are more paradoxical. He strikingly describes how the frustration and futility of the desire for identification is precisely what sustains it. For Lacan, identification emerges as part of the search of the subject who constantly desires to fill the lack on which she or he is constructed. To understand this, it is important to grasp what is arguably the most crucial point of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the essential existence of constitutive lack. It is not that there is a preexistent human agent who is missing something from their original wholeness; rather, it is this lack that is needed for the subject to come into existence. Lack is constitutive: ‘rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes absence emerge—just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence’ (Lacan 1998 [1973]: 26). Lack is the only thing essential of the ‘I’: ‘the element lost in the process of becoming a human-being is being itself, the pure being, the real, the thing without a name, leaving us with a basic lack as a condition for our becoming’ (Verhaeghe 1998: 176). It is because of the existence of this lack that the individual desires its fulfillment, and it is the very impossibility of its closure that sustains desire. Thus, desire, for Lacan, leads us in futile yet irresistible spirals of identification. It is a commonplace notion that we often only want something because we can’t have it. Yet the crux of Lacanian desire is not that when the object of desire is obtained it will no longer be desired but rather that it can never be obtained. After all, what is desired by the subject is prenatal unity: ‘the insistent attempt of the drive to reinstall an original situation stresses the fact that this original state is forever lost. Every drive pulsates around an original loss and thus around an irreversible 289

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lack’ (Verhaeghe 1998: 166). However much our demands are satisfied, desire is beyond satisfaction. We can never reach the object of our desire, just as we can never see the back of our head in the mirror: ‘it is quite clear that Achilles can only pass the tortoise—he cannot catch up with it. He only catches up with it at infinity’ (Lacan 1999 [1975]: 8). We are fated, then, to continue to seek an impossible unity. Various social discourses and political projects promise to provide us with this unity, with ‘what is missing’, but nationalism seems particularly potent. Nationalism provides the promise of fulfillment, offering an image of unity in the nation. However, as Stavrakakis suggests, it may also fuel desire by providing a certain intense and obscene enjoyment, an enjoyment that works in various paradoxical ways. The term jouissance is used to consider Lacan’s particular handling of enjoyment. Dylan Evans explains that in Lacan’s early work, the term seemed to mean pleasure or orgasm, but later, it became clear that it was more than a simple synonym for pleasure and was also linked to pain: not pleasure in pain itself (which would be masochism) but pleasure of ‘the paradoxical satisfaction which is found in pursuing an eternally unsatisfied desire’ (Evans 1998: 5). Jouissance is what the subject searches for to regain fullness: it is what is desired, although it will never be found, since its lack is what sustains desire: ‘the prohibition of jouissance, is exactly what permits the emergence of desire’ (Stavrakakis 1999: 42). Jouissance is the only ‘substance’ in psychoanalysis: ‘la substance jouissante . . . the substance of the body, on the condition that it is defined as that which enjoys itself ’ (Lacan 1999 [1975]: 23). However, it is a substance that is missing. It has ‘ex-sistence’, which is opposed to ‘existence’. It is the ‘fluid’ that is drained away by the inescapable shift of the subject into social and symbolic reality. Furthermore, jouissance is not only the substance that we search for; it is also found in the search itself. There is an additional enjoyment simply in pursuing the missing enjoyment. In Lacan’s opaque prose, ‘the signifier is the cause of jouissance . . . the signifier is what brings jouissance to a halt’ (Lacan 1999 [1975]: 24). Jouissance is both enjoyment and the surplus of enjoying; there is an enjoyment in pursuing desire, and yet the pursuit is for the enjoyment that has been lost. This is why we sometimes follow pleasure that has foreseeable fatal consequences, regardless of rational calculations; we don’t always obey the logic of pain avoidance: ‘Jouissance is what serves no purpose’ (Lacan 1999 [1975]: 3). There is no ‘rational’ calculation behind it. As creatures conditioned by unconscious desires and paradoxical enjoyment, we are prone to nonrational provocations and practices. By using the concept of jouissance, Stavrakakis suggests that we can understand the attraction of various political movements: ‘it is the imaginary promise of recapturing our lost/impossible enjoyment which provides, above all, the fantasy support for many of our political projects and choices’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 196). This is why many national histories conjure up a golden past, a time when everything was good and prosperous (Stavrakakis 2007: 199). Certain national pasts become salient because they provide the key to the missing jouissance; they are fantasy scenarios of the existence of a time when we were sated, blissful, unantagonized; and they often gesture toward the possible dawn of a golden future too. ‘What is “national heritage” ’, writes Slavoj Žižek, ‘if not a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism’ (Žižek 1993: 232). At the same time, nationalism offers a sort of partial enjoyment: ‘A national war victory or the successes of the national football team are examples of such experiences of enjoyment at the national level’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 197). In a cowritten paper with Nikos Chrysoloras, Stavrakakis explains how the nationalist fantasies of ‘official’ discourse are sustained through the enjoyment found in unofficial national practices, customs, and rituals that provide a partial encounter with jouissance. Nationalism provides jouissance and also the promise of jouissance, through 290

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official public discourse and unofficial practices. ‘It is always such a dialectic between officially sanctioned ideals (imaginarized promises of jouissance) and largely unofficial practices (partial encounters with a jouissance of the body) that structures an effective national identification’ (Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006: 157). Celebrations and festivals, sports games/matches, and national anthems can ‘have those proverbial hairs standing on the nape of your neck’ (Garton Ash 2008). This is the stuff of the ‘nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment’ (Žižek 1993: 202). It may be, then, that strategies to construct a European identity are failing precisely because they seem to repress enjoyment.The top-down bureaucratic depictions of European identity are ‘dry, institutional, symbolic’ in contrast to anti-European and populist discourses that are ‘aggressive, visceral and funny’ (Stavrakakis 2005: 87). It should have come as no surprise, perhaps, that the obscene, shocking, funny claims of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 were more engaging and enjoyable than the dry, rational campaign to remain. Leave had jouissance; leave promised to return to the British public the nation as the desirable imaginary community.

Nationalist Fantasy The imaginary nation, as we have seen, offers a fantasmatic unity and mastery. Like all other identifications, however, it is ultimately alienating. Psychoanalysis allows us to grasp the ambiguities and fluctuations of nationalism; its oscillations between fierce love and violent hatred. For Freud, the ego’s relation to its objects are frequently ambivalent: love is often ‘accompanied by impulses of hate towards the same object’ (Freud 2005 [1915]: 30); ‘almost every intimate emotional relation . . . contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility’ (Freud 1964 [1921]: 101). This ambivalence is also discussed by Klein; the primal object offers the infant ‘everything he desires’, and actually because of this, it is simultaneously envied: ‘the very ease with which the milk comes . . . also gives rise to envy because this gift seems something so unattainable’ (Klein 1975 [1957]: 183). The object itself can become the object of persecutory anxiety (Klein 1975 [1957]: 234). For Klein, envy and destructive impulses can be mitigated by the splitting of the object into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which allows for their dispersal (Klein 1975 [1957]: 191). But for Freud and Lacan, this dispersal works by the formation of an ‘other’. Freud posits that when a group is formed, the formation of libidinal ties assuages the disappearance of hostility between members (Freud 1964 [1921]: 102). But both Freud and Lacan explain that hostility is then directed toward the other: ‘the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in my relation to the other, even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of aid’ (Lacan [1966] 2001: 7). Psychoanalysis, then, posits the ongoing potential of aggression directed toward ‘them’. Consider a group of spectators watching a football match. In this language game, ‘England’, say, is the team on the pitch. The spectators may identify with this ‘England’. And for a while, there is an intense pleasure in this identification and in the language game that gives ‘England’ a particular meaning, because there is an apparent unity here, a straightforward wholeness and a satisfying mastery. This unity is, of course, an illusion. The spectators are not the team on the pitch; the representation of ‘England’ is not ‘us’. The reflection ‘we’ are identifying with is therefore both us and not us; as it attracts the football fans, it simultaneously repels them. In his book on English soccer hooligans of the 1980s, Bill Buford observes how the football supporters he is writing about ‘wanted an England to defend . . . they wanted a nation to belong to and fight for’ (Buford 1992: 305). Narcissistic pleasure is inevitably interlaced with aggressive tension. This imaginary ‘England’ that appears full and complete and unlacking is alien; it is other at the very place we expected to find ourselves. Whatever the result, whether ‘England’ win or lose, the 291

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frustration of desire may result in the display of aggression. Buford describes the brandishing of flags and the ‘powerful glee’ and ‘explosive roar’ of the crowd witnessing the scoring of a goal (1992: 184). He describes the violence of the riot that followed in which he detects ‘an excitement that verged on being something greater, an emotion more transcendent—joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy. There was an intense energy about it’ (Buford 1992: 192). Easthope considers the ‘energy’ that holds together the apparently unified but precariously constructed nation and that may be released in the direction of any threat to that tricky unity (Easthope 1999: 219). Nationalism thus comes always with the potential of aggression: ‘like every human collectivity nation cannot insulate itself from the fear of coming to pieces and the desire to contain that threat by directing violence at another’ (Easthope 1999: 223). Nationalist antagonism, then, can always arise from an alienating identification with the ever precious, ever precarious, nation. As Zygmunt Bauman writes, the ‘we talk’ of the nation always and inevitably divides the world into friends and enemies: Identity is permanently under conditions of a besieged fortress: since its inception, it is to be forever threatened by trespassing of enemies, dilution, slackening of vigilance. Always made up, almost always contested, it tends to be fragile and unsure of itself. (Bauman 1992: 678–679) It is fantasy that tells us what to desire. It is fantasy that offers the possibility of attaining what we desire. And it is fantasy that provides the reasons for why we haven’t yet attained what we desire. This is why a ‘scapegoat’ often appears in nationalism as an ‘other’ who is blamed for the nation’s lack; the ‘blunder referee’ who is blamed for ‘stealing’ a goal from the national teams;1 the EU bureaucrats who are accused of ‘taking money’ from the National Health Service;2 and the Roma communities who are stigmatized as a ‘security issue’ (Nacu 2012). In Žižek’s words, ‘In the anti-Semitic ideological fantasy, social antagonism is explained away via the reference to the Jew as the secret agent who is stealing away social jouissance from us’ (Žižek 1998: 210).Thus, ‘scapegoating, the sinister type of difference as exclusion and demonization, always remains a real possibility inscribed at the core of any identity claim’ (Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006: 150). In scapegoating, an ‘other’ is accused of stealing ‘our’ lost enjoyment. Nationalist fantasies promise to not just cover over the alienation in the nation but also provide an explanation of what went wrong, why our nation is not full and unified—hence the construction of national enemies who can be blamed for ‘our’ lack and alienation. It is this that Renata Salecl detects in the nationalism of the former Yugoslavia; ‘the fantasy of the enemy: an alien which has insinuated itself into our society and constantly threatens us with habits, rituals . . . discourses—that are not of “our kind” ’ (Salecl 1994: 211). Whatever the other does, it nevertheless is threatening. ‘They’ are accused of being lazy and of stealing ‘our jobs’. If they retain ‘their’ habits, they are viewed as uncivilized, and if they adopt ‘our’ customs, they are accused of stealing ‘our thing’ (Salecl 1994: 211). Žižek notices the traumatic paradox that while the scapegoat is seen as stealing from ‘us’ of course, ‘we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us’ (Žižek 1993: 203). A further crucial point here is that it is not just that the nation is threatened by the Other but that our fantasies about the Other allow us to organize our own enjoyment: ‘the fascinating image of the Other gives a body to our innermost split, to what is “in us more than ourselves” and thus prevents us from achieving full identity with ourselves’ (Žižek 1993: 206). We perversely enjoy the fantasy of the threat of the Other. Stavrakakis reminds us that the scapegoat might be an other inside the nation: ‘the source of all evil for our community is someone out there—even if it is one of us, an internal enemy, the traitor’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 199). A traitor is one of us who is one of them, an other in the midst 292

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of the community. The term ‘traitor’ is a doublet of the term ‘tradition’; both words stem from the Latin ‘tradere’ meaning ‘deliver’ or ‘surrender’ or ‘hand over’. A traitor is ‘one who delivers’, while tradition involves the ‘handing down’ or ‘handing over’ from generation to generation. A traitor, then, delivers in the same way as tradition, but instead of handing over to his or her own nation, he or she delivers to the Other.The traitor surrenders to them what is ours, and what he or she surrenders is ‘the Thing’. Isn’t the name ‘traitor’ given to politicians when they are seen to be surrendering something that belongs to the nation to various ‘outsiders’: immigrants, asylum seekers, and the European Union? In 2002 the British foreign secretary Jack Straw was branded a ‘traitor’, accused of ‘handing over’ the disputed territory of Gibraltar to Spain (BBC 2002). Although Gibraltarians are British citizens and its governor is appointed by the British monarch, Gibraltar votes in its own representatives to its House of Assembly and is actually self-governing in all areas except defense and foreign policy. Moreover, what Straw was actually debating with Spain was joint sovereignty.Yet the issue was highly sensitive and passionately felt. What Straw was threatening to hand over was not any particular territory, people, or money. What he was surrendering was, it seems, something already missing, that lack that prevents the nation from being itself. Psychoanalysis helps us grasp the crucial insight that the alienation and aggression arising from identification can never be finally, completely, overcome; the dark side of nationalism is ever liable to show itself: in hostility to others, in the construction of scapegoats, and the taunting of ‘traitors’. It is only once this dark side is grasped that it might be possible for it to be sublimated. Moreover, it might be that the very impossibility that nurtures alienation also holds the potential for a more positive emergence. The very alienation and hostility that inevitably haunts the nation and frustrates its grasp may hold the possibility of a creative potency. Klein indicates that the frustration stemming from unfulfilled desires can actually fuel creative activity (Klein 1975 [1957]: 186). Does the inevitable lack of satisfaction with national identification drive the ongoing creative search for a more satisfying and suitable image? The nation is always deficient, alienating, not quite right, not quite us. Its claim is never complete, its identity is never fixed, its history is never fact, and its unity is never quite comforting enough. Any ethnic or territorial or linguistic nationalism is never quite right and ultimately fails—producing further violence that may be directed toward the other or, possibly, toward its own object. The failed unity of the imaginary community ensures discomfort at its presumptive closure, keeping it open for new possibilities. Nationalist fantasy can be restructured, its object can be substituted, the forgotten memories can be remembered, and the mirror in which the image appears may be tilted in a different direction.

Conclusion The nation has long inspired both love and hate; both generosity and violence; both boldness and fear. This constitutes the (in)famous Janus face of nationalism. One face of nationalism consists in is its ability to unify. We might understand this unification in terms of what Freud meant by Eros: the drive ‘to preserve the living substance and bring it together in ever larger units’ (Freud 2004 [1930]: 70). For Freud, civilization can be partly characterized by ‘a process in the service of Eros whose purpose is to gather together individuals, then families and finally tribes, peoples and nations in one great unit—humanity’ (Freud 2004 [1930]: 74). Freud believed that while human beings were ultimately repressed by civilization, cooperating was ultimately crucial for achieving whatever happiness was accessible to us. As the other face of nationalism, however, we can observe the aggressive drive, which can easily be channeled toward outsiders: ‘One should not belittle the advantage that is enjoyed 293

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by a fairly small cultural circle, which is that it allows the aggressive drive an outlet in the form of hostility to outsiders’ (Freud 2004 [1930]: 64). These two faces do not constitute an either/or choice. They are not separable; one face cannot be wiped off, to leave the other happily smiling, regurgitating its version of the story of nation and recounting its vision of its future.These two faces comprise the ambivalent and affective identification that psychoanalysis helps us to grasp. Using the resources of psychoanalysts, this chapter has suggested that we can understand the nation, first, as an imaginary community. Furthermore, the nation is an object of identification, of desire and of fantasy—an image of a unified community, an imagined unity, holding what ‘we’ are lacking, because ‘we’ can never be what is ultimately desired. The alienation resulting from this impossibility has dangerous and violent potential. But this alienation also holds the possibility of a more progressive and democratic result: the ongoing political contestation of any dominant construction of identity in the confused and confusing contemporary world.

Notes 1. The referee Jorge Larrionda was blamed disallowing a ‘ghost goal’ scored by England against a match with Germany in the 2010 World Cup despite a general consensus that the team was playing dismally. Intriguingly, the German chancellor was reported to have ‘apologized’ to the British Prime Minister. See www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1289962/World-Cup-2010-England-crushed-4-1-Germany.html 2. Notoriously, the Leave campaign in the British referendum of 2016 pledged that it would return the ‘£350m-a-week’ that it alleged was sent to the European Union from the British taxpayer, to the National Health Service instead. This pledge was later rescinded.

References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London:Verso. Bauman, Z. (1992) ‘Soil, Blood and Identity’, The Sociological Review, 40(4), 675–701. BBC (2002) ‘Straw Jeered in Gibraltar’, 3 May, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1965546.stm (accessed 1 July 2017). Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. Bowie, M. (1979) ‘Jacques Lacan’, in Sturrock, John (ed.) Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buford, B. (1992) Among the Thugs: Face to Face with English Football Violence, New York: Random House. Easthope, A. (1999) Englishness and National Culture, London: Routledge. Eller, J.D. and Reed, C.M. (1993) ‘The Poverty of Primordialism: The Demystification of Ethnic Attachments’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(2), 183–202. Evans, Dylan (1998) ‘From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience’, in Nobus, Dany (ed.) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Rebus. Finlayson, Alan (1998) ‘Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Theories of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 4(2), 145–162. Freud, S. (1964) [1921] ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of The Ego’, in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVIII, Strachey, James (trans.), London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (2004) [1930] Civilization and Its Discontents, London: Penguin. Freud, S. (2005) [1915] The Unconscious, London: Penguin. Frosh, S. (1987) The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Gallop, J. (1985) Reading Lacan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Garton Ash, T. (2008) ‘There Are Great National Anthems—Now We Need an International One’, The Guardian, 17 January, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/17/kosovo.serbia (accessed 5 July 2017). Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1985) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, London: Polity.

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Nationalism Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kedourie, E. (1993) Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, M. (1975) [1957] ‘Envy and Gratitude’, in The Writings of Melanie Klein Volume III 1946–1963, New York: Free Press. Lacan, J. (1998) [1973] The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, Sheridan, Alan (trans.), New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1999) [1975] Encore:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2001) [1966] Ecrits: A Selection, London: Routledge. Machin, A. (2015) Nations and Democracy: New Theoretical Perspectives, New York: Routledge. Nacu, A. (2012) ‘From Silent Marginality to Spotlight Scapegoating? A Brief Case Study of France’s Policy Towards the Roma’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(8), 1323–1328. Renan, E. (1990) ‘What Is a Nation?’, in Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.) Nation and Narration, Abingdon: Routledge. Salecl, R. (1994) ‘The Crisis of Identity and the Struggle for New Hegemony in the Former Yugoslavia’, in Laclau, Ernesto (ed.) The Making of Political Identities, London and New York:Verso. Smith, A.D. (1991) National Identity, London: Penguin. Stavrakakis,Y. (1999) Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge. Stavrakakis, Y. (2005) ‘Passions of Identification’, in Howarth, D. and Torfing, J. (eds.) Discourse Theory and European Politics, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stavrakakis,Y. and Chrysoloras, N. (2006) ‘(I Can’t Get No) Enjoyment: Lacanian Theory and the Analysis of Nationalism’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, (11), 144–163. Vanheule, S. and Verhaeghe, P. (2009) ‘Identity Through a Psychoanalytic Looking Glass’, Theory & Psychology, 19(3), 391–411. Verhaeghe, P. (1998) ‘The Lacanian Subject’, in Nobus, Dany (ed.) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Rebus. Žižek, S. (1993) Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (1998) ‘The Seven Veils of Fantasy’, in Nobus, Dany (ed.) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Rebus.

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23 CAPITALISM Samo Tomšič

When readers turn to Freud’s texts to search for a critique of capitalism, they most likely remain unsatisfied. Capitalism is rarely mentioned by name, and its damaging features are addressed in only a few explicit passages. Freud prefers the more neutral sounding term culture, which creates the impression that he targets merely the general symbolic mechanisms in place, whether subjective or social, beyond particular historical circumstances. In this respect, Freud remains in accordance with his thesis that the unconscious knows no time.This apparent absence of historical sense could eventually make us believe that the unconscious is immunized against the conditions specific for the establishment and functioning of capitalist cultures. Such an unconscious would be a container of transhistorical contents and would overlap with the Jungian collective subconsciousness.Yet a closer look reveals that in the foreground of neurotic complexes always stand concrete social phenomena and processes, specific to the advance of capitalism, in particular the degradation of the paternal function (the so-called crisis of authority), the increase of traumatisms through shattering events like war, economic crisis, and so on.

The Unconscious and the Economy One feature is particularly interesting in Freud’s work, namely his constant use of economic metaphors to explain the logic of unconscious mechanisms. Freud does not refer to some abstract economy but rather to its specifically capitalist character. Libido is described as mental currency; then there is the notion of libidinal investment, the mental apparatus contains a force that demands production of pleasure gain (Lustgewinn, pleasure profit);1 Freud also speaks of expending (Aufwand) and saving (Ersparnis) the mental energy (libido) of affect sums (Affektbeträge), which are bound (hence the idea of libidinal bonds and investments). All this and more grounds on the (epistemological) conviction that libido is quantifiable and can become an epistemic object, by means of which thought processes can be measured, calculated, and discursively (verbally) mobilized for the transformative aims of the cure. Libido is thus manipulated through the symbolic apparatus (language, value, discourse). Libidinal economy, or drive economy (Triebökonomie), consists of symbolic fictions, signifiers, and fantasies, which possess the power to cause pleasure and unpleasure in the speaking body. Or, these fictions are historically conditioned, and in this respect, the libidinal economy analyzed by Freud in a specific space and time can indeed be compared to the capitalist economy. The 296

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latter, too, cannot be thought of without fictions, notably not without what Marx called fictitious capital (finance, credit, interest), another fiction endowed with the power of causality. Then there is finally the notion of labor (Arbeit), without which Freud’s theory of the unconscious is unthinkable, to the extent that one could speak of the labor theory of the unconscious. All of this leads back to the problematic status of the unconscious: it is neither atemporal nor temporal, neither transcendent to all historical circumstances as some kind of unchangeable human condition nor entirely immanent to the given historical conditions as some kind of alienating instance invented and imposed by the capitalist mode of production. Lacan coined the perfect term for describing this immanent transcendence of the unconscious: extimity. The unconscious is a real consequence of the symbolic order (language, discourse, value) in the speaking body, but it entirely depends on the actually existing social links or modes of production. This means first and foremost that the laws and the logic of the unconscious change in accordance with the laws and the logic of such social links and modes of production. In the following, the psychoanalytic contribution to the critique of capitalism is examined from two angles. The first sections focus more extensively on the ongoing actuality of Freud’s confrontation with the damaging consequences of capitalism in the mental apparatus. In the second half, the chapter turns to Lacan’s structuralist take, examining the psychoanalytic theory of structural causality and highlights the link between enjoyment and exploitation. The discussion concludes by reaffirming Lacan’s emphasis on the inscription of psychoanalysis in the critical tradition, where the Freudian invention joins forces with Marx’s critique of political economy. It is not surprising that at the core of both frameworks, we encounter the link between the organization of labor and production, on the one hand, and the organization of thinking, on the other.

The Capitalist Unconscious Freud addresses the link between the capitalist economic mechanisms and the logical mechanisms of unconscious thought in his theory of dreamwork in Interpretation of Dreams and in his cultural etiology of neuroses in Civilization and Its Discontents, where the proliferation of traumatic neuroses is associated with two major features of capitalism: war and crisis. A double etiological perspective is at stake: while the cultural etiology focuses on the traumatic impact of socioeconomic events and technological innovations, thereby suggesting that a traumatic dimension pertains to the very foundations of culture, the problematic of unconscious labor contains a thesis, according to which neurosis is an illness resulting from what in German is called Verausgabung.The term means both expenditure in the economic sense and exhaustion in the psychological sense, and it can be directly linked to economic exploitation and precarization. From this viewpoint, the Freudian theory of the unconscious contains an important critical outlook: it proposes a sociogenesis of psychopathological complexes, which has been immediately adopted by critical thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and other representatives of the early Frankfurt School.2 To become aware of the centrality of labor in Freud’s theory of the unconscious one need only consult the founding work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, where by far the longest chapter is dedicated to dreamwork. Freud’s subsequent publications introduced other types of unconscious labor: joke work, work of mourning, even repression work. This intellectual labor is both impersonal and abstract, labor without qualities, given that it ‘does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all’ (Freud 2001 [1900]: 507); this feature makes it entirely distinct from consciousness, which always thinks, calculates, and judges—hence performs labor with qualities. Not without irony, the unconscious can be called ‘the ideal worker’ (Lacan 1990: 14) because, unlike the conscious worker, it never seems to go on strike, raise protest, or sabotage 297

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the production in any way at all. In addition, Freud’s detachment of work from a central laboring instance brings this process closest to Marx’s notion of abstract labor or labor power. The notion of unconscious labor strictly equates thought and labor (which is an unprecedented thesis on thinking). When Freud analyzes the various intellectual achievements in phenomena such as dreams, jokes, parapraxes, screen memories, and so on, he breaks them down into two basic operations—condensation and displacement—which he describes as skilled workers (Werkmeister, master workers) in mental life. Thought can thus be reduced to two formal ways of processing its content, manipulating its form and expression. Following Roman Jakobson, Lacan translated condensation and displacement into two basic linguistic operations: metaphor (for condensation) and metonymy (for displacement). In doing so, he supplemented Freud’s labor theory of the unconscious with what could be called the labor theory of language. Language is already a mode of production, hence a specific economic order. Lacan’s phrase that ‘there is no metalanguage’ underlines there being no neutrality in language, no possibility to assume a discursive meta-position in relation to the predominant social mode of production. If language is indeed a tool, then the Freudo-Lacanian perspective insists that this tool is never neutral. There is no language, which would not be marked by the social mode of production, and consequently, there is no thought, which would not operate within the forms of expression imposed by the social milieu.3 Because the main feature of unconscious labor resides in its atemporal character—it knows no day or night and continues to work behind the back of consciousness—there is a constant expenditure-consumption of mental energy in the mental apparatus. The subject is confronted with an insatiable demand for labor, and Freud provided two names for this demand: desire and drive.4 In this context, surprisingly or not, we find the only truly significant reference to capitalism in Freud’s work. To explain the status of unconscious desire, Freud recurs to the following economic analogy: A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without the capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious. (Freud 2001 [1900]: 560–561) Unconscious labor is absent from the economic comparison but discussed exhaustively in the rest of Freud’s text.This work consists above all in giving the intellectual content such form that will sustain the satisfaction of unconscious desire. Freud leaves no doubt that the main achievement of unconscious labor consists in form giving rather than in content manipulation. The content remains unchanged, but the form, in which it is expressed, comprises condensations and displacements of material and, on a higher level, visualization and secondary elaboration, which wraps up the product. The result of this process, a concrete dream, is comparable to a commodity, for which Marx reminds us that it needs to be analyzed in its double character: as use value, it satisfies a finite need; as exchange value, it satisfies the virtually infinite and insatiable demand of capital for surplus-value. Unconscious desire is also satisfied not through content and qualities but through form and quantity, and the same goes for the unconscious tendency that Freud introduced only five years after the quoted lines were written—namely, the drive, which preoccupied his work for the rest of his life. Freud’s thesis is that intellectual processes contain a metamorphosis similar to the one that marks the production of commodities. He starts with the relation between two quantifiable 298

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objects: the libidinal outlay invested in the unconscious production and unconscious labor. Again, labor and thought are at this level strictly equivalent: thought is labor but a labor that never ceases. Its endless, virtually infinite character is revealed only under the condition that the analytic gaze examines thought processes from the viewpoint of their quantitative character, as thought without qualities—or, to paraphrase Marx, as abstract thought. Insatiable demand is met with uninterrupted intellectual labor. Because this process uninterruptedly produces pleasure for the sake of pleasure, Freud’s sketch of unconscious labor process contains another equation: ‘thought is enjoyment’.5 The atemporality of labor and the interminability of enjoyment are one and the same—and the neurotic would be someone who is radically consumed, exhausted by this identity nexus of thought, labor, and enjoyment.

From Economic Logic to Economic Casualty The process analyzed by Freud thus consists of three steps: investment of outlay, unconscious labor, and consumption. This process is not finite but infinite, which means that the three steps form a vicious circle, in which the unconscious tendency never stops demanding and consuming and in which unconscious labor never ceases to produce. Incidentally, the best exemplification of such a virtually infinite process can be found in Marx’s discussion of two circulations: commodity exchange, C—M—C (commodity—money—commodity), and the properly capitalist circulation, M—C—M’ (money—commodity—increase of money).6 In the second formula, money is invested to keep the production of objects of value (commodities) running—hence, Marx’s characterization of the capitalist production with the terms ‘production for the sake of production’ and ‘overproduction’. Commodities are thrown on the market, not to meet the demands of consumers but to cause the demand (or more precisely to produce needs as Marx remarks in Grundrisse: production of commodities is the production of needs; see Marx 1993: 92) in the consumer and moreover to cause dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction, since only this dissatisfaction enables the uninterrupted extraction of profit. If the essence of capitalist production is production for the sake of production (virtually infinite or interminable production) then the psychoanalytic insight in the anchoring of libidinal economy in production of pleasure for the sake of pleasure (or what Lacan called jouissance, or enjoyment) addresses the subjective flipside of the capitalist social organization of production. As already mentioned, for Freud, pleasure is the equivalent of profit. Unconscious circulation could be written as P—L—P’ (pleasure—labor—gain in pleasure), wherein the outlay invested by the unconscious tendency in the processes of labor is nothing other than negative pleasure, ‘renunciation of enjoyment’ (Lacan 2006b: 17). Desire and drive repeatedly demand this renunciation— which is the hidden truth of the imperative of labor—in order to obtain more pleasure. In this precise aspect, desire and drive coincide with the role of a capitalist in the social mode of production. The capitalist also demands that every subject renounce enjoyment in order to satisfy the systemic demand for surplus-value—that is, the enjoyment of the system. The subjective and the social sphere contain a homologous process of alienation through metamorphosis. In Marx’s case, money or, better, capital assumes the objectified and concrete form of commodity (the left side: M—C), which in the next step transforms into surplusproduct or, better, from which the surplus-product is extracted by means of consumption (the right side: C—M’). In the mental apparatus, the unconscious tendency is equally externalized by means of transformation of unconscious currency (libido or pleasure) into unconscious labor (the left side: P—L), which is then consumed for the aim of extracting surplus-pleasure (the right side: L—P’). Again, when Freud speaks of the economic factor, his wording is not to be taken metaphorically. Social economy seems to hold the key to understanding libidinal economy. 299

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Freud’s labor theory of the unconscious already highlighted something that comes close to the problematic of social exploitation: the expenditure/exhaustion of the subject in an endless labor process/process of enjoyment. With his increased focus on the socioeconomic etiology of neurosis, Freud explicitly acknowledged two other factors that intensify the damage in the subject: war and crisis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we read, A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of ‘traumatic neurosis’.The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force. (Freud 2001 [1920]: 12) Freud wrote these lines in the aftermath of World War I, which triggered a proper epidemic of traumatic neuroses. He most clearly acknowledged a contingent and a structural factor, which contribute to the modern proliferation of neuroses: accidents associated with production and technology, which are contingent, and structural reality, which consists above all in the exploitation of life through devastating processes such as war, economic crisis, and what is today called precarization. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud even more explicitly draws the link between neurosis and capitalist culture, to the extent that one gets the impression that the difference between culture in abstracto and capitalism in concreto consists merely in the extent of production of ‘damaged life’ and the intensity of traumatism. Capitalism surely did not invent neurosis, but with its foundation of economic and social relations on the imperative of overproduction and on the nexus of perpetual war and crisis, traumatic neurosis progressively became a mass phenomenon and an inevitable, necessary side effect of the aggressive implementation of capitalist economic imperatives. An essential, necessary, and inevitable component of capitalism is thus mass production (overproduction) of damaged subjectivity, meaning that neurosis can be considered the privileged personification of the collateral damage that capitalism uninterruptedly causes at the level of thinking. In contrast to the capitalist ideology of happiness, Freud sees in the present state of culture organized traumatism and intensified neurotization of subjectivity. To the ideological fiction of subjectivity (homo oeconomicus, this presumably self-sufficient, egoistic and narcissistic individual), psychoanalysis opposes actually existing subjectivity, the traumatized neurotic as the real consequence and conflictual truth of capitalist ‘progress’. In Freud’s own wording, When we justly find fault with the present state of our culture for so inadequately fulfilling our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy, and for allowing the existence of so much suffering which could probably be avoided—when, with unsparing criticism, we try to uncover the roots of its imperfection, we are undoubtedly exercising a proper right and are not showing ourselves enemies of culture . . . perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of culture which will not yield to any attempt at reform. . . . The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to culture which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American culture. (Freud 2001 [1930]: 115–116, trans. modified) 300

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Freud leaves no doubt that there is no ideal cultural condition: cultural discontent is universal and unavoidable. Because of this sober view of cultural mechanisms, psychoanalysis enters the political space with the imperative of working through organized cultural resistance against uncovering the roots of cultural ‘imperfections’ and contribute to a transformative work on social structures. It is telling that Freud takes American culture, the crisis-driven American capitalism between the two World Wars, as the best entry in the critical examination of the relation between cultural mechanisms and the production of ‘damaged’ subjectivity. It is as if Freud were saying that capitalism intensifies everything that is wrong with culture as such, and in doing so, it offers a privileged entry point in the critical account of the link between socioeconomic mechanisms and production of traumatized subjectivity. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur could as well bear the title Das Unbehagen im Kapitalismus, notably if we consider that the text concludes with the conflict between Eros and Thanatos and perpetuates Freud’s reflections on death drive. The extreme capitalist indifference toward the subject’s existence and well-being, the anchoring of social relations in the invention of ever-new forms and strategies of exploitation behind the apparent global spreading of freedom and equality, as well as its anchoring in perpetual war and crisis, provide crucial insights into what Freud targets through the concept of death drive: the virtually infinite and insatiable demand for pleasure-profit, which is indifferent to the preservation or improvement of the subject’s existence. The death drive is life beyond the subject, so in this respect, capitalism seems to be for Freud the culture of the death drive par excellence.7

Lacan’s Return to Freud . . . Through Marx While Freud has been rather discreet in his critical confrontations with capitalism, Lacan was exactly the opposite. First, there is the explicitly political value of his return to Freud, which contains a critical reaction to the normalizing tendencies of many strands of post-Freudian psychoanalysis; then there is his theory of enjoyment, which systematized and in many ways simplified Freud’s speculative conception of pleasure, linking his examination of the connection between libidinal economies and social structures with Marx’s critique of political economy; and finally, there is his theory of discourses, which, in reaction to the political events of May 1968 but also as formalization of the epistemological and conceptual homologies between psychoanalysis and the Marxian critique of capitalism, provided a formal tool to think about the historical and structural metamorphoses, the crises and contradictions of capitalism.8 It is not far-fetched to claim that in the mid 1960s, Marx began to play an increasingly important role in Lacan’s return to Freud, to the extent that the reference to the critique of political economy took over the role previously played by structural linguistics. This reorientation of Lacan’s teaching is accompanied by his growing interest in the links between capitalism, traumatized subjectivity, and enjoyment. Despite occasional criticisms, Lacan leaves no doubt that it is necessary to traverse the field opened up by Marx in order to fully understand the political weight of psychoanalysis. Post-Freudian analysis, notably in the Anglo-American framework but also in continental Europe, interrupted all ties with the critical tradition and instead adjusted its clinics to the social demands of economic liberalism. Lacan’s return to Freud, starting with the conceptualization of the mirror stage and followed by the theory of a subject grounded on the structural analysis of language, can be read as a thorough rejection of the capitalist fictions of subjectivity: I won’t go back over the function of my ‘mirror stage’ here, the first strategic point I developed as an objection to the supposedly ‘autonomous ego’ in favor in psychoanalytic theory, whose academic restoration justified the mistaken proposal to strengthen 301

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the ego in a type of treatment diverted thereafter toward successful adaptation—a phenomenon of mental abdication tied to the aging of the psychoanalytic group in the Diaspora owing to the war, and the reduction of an eminent practice to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval attesting to its suitability to the ‘American way of life’. (Lacan 2006a: 684–685) There is no reconciliation between the ideological fictions of subjectivity (the strong ego, the egoistic homo oeconomicus) and the actual subjectivity that psychoanalysis derives from the experience of the unconscious. Lacan’s notions of the mirror stage and of the subject of the signifier oppose to these ideological fictions a conception of subjectivity elaborated against the background of the primacy of alienation through speech and labor. In this way, psychoanalysis assumes a more radical position than many Marxist currents, including Freudo-Marxism or the so-called Freudian Left, according to which the task of political organization inspired by Marx’s critique of capitalism and Freud’s critique of culture is to create the conditions in which human subjects, alienated through the capitalist social and psychological conditions, will again be dealienated and the capitalist ‘social relations between objects’ (Marx 1990: 165) replaced by authentic interhuman relations. Lacan’s theory of the subject rejected both the Freudo-Marxist humanist striving for dealienation and the capitalist fantasies of dealienated subjectivity. Post-Freudians adjusted their theory and practice in a way that sustains rather than confronts the conglomerate of fictions that the governing ideology circulating in society.Their theoretical and clinical work progressively became another major resistance against psychoanalysis.The risks of such development were not unknown to Freud, who expressed skepticism toward theoretical and clinical shortcuts9 and the conviction that psychoanalysis encounters one of the crucial epistemological, political, and clinical obstacles in the structural anchoring of resistance.The latter is internal and external, subjective and social, and it should be associated less with a psychological bearer than with the reproduction of the given structural order and the libidinal fixation of the drive. At this point, psychoanalysis addresses the analysand with its own imperative of work and provides the orientation that aims to bring about the change of the ego (Freud) or transformation of the subject (Lacan) that is the flipside of structural change. The two changes in question (subjective and social) are two inseparable faces of one and the same structural process. Lacan’s turn to Marx could surely be partly explained by the student and workers uprisings in France in the late 1960s, but it was also necessitated by the recognition of the common epistemo-political framework of psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy. Lacan addressed this framing in his claim that Marx’s analysis of surplus-value and Freud’s theorization of the link between unconscious labor and the production of pleasure (surplus-enjoyment) stand in mutual homology. Marx’s take on capitalism departs from the contradiction in the commodity form, which contaminates other spheres of capitalist reality and which, in the last instance, highlights the persistence of class antagonism within the social framework. Extending Lacan’s idea of homology, one can say that Freud’s notion of psychic conflict—the conflict between the demand of the drive and the subject’s Verausgabung, which eventually results in a demand for cure—stands in structural parallel with class conflict. Such parallelism is all the more justified if we recall that for Freud there are, strictly speaking, no private illnesses: social structures and cultural demands always contribute to the (dis)functioning of the mental apparatus. Lacan’s early thesis, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, still remained vague regarding the link between the unconscious and social structures (the structure of language being the most fundamental social structure, the condition of all other social structures); this thesis counteracts Freudian biologism and its focus on phylogenesis, but the thesis does not grasp the entire historical dynamic of the unconscious, insofar as it still allows one to understand 302

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language in abstracto and consequently risks sliding into ahistoricism. Lacan did not remain ignorant of this perspective, which is why his theory of discourses more firmly addresses the dependency of the unconscious on social links. The move from the structure of language in abstracto to the notion of discourse as synonymous to social link in concreto explains why Lacan eventually remarked that an important aim of psychoanalysis consists in searching for an ‘exit from the capitalist discourse’, adding that finding such exit ‘will not constitute a progress if it does not happen for all’ (Lacan 1990: 16, trans. modified). At this point, we might come across an evident limit to the homology between psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy. While the latter targets precisely an exit from capitalism for all, psychoanalysis remains restricted to the subject’s singularity. Exiting the capitalist discourse would here mean that the subjects are perhaps not entirely ‘cured’ from capitalism or immunized against the mental damage that it inevitably produces, but they are at least provided with a minimal orientation, which will allow them to work beyond the framework of analysis against the structural resistance of the capitalist mode of enjoyment in their lives. An important contribution of psychoanalysis in general and Lacan’s theory in particular to the critique of capitalism consists in its systematic examination of the relation between discourse and enjoyment: ‘The intrusion into the political can only be made by recognizing that the only discourse there is, and not just analytic discourse, is the discourse of jouissance, at least when one is hoping for the work of truth from it’ (Lacan 2007: 78). Lacan’s thesis on discourse is double: under discourse, one should understand social link qua libidinal link, which immediately gives the nowadays banal-sounding statement that power relations are libidinal relations or concretized as overdetermined modes of enjoyment. The psychoanalytic ‘intrusion into the political’ thus evolves around the nexus that could be called power-enjoyment: that every production of enjoyment involves labor was already the Freudian insight, something that Lacan alludes to with the work of truth; but this truth must be thought together with Marx’s critical insight that the production of surplus-value, this capitalist version of surplus-enjoyment within the socioeconomic framework, always comes together with exploitation. Hence, the nexus of labor, enjoyment, and exploitation (or to repeat again the German term Verausgabung, expenditure/exhaustion) as the main knot, in which Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist politics must intervene to resolve it in favor of the exploited, suffering subject.

The Theory of the Discourses as Critique of Capitalism Lacan eventually proposed his formulae of the four discourses, which show that there is a peculiar compatibility between the master’s discourse and the university discourse, on the one hand, and the hysteric discourse and the analytic discourse, on the other.10 In Seminar XVII, where the theory of discourses is thoroughly developed, Lacan provides a sophisticated and multilayered reading of his four formulae with regard to the history of capitalism. It would take up too much space to examine the four discourses in all their complexity, but what can be recalled here is that Lacan pays particular attention to the shift from the master’s discourse to the university discourse in terms of the historical development from feudalism to capitalism. The social implementation and globalization of capitalism clearly did not abolish or overcome the master’s discourse, understood as the discourse sustaining relations of domination and subjection.The placement of the four elements that constitute a discourse (S1, master-signifier; S2, knowledge; $, split subject; a, object) show that in the university discourse the master signifier assumes the position of truth, whereby Lacan remarks that capitalism managed to reduce the master to its essence, namely that s/he does not know what s/he wants. 303

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The capitalist master may not know what s/he wants but s/he certainly knows how to achieve it: ‘The wealthy have property. They buy, they buy everything, in short, well, they buy a lot. But I would like you to meditate on this fact, which is that they do not pay for it’ (Lacan 2007: 82). How can one constantly buy without paying the purchase? Precisely through debt, which brings us back to Freud’s insight on the mechanisms of unconscious investment of libidinal energy: the unconscious is indebted, in the sense that it is grounded on the renunciation of enjoyment, and this is why there is a constant demand for labor coming from the repressed unconscious tendency, since here, just as in the social context, lack is externalized and imposed onto the subject. The homology between debt and lack reflects in the social framework, insofar as debt, too, is externalized in political subjects, who literally owe themselves to the system in the form of exploitable labor power. It is no coincidence that in the formula of the university discourse (that Lacan repeatedly associates with capitalism), the subject occupies the position of the product. To refer to Lazzarato’s reading of financial capitalism (Lazzarato 2012), the university discourse stands for the fabrication of indebted subjectivity, which is brought into existence through the repetition of the act of buying/debt accumulation, under the particular conditions determined by the (national) debt and credit system.11 As already pointed out, the truth of the university discourse lies in the master’s discourse, which in this framework no longer stands for the premodern (feudal) relation of domination and subjection but for a specifically modern, capitalist mastery that is codified in the abstract act of economic exchange. If the university discourse gives the key to the creditor-debtor relation through the repetition of the act of buying without paying, then the discourse of the master provides the key to the hidden truth of the link between economic exchange (selling and buying) and the production of surplus-value (which in the master’s discourse assumes the position of the product). As Marx has shown, behind the apparent reign of ‘freedom, equality, property and Bentham’ (private interest), the capitalist reality is governed by exploitation, inequality, dispossession, and the insatiable drive for profit (see Marx’s Bereicherungstrieb). In contrast to these two discourses, which sustain the capitalist forms of domination and exploitation, the discourses of the hysteric and the analyst can be read as discursive structures, which articulate and mobilize the contradictions of capitalism for transformative aims. Lacan, for instance, does not shy away from identifying Marx and Lenin with the hysteric, suggesting that in the revolutionary discourse, the split subject assumes the position of agency, which ‘interpellates’ the master (capital) in order to extract knowledge of the contradictions that mark the sphere of production. For Marx, the proletarian was such a revolutionary subjectivity, from the structural position of which the critique of political economy could uncover the conflictual truth of capitalism, in opposition to the fictitious political-economic knowledge, anchored in the fetishization of the three central capitalist abstractions: commodity, money, and capital. In contrast to political economy, its critique fetishizes a different abstraction, abstract labor, or more specifically, labor power: a commodity, which assumes a symptomatic status in the universe of commodities (being the only commodity-producing commodity, and hence both identical and non-identical to all other commodities, inside and outside the ‘immense collection of commodities’ [Marx 1990: 125]). Marx thus writes not only from the position of the proletarian but also as proletarian. Another way of dealing with the social symptom is exemplified by Freud. For him, the neurotic personifies a subjectivity that is both integrated in and excluded from the libidinal and social economy and that, in its bodily or mental suffering, exemplifies the structural causality and the economic organization of affects in the speaking body.Traumatic neurosis embodies the discontent in capitalism and stands for the actual form of subjectivity produced by the capitalist condition. Further, just as Marx invented a critical method of interpreting the capitalist mode of 304

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production, oriented around the subjective demand for a just political order, in which systemic exploitation will no longer be the ultimate horizon of social relations, Freud invented a technique of the cure, which interferes with the libidinal anchoring of relations of exploitation, and invented another ‘conflictual science’ (Althusser 1993: 226), which confronts the multiplicity of structural and actual conflicts that constitute culture.When it comes to the critical confrontation with capitalism, the Freudo-Lacanian critique of libidinal economy provides the necessary supplement to the Marxian critique. It is by far no coincidence that during the ongoing economic, political, and environmental crisis, both endeavors made a triumphant return, since in critical times, the overproduction of traumatized subjectivity most evidently intensifies and the imperative of working through or working against the resistance of the system becomes all the more necessary in all registers of human reality.

Conclusion In the last years of his life, Freud called psychoanalysis an impossible profession. This impossibility is closely linked to what preoccupied him throughout his life: the problem of resistance against psychoanalysis, which is met both in individual analysands and in cultural frameworks. It would be wrong to restrict this resistance to its psychological appearance only. Instead, it stands for the most fundamental feature of culture. It is not resistance against something external, foreign, or menacing but rather resistance against something constitutive of culture as such, of the difference between culture and nature and of all the antagonisms immanent to culture. It is this constitutive resistance, this fundamental action of symbolic structure, that explains why Freud saw in the psychoanalytic work an impossible task—which does not mean that analysts should see in this impossibility an excuse for not following its imperative of working against resistance (this is what Freud called Durcharbeiten, working-through). Psychoanalysis introduces in the life of analysands and more broadly in the cultural framework a new antagonism, which short-circuits the integration of subjective libidinal economies or modes of enjoyment in the existing socioeconomic framework. This new antagonism explicitly involves the mobilization of the analysand’s mental activities—speech, thought, and enjoyment— for transformative work on social structures. Psychoanalytic technique always comes in combination with an effort in organizing labor and even with a politics of labor. This is where the Freudian method intersects with Marx’s critique.12 In Marx, the problematic of systemic resistance is addressed, for instance, in the guise of fetishism, and the labor of critique is underpinned by the same imperative of working through resistance as in Freud. Emancipatory politics stands for an immanent work on structure, which counteracts the organized resistance of the capitalist system and which could—so the bet goes—progressively lead to an overall transformation of the social mode of production, an immanent construction of an exit from capitalism. For Lacan, psychoanalysis cannot afford to ignore this task.

Notes 1. One could say that this force demands production of pleasure for the sake of pleasure, to paraphrase Marx’s description of capitalist production as ‘production for the sake of production’ (Marx 1990: 742). Freud names the tendency in question Trieb (drive), thereby using the same notion as Marx. For a recent discussion of the drive in Marx and Freud, see Johnston 2017 and Tomšič 2015: 117–130. 2. For an exhaustive account on the Freudian Left, see notably Dahmer 1982. In the Anglophone world, the topic was covered by Robinson 1990. 3. This absence of linguistic neutrality has been the central topic in Volosinov 1986. 4. Freud occasionally broke the drive down to the ‘amount of force or the measure of the demand for labour (Arbeitsanforderung) that it represents’ (Freud 2000: 220).

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Lacan 1999: 70, trans. modified. See Marx 1990: 247–257. On the issue of the ‘society of the death drive’, see McGowan 2013: 283–286. Although it would be wrong to claim that Lacan was a leftist, his theory can and should be appropriated for emancipatory purposes. It is no coincidence that the critical outlook of his teaching gave rise to an entire so-called Lacanian Left (Stavrakakis 2007). 9. Notably in his debate with his former student Otto Rank: ‘Rank’s argument was . . . a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post-war misery of Europe and the “prosperity” of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life. . . . The theory and practice of Rank’s experiment are now things of the past—no less than American “prosperity” itself ’ (Freud 2001 [1937]: 216–217). The lines were written shortly after the financial crisis, and one could legitimately argue that the presumably interminable character of analysis is anything but unrelated with the perpetual crisis that marks the social and subjective conditions under capitalism. 10. For the schemas of the four discourses and their structural order, see notably Lacan 2007: 31, and the entire second chapter. It should be added that the notion of discourse in Lacan stands for the symbolic structure, which sustains two apparently different registers: the individual speech and the social link. Discourse thus reflects Lacan’s thesis of structural homology between subjective structures and social structures. 11. This is where Marx’s reconstruction of the so-called primitive accumulation in the final chapters of Capital, Vol. 1, provides the necessary supplement for understanding some of Lacan’s critical remarks on capitalism. Marx detects in the invention of public credit and the corresponding constitution of the nation-state qua indebted state the main condition that boosted the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production. 12. We can recall that sustaining the productive tension between resistance and working-through marks two other professions that Freud characterized as impossible: governing and educating. In the end, the pair Marx and Freud or critique of political economy and psychoanalysis stands for a specific alliance of impossibilities.

References Althusser, L. (1993) Écrits sur la psychoanalyse, Paris: STOCK/IMEC. Dahmer, H. (1982) Libido und Gesellschaft: Studien über Freud und die Freudsche Linke, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Freud, S. (2000) Studienausgabe,Vol. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Freud, S. (2001 [1900]) ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. 5, London:Vintage Press. Freud, S. (2001 [1920]) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition,Vol. 18. Freud, S. (2001 [1930]) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition,Vol. 21. Freud, S. (2001 [1937]) ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, in The Standard Edition,Vol. 23. Johnston, A. (2017) ‘From Closed Need to Infinite Greed: Marx’s Drive Theory’, Continental Thought  & Theory, 1(4), 270–346. Lacan, J. (1990) Television: A Challenge for the Psychoanalytic Establishment, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1999) Seminar, Book XX, Encore, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2006a) Écrits, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2006b) Le Séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2007) Seminar, Book XVII,The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lazzarato, M. (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man, Cambridge and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marx, K. (1990) Capital,Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin Books. McGowan,T. (2013) Enjoying What We Don’t Have:The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Robinson, P. (1990) The Freudian Left, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stavrakakis,Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London:Verso. Volosinov,V.N. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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24 CHOICE AND CONSUMERISM Renata Salecl

Historically, the idea of freedom of choice has often been debated in the context of the demands for democratization of the political space. In the developed postindustrial world, however, choice also became a theme that is primarily linked to consumerism. When it appears that people have limited possibilities to have an impact on social and political developments and forces around them, ideology convinces them that they have all the power to create their private lives in the way they desire if only they make the right choice.1 A simple look at advertising on the streets shows that nowadays people are encouraged to choose their identity. One is constantly bombarded with slogans like, ‘It is your choice’, ‘Become what you want to be’, ‘You hold the key to happiness, it’s your choice to open the door’, or ‘Life. Book now’. These slogans give the impression that one is capable of achieving happiness and finding enjoyment in life by making the right choice. The individual is also perceived as some kind of self-creator.Yet in this highly individualized society that gives priority to the individual’s self-fulfillment over submission to group causes, people face anxiety-provoking dilemmas related to several questions: Who am I for myself? What shall I choose? How will the others regard me with regard to my choices? In particular, people appear to be anxious for two reasons: first, it seems that no one is in charge in society as such, and second, the freedom of choice actually does not give more power to consumers but rather to corporations, which are trying to sell their products. A person shopping around on the Internet for the best price of a product, for example, gives corporations a chance to collect valuable data about his or her desires and spending habits. What is then anxiety provoking for people is both that no one seems to be in control and that someone (the corporations) is, in fact, in charge in a hidden way. When people are struggling over their choices, they often search for an authority who might appease their anxiety. With the demise of traditional authorities, all kinds of new authorities (from couches to trendsetters in the social media) are becoming points of reference and identification, and one can even observe new therapists who specialize in anxieties related to both consumer and life choices. This chapter will look at the nature of the anxiety related to consumer choices as well as to the troubling remedies people are offered to appease it. It will also ask what the difference 307

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between choice and chance is and question how rational people’s choices actually are. In this line of argumentation, the importance of psychoanalysis will be central.

Anxiety, Choice, and the Big Other When people feel the anxiety that no one is ultimately supposed to be in charge within society at large or that someone (e.g., corporations) is already ‘choosing’ in advance what they supposedly need, they are prone to question the status of what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the big Other: a symbolic order that we are born into and which consists not only of institutions and culture but primarily of the language that shapes our social sphere (Lacan 1991). It is, of course, Lacanian common sense that the big Other does not exist, which means that the symbolic order we live in is not coherent but rather marked by lacks—that is, inconsistent. In addition to stating that the big Other does not exist, Lacan stressed the importance of people’s belief that it does. That is why Lacan ominously concluded that although the big Other does not exist, it nonetheless functions—that is, people’s belief in it is essential for their self-perception. A few years ago, US Life TV conducted a survey on people’s anxieties. Participants were asked to make a list of the five most important anxieties that hold them back from living their life to the fullest. One would have expected the list to include terrorists, viruses, natural catastrophes, and economic crisis, but instead, we learned that people are most anxious over the following things: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

There isn’t enough (money, love, etc.). They won’t like me anymore (i.e., fear of rejection). It is too good to last. I will be found out (i.e., others will see that I am just faking it). My life doesn’t matter (i.e., I don’t know how to create a legacy for myself).

To calm these fears, people were given advice from a self-help guru, which listed everything from the need to be more generous and less centered on their own wealth; to reveal one’s real self, even flaws; to tack ‘I deserve happiness’ above a desk or mirror; to create a folder of positive reinforcements with all the compliments one receives; to enrich bonds with friends and families; and others. Both the list of anxieties and the advice given to overcome them show that the primal concern for the subject is for his or her place in the world and in his or her interaction with others. As Lacan points out, it is the Other (both in the meaning of the symbolic order and of other people) that is ‘anxiety-genic’ for the subject, since it constantly forces him or her to question who they are and especially who they are for the Other. These questions became more complicated within neoliberal societies, when the subject became perceived as a self-inventor and as someone who appears freer from the constraints of other people than our predecessors have been. So, if on the one hand, the subject is still concerned about the question regarding the desire of the Other (i.e., how do others regard him or her and how is he or she regarded in society as a whole), on the other hand, the subject is under pressure to make a choice about his or her life independently of social constraints. This pressure, however, has a detrimental effect on many people. Psychoanalysts often encounter patients who come to analysis demanding to determine what they want out of their lives. It is no longer the case that a person is struggling with her or his parents who prevent her or him from doing something in life; nowadays, the person struggles with the burden of making herself or himself into a persona that she or he might find likable. Paradoxically, freedom of choice increases the feeling of anxiety and guilt that people are suffering from in today’s society. 308

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The act of choosing is so traumatic precisely because there is no big Other: making a choice is always a leap of faith where there are no guarantees. When we try to create self-binding mechanisms that will help us feel content with our choices and eventually help us to be less obsessed with choice, we are not doing anything but ‘choosing’ a big Other—that is, inventing a symbolic structure that we presuppose will alleviate our anxiety in front of the abyss of choice. The problem, however, is that the very existence of the big Other is always our ‘choice’: we create a fantasy of its consistency. In recent years, there has been growing debate about whether something changed in our perception of the big Other. Did the symbolic structure within late capitalism change? Or was the subject’s belief in the big Other altered already when traditional authorities, which were often perceived as the embodiment of the big Other (like state, church, nation, etc.), lost their power? French psychoanalyst Charles Melman (Melman 2005) sees the change in the subject’s perception of the big Other as being related to the overwhelming assumption that the world is rationally organized. This assumption is also behind the idea of rational choice. The domain of the big Other seems to be overflowing with information that is supposed to help people make choices in their lives, but this expansion of information paradoxically increases people’s dissatisfaction. If we take the example of new scientific developments, we can observe that they opened many questions, while there seem to be no authorities on which one can rely for answers, which is why we create various temporary, ad hoc structures (like committees). The latter are supposed to help us in dealing with the inconsistency of the big Other, but they, of course, always fail in providing the certainty we search for. French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour (Dufour 2008) presents his own pessimistic perspective on the demise of our symbolic structures. Dufour departs from Freud’s presupposition that each culture, in its own way, forms the subjects who then try to discern the always-specific footprints leading to their origin. For Dufour, this is why one paints the Other, sings it, gives it a form and a voice, stages it, and gives it representations. The Other supports for us what we cannot support—thus providing the ground which founds us. This is why our history is always a history of the Other. Dufour further points out that the subject is always the subject of the Other, which in the past has taken many forms of some kind of big Subject—including physis, god, king, the people, and so on. Throughout history, the distance between the subject and this big Subject was eventually reduced. With modernity, however, there emerged a plurality of big Subjects, which is linked to the decline of the power of the Church and the vast expanse of scientific progress. In today’s culture, the subject is permanently decentered; however, also the symbolic place around him or her appears more and more anomic and diffused. Discussions of postmodernity have thus focused on the fact that there are no grand narratives anymore, that there are no strong authorities with whom the subject can identify, and that individualism seems to have been pushed to its limit, so that the subject more and more perceives himself or herself as a dynamic self-creator.

The Anxious Consumer In the early 1970s, at a lecture in Milano, Lacan made the observation that in a developed capitalist system, the subject’s relationship to the social field can be observed to form a particular discourse. In this discourse of capitalism, the subject relates to the social field in such a way that he or she takes himself or herself as a master. Not only is the subject perceived to be totally in charge of himself or herself, but he or she also appears to have the power to recuperate the loss of jouissance (enjoyment). In late capitalism, the subject is thus perceived as an agent who has enormous power. What does it really mean that the subject is placed in the position of such an 309

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agent? First, it looks as if this subject is free from subjection to his history and genealogy and thus free from all signifying inscriptions. This seems to be the subject who is free to choose not only objects that supposedly bring him or her satisfaction, but even more the direction of his or her life—that is, the subject chooses himself or herself. The subject who is presumably free to make numerous choices, however, often searches for identification with some kind of new master: gurus, religious leaders, political extremists, selfhelp authors. Following their advice paradoxically often limits her or his choices. Let me exemplify this with dilemmas that many women experience when they need to decide what to wear.2 For some women, one of the most anxiety-provoking moments with regard to dress choice is before their wedding (Broekhuizen and Evans 2014). Marriage, which is often referred to as ‘tying the knot’, changes one’s symbolic status by untying family knots while legally binding one partner to another.The creation of this new knot in the traditional way involves dressing up. Paradoxically, today with the changes in the relationship to authorities, the Internet is becoming a new symbolic space, which often functions as an ad hoc therapy space. On many online forums devoted to wedding issues, one can thus read about the dilemmas that women face when they are choosing the dress for this important event. One woman writes, ‘I’m getting married this September, and just bought my dress a couple of days ago. However, since then I’ve been having major dress anxiety! I don’t know if this is normal, if other brides have gone through this, or if anyone has any ideas to help with my jitters!’ (lostsock 2015). The woman then explains that she is rather picky.When searching for the perfect dress, she went through 35 different dress fittings before she found the one.The problem, however, was that her mother could not be with her at the time when she made the choice. When she showed the dress to her mother, the latter liked another dress better. The woman regrets that she did not consult her mother before making the purchase and then ponders how to proceed: I had an emotional reaction to the dress I ended up choosing, so I made the purchase after I tried the dress on for the second time on the same day (which, again, was probably a mistake). But now I’ve made a down payment, and there’s no turning back. I’m pretty sure I made the right choice, but can’t help feeling there’s something wrong with the dress, or should have gone with the one my mom liked. (lostsock 2015) From the responses this woman received to her anxious post, we can learn that many other brides-to-be have been in a similar situation. They give advice to each other, along the lines of ‘as long as the dress looks and feels good on you, then it is the “right” dress!’ Women also urge each other to question whether they love the dress, whether they feel good in it, whether the dress makes them happy, and so on. Many women on the forum complain that they made their choice in light of what others perceived as the right choice. One woman even says, ‘I think I chose a beautiful dress, but I’m still wrestling with what-could-have-beens’ (lostsock 2015). From discussions like this, one easily gets the impression that the dress is just a stand-in for all the other anxieties that the bride is going through before her wedding. It might very well be that while pondering whether she has chosen the right dress, she is unconsciously questioning whether she chose the right husband, and that the ‘what-could-have-beens’ are related to the decision to marry or to tie the knot with this particular man. The mother’s criticism of her daughter’s dress can also be understood in the broader context of mother-daughter relationships. It might well be that the mother’s disapproval of the dress is masking her disapproval of the marriage, that she is envious of her daughter taking center stage 310

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at the wedding, that she is unwilling to separate from her, or that she is playing out her own past wedding dilemmas. If women struggle first with the question of what others (especially their mothers) want, they also struggle with the question of how their choices relate to the fantasy image of how their wedding should look. When choosing the dress, many women have the problem of bringing the reality of their wedding close to the image that they have created in their heads. One woman thus says, ‘I went to 14 bridal stores until I finally picked one. I had a vision and couldn’t get that out of my head. I wanted to fulfil my wedding dress vision, but still find a dress that was flattering’ (lostsock 2015). This woman finally calmed down when others on the forum began saying to her, ‘Your wedding look is more than just the dress. It is the hair, makeup, veil or no veil, jewellery and you’ (lostsock 2015). However, those women who cannot easily be calmed by the advice they get from other women on the Internet can turn to new authorities that professionally specialize in curing dress anxiety. An institution called Calm Clinic claims that among the many anxiety treatments they offer, there is one that caters especially to women who have problems with their wedding dresses. In its online advertisement, the clinic states that the type of dress one wears affects one’s stress levels and that one can actually be ‘dressed for stress’ (Calm Clinic n.d.). An anxiety test is offered, to help people determine whether they are anxious because they dress for others (controlling friends, spouses, parents) or whether they are sabotaging their own well-being with ‘I don’t care couture’. People might also be stressed because they are ‘dressing up their own low self-esteem’—they might dress to ‘fit in’ or get attention from others. From the advice on the Calm Clinic website, we also learn how to dress for success.The idea is that one needs to dress for oneself and no one else, think carefully about what one wears, show off one’s positive qualities, and especially avoid dressing in what hurts. The idea that one needs to dress for oneself might appear calming; however, it goes very much against the reality that dress per se has a social component. One is never dressing for oneself alone. Everything about dress involves others and society at large—that is, the big Other.The fabrics we use, the styles we choose always involve a particular symbolic setting in which dress plays a particular role. Even if we were to have produced the fabric by ourselves, sewn the dress at home and chosen the cut of the dress, the facts are that we are going to cover our body in a particular way and that our dressing up will be reflected in the eyes of others, which show that dress is essentially a social construct (Arnold 2001). In times of abundance of choice, this social dimension of dress invokes dress anxiety in two ways: on the one hand, we have the old dilemmas related to the question of fitting in (i.e., following social codes within particular situations); on the other hand, we have the pressure to ‘be yourself ’ and to take oneself as an object of self-creation.

Ignorance, Chance, and Choice Amid feelings of guilt and anxiety related to choices, the issue of social inequality is often pushed aside, and the fact that people’s choices are highly determined by their economic status is also often ignored. The success of the ideology of late capitalism has been that it created the fantasy of possibility even amid obvious impossibilities. Even the very poor, who have fewer and fewer choices, would passionately support the idea of choice. Dan Ariely and Michael Norton (Norton and Ariely 2011) conducted a study on how people perceive social inequality. They asked participants of a survey how much of the US wealth is in the hands of the richest 20 percent of people and what would be a just distribution of wealth. People guessed that the richest 20 percent probably have about 60 percent of all of the wealth, but that the just distribution would be for them to have about 30 percent. In reality, however, the top 20 percent have more than 80 percent of the wealth (Norton and Ariely 2011). 311

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Why do people not rebel against what they actually perceive as an unjust distribution of wealth? Why do they not, for example, more enthusiastically support larger taxes on the rich and universal health care? When presenting the results of the Ariely and Norton study, The New York Times (2011) asked different commentators to explain the lack of people’s reactions against wealth inequality, especially since the majority of people imagine that in an ideal world, the inequality would be much smaller than it is. A brief overview of the responses and the explanations touch on the following: 1. The United States is driven by lottery mentality, which means that people think that maybe they can still make it in the future. 2. Those who are pessimistic about their own future might nonetheless harbor the belief that their kids might make it, which is why they do not want to impose high taxes on them. Here the identification with various successful people from Silicon Valley is particularly strong. 3. People more strongly identify with those who are similar to them—like their colleagues or neighbors—which is why they also envy these people more than the superrich. The latter are so out of reach that people do not even compare themselves with them or envy their lifestyle. 4. Many people have the feeling of guilt that they have overspent and that they are actually individually guilty for their financial troubles. 5. Many middle-class people have the impression that they are actually not doing so badly since they are in possession of many gadgets and since their lives are actually better than the lives of their parents. 6. During times of crisis, there is not as much desire to have but rather desire to keep. To the list of these responses, one needs to add an explanation of how the belief in choice has been underpinned by the idea of chance. While chance offers everyone the possibility to make it, it also presents a traumatic, uncontrollable moment that goes against the perception of rational subjectivity on which the ideology of choice relies. If we look at the negative part of chance, we are quickly reminded that the most random moment in our lives is the moment of death. The ritual of Russian roulette illustrates well the fact that death is always something related to chance and choice at the same time. When Jean Paul Sartre was talking about anxiety being related to freedom, he was thinking precisely about the fact that we are always free to take our own life. Albert Camus’s saying that he was often pondering if he should have another cup of coffee or he should kill himself goes to the core of this choice. In Russian roulette, however, we make a choice and do not make it fully at the same time. We allow randomness to decide for us. We thus give mastery over our choice to something else. Randomness then becomes a new master. Often, throwing the dice at first looks like an opening to pure chance. Dice, however, soon take over and themselves become a mechanism of power. Let me exemplify this with an event that I witnessed in my home. My son once had one extra ticket to a desirable concert and two friends who wanted that extra ticket.The boys also wanted my son to make the decision regarding who could have the ticket while each boy offered an explanation why he deserved the ticket more than the other. Amid this drama, the boys searched for criteria that might help in making the decision—like who is the oldest friend, who is the most supportive friend, who first said that he wants to go to the concert, and so on. My son, however, refused to be the master since he knew that whichever criteria he used, he would lose the friendship of the boy who would not get the ticket. The solution came when my father intervened and proposed to the boys to let dice decide. The boys agreed. At that moment, the dice became the new master. To make 312

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everything even more fair, the idea was that the dice would be thrown by my father and not by one of the boys. When the dice decided, the boys took that as a fair result. The boy who lost was reminded that dice is often used in sports and that he needed to take loss with dignity like a good sport. A comparison can be made here with the idea of the market. The belief in the power of the market at first appears like the belief grounded in the idea of randomness. The possibility of possibility is Soren Kierkegaard’s definition of anxiety (Kierkegaard 1986 [1843]), which can also apply to the idea of the market. However, we deal with this anxiety by erecting choice to the pedestal of mastery. Randomness suddenly becomes something that needs to be controlled and figured out, and its potentially damaging effects (its closeness with death and annihilation) need to be prevented—which is why we have endless market analysis and risk aversion studies.

Forced Choice Choice operates on a different level from that on which rational choice theory perceives it. Books that promote positive thinking as a way one can change one’s life and all the self-help advice that encourages people to choose various directions in their lives do not pay attention to the fact that quite a number of choices we make in our lives fall into the category of forced choice. An example of forced choice is the following: the Yugoslav army had a particular ritual for the conscripts starting their military service. The army created a ceremony in which the young soldiers had to take an oath and sign a statement that they freely chose to become members of the Yugoslav army. A young soldier would occasionally take this choice seriously and refuse to sign the oath. Such acts of disobedience were severely punished, and the soldier would usually be put in jail. He would be released from jail only when he would ‘freely’ sign the oath. A similar case of a forced choice was at work in the treatment of prisoners at the time of the Iraq War. After it was revealed that many prisoners were subject to torture by the US military, the latter introduced special questionnaires that prisoners who were about to be released from prison were supposed to fill out. The form enquired into whether the prisoner underwent torture during the time of detention. Men were often advised by their translators not to respond positively to this question since that might prevent them from exiting prison. Here, too, the choice to answer truly was offered and inadvertently denied at the same time. Even in daily conversations, we often offer the possibility of choice when we actually do not mean it. Examples are acts of politeness when a person offers something to another with the expectation that the offer will be rejected, since it was only a polite gesture. A case of forced choice is also when a person is faced by a robber saying ‘Your money or your life!’ If the person chooses to keep the money, he or she will of course not be able to enjoy it. These examples show that in cases of forced choice, the person is faced with the possibility of choice that is at the same time denied. The first impression one gets from such cases is that they should not be called choice at all. However, forced choice acts as an important part of the social bond. The fact that we have forced choice attests to society envisioning a person as being capable of freedom. Such mocked trials of choice also attest to society not being able to simply reject this freedom. Even the most severe forms of totalitarian regime often resorted to acts of forced choice, which shows that for power to employ coercion, some kind of a fantasy of the individual’s free submission to the regime needs to be preserved. Psychoanalysis also finds importance in the idea of forced choice. Freud coined the notion Neurosenwahl—the choice of neurosis—which pointed out that the person suffering from neurotic symptoms was not a mere victim but also had some ‘authorship’ over his or her suffering. That Freud perceived neurosis as something linked to a particular type of choice was a step 313

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that actually made psychoanalysis possible. Without this step, we would have to assume that the person becomes what she or he is solely due to her or his traumatic experiences. Freud acted against such determinism quite early, when he rejected his theory of seduction and started perceiving traumatic experiences as something that does not necessarily have automatic results. The link between cause and effect became much more blurred. That Freud and his successors took neurosis as a matter of choice opens up the question of the responsibility of the individual for her or his psychological suffering. Psychological trauma thus always has an inscription of an individual’s ‘freedom’ in forming a symptom, which means that the individual is not simply bound by numerous external determining factors (family, friends, etc.).

Conclusion One of the crucial reasons for choice being so traumatic is that every choice involves a loss. If we choose one path, we have lost the possibility to pursue another one. And finally, death is beyond choice. Because choice is so anxiety provoking, we often try everything to avoid it. A woman might, for example, think about leaving her partner but then finds a variety of reasons not to make this move. She might reason that she can leave tomorrow; she might think that choosing another partner will in the end not bring a change to her life; she might think that leaving will undermine her identity. But equally hard is dealing with the loss of choice. A middle-aged woman might, for example, feel sad when she loses the choice to have children, even if she actually does not want them. The choices we make are often irrational. When we, for example, buy an expensive car, it might well be because we hope to provoke envy from others and not because we have rationally come to the conclusion that we need the car. Provoking envy and desire for something that someone else has is very much part of today’s marketing strategies. The new trend, however, is to introduce humiliation into the mix. In Japan, a number of stores became fashionable because they limit people’s choices. A store that sells fashionable products is, for example, set at the outskirts of Tokyo and operates at random hours. Shoppers come there and wait in long lines, and when the shop finally opens, they often cannot buy the products that they wish. When a particular shopper wants to have an object, it might be that a sale assistant decides that this object is not going to be sold to him or her. One would guess that such ‘torture’ would push shoppers away. On the contrary, people became fascinated by a limitation of choices and are flocking to such stores in great numbers. While some writers are nowadays trying to figure out how to teach people to develop strategies to limit their choices, people often form their own self-binding mechanisms, although they are not conscious ones. People limit their choices by themselves, or they act as if someone else had imposed limits for them. A professor once decided to give students the chance before the exam to formulate the question they want to be asked in the exam. This freedom of choice was not at all liberating. At the time of the exam, students acted deeply shocked when they were asked the question (which they had formulated beforehand) and behaved as if they had been unfortunately asked one of the rare questions that they did not know much about. One student even complained that the question does not connect sufficiently to the material they had been dealing with in the course. So although the person makes his or her choice, he or she can easily act as if the choice has been imposed from someone else. This desire for a limit we also find in little children. If there are too many possibilities to choose from, children often become agitated and uncertain and often ask parents for guidance, even if later they choose exactly the opposite of what the parents suggested. The problem today is that choice is often solely taken as rational choice and that its understanding is underpinned 314

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by economic rationality and consumerism. In contrast, psychoanalysis insists that choice involves the individual’s unconscious and that our choices involve our guessing about the desire of others, as well as the big Other. For psychoanalysis, choice is linked to the possibility of change. Precisely because the individual is perceived as an ‘author’ of her or his suffering who has in an unconscious way ‘chosen’ her or his neurosis, there is also a possibility that symptoms might change and thus suffering might be alleviated. The idea of choice can open the possibility of change also at the level of society. However, this can happen only if it ceases to be perceived solely as an individual matter. Neoliberalism with its hyped individualism and glorification of the idea of rational choice contributed to an increase of people’s feeling of anxiety. The perception of the individual as a consumer who can choose the direction of his or her life has also contributed to the feeling of inadequacy, guilt, and self-blame. Social dimensions and economic factors, which hugely influence people’s lives, have become perceived as something that a person can fight against by making the right choice. Political theory needs to engage in challenging this neoliberal perception of choice. As we have seen, psychoanalysis, with its perception of the idea of choice, which takes into account the power of the unconscious as well as the larger social setting—that is, the big Other—can be of great help in offering a critique of the dominant idea of rational choice.

Notes 1 . The neoliberal ideology of choice has been further developed in Salecl 2011. 2. I further developed the idea of dress anxiety in Salecl 2016.

References Arnold, R. (2001) Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Broekhuizen, F. and Evans, A. (2014) ‘Pain, Pleasure and Bridal Beauty: Mapping Postfeminist Bridal Perfection’, Journal of Gender Studies, 25(3), 335–334. Calm Clinic (n.d.) ‘How What You’re Wearing Can Affect Your Anxiety’, www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/ clothing-matters (accessed 24 May 2016). Dufour, D.-R. (2008) The Art of Shrinking Heads:The New Servitude of the Liberated in the Era of Total Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity. Kierkegaard, S. (1986 [1843]) Fear and Trembling, London: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1991) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (Vol. Book II), Miller, J.-A. (ed.), Tomaselli, S. (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. lostsock (2015) ‘Dress Anxiety’, The Knot, March, http://forums.theknot.com/discussion/1054523/dressanxiety (accessed 24 May 2016). Melman, C. (2005) L’Homme sans gravité: Jouir à tout prix, Paris: Folio. Norton, M.I. and Ariely, D. (2011) ‘Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 9–12. New York Times (2011) www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/21/rising-wealth-inequality-shouldwe-care (accessed 12 May 2018). Salecl, R. (2011) The Tyranny of Choice, London: Profile Books. Salecl, R. (2016) ‘Dress Anxiety’, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, 7(1), 3–17.

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25 RELIGION AND ISLAMIC RADICALIZATION Andrea Mura

Since Freud’s early writings, and to this day, religion and psychoanalysis have constantly sought clarification regarding the status of their relationship. Over time, most inflexible interpretations have rejected the possibility of establishing a common ground between the two. When their incompatibility was not declared, in a suggestion that they lead completely independent lives, religion and psychoanalysis were taken to form an odd couple. Although tenderly intertwined, they remain utterly different from each other and would not normally get along under other conditions. What then are the circumstances enabling religion and psychoanalysis to get along and escape the grammar of an oppositional relationship that many have implicitly endorsed over time?

Freud and the Limits of Religion Despite his strong interest in religion, it is well-known that Freud did not help ease the ill-effects of this adverse relation and incited the strongest reactions with his pronouncements that ‘the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex’ (Freud 1957 [1910]: 123) and that ‘at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father’ (Freud 2001 [1913]: 171). Moreover, he noted that by arising, like the obsessional neurosis of children, ‘out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father’, religion stands in fact as ‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’ (Freud 1961 [1927]: 43). Although scrutinized from different angles over time, one original theme behind Freud’s long-lasting fascination with religion is thus the structural relation that it establishes with neurosis. While initially standing as ‘the expression of the instincts it has suppressed’ (Palmer 1997: 13), Freud increasingly associated religious feelings of guilt and protection with the early biological condition of childhood, finally anchoring religion in the tutelary power of the father: As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection – for protection through love – which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus, the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life . . . and 316

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the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. (Freud 1961 [1927]: 30) In the light of this original theme, Freud defines religion as an ‘illusion’. Religious beliefs, Freud explains, are not ‘errors’ and are ‘not necessarily false’. ‘What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions’ (Freud 1961 [1927]: 31). A religious belief becomes an illusion when ‘a wish fulfillment’ is thus assumed as a ‘prominent factor’ in its motivation, which bestows individuals with a cherished consolatory power. However, this entails disregarding its relations to reality, ‘just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification’ (Freud 1961 [1927]: 31). Although acknowledging religion’s enduring impact on human culture and its role in stabilizing basic moral norms, Freud remained convinced throughout his life of the irremediable inability of religion to achieve, increase, or even facilitate conditions of justice and happiness. The illusory character of religious dogma has long hindered any possible reconciliation with civilization. Religious phenomena have obstructed the development of rational explanations, which have only recently, thanks to the newly conquered territories of scientific progress, managed to gain final primacy over religion. Defining the particular circumstances grounding Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to religion would certainly account for what Freud saw as the ‘modern’ decline of religious dogmas. His modernist belief—or we can hazard the term illusion here—was that as the scientific approach grows, so religion declines. Aware of the negative effects that an enfeebling of religion may have on social stability, Freud envisaged the crucial task to be one of endorsing scientific work even further and assumed that it is ‘the only road’ to ‘a knowledge of reality outside ourselves’ (Freud 1961 [1927]: 31). This meant rethinking the relation that culture has long established with religion and so finally committing the former to maintaining rational grounds for the precepts of civilization: Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. . . . In this way our appointed task of reconciling men to civilization will to a great extent be achieved. (Freud 1961 [1927]: 44) Despite his ongoing interest in religious beliefs, Freud continued to endorse a structural distance between religion and psychoanalysis, with the latter understood as an expression of scientific and rational knowledge. At the same time, religion functioned as the discursive horizon from which Freud’s theorization derived a relevant part of its material. As Lacan often discussed over time, ‘Freud’s meditation about the function, the role, and the figure of the Name-of-theFather, as well as his entire ethical reference, revolves around the Judeo-Christian tradition, and can entirely be articulated around this tradition’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 22). This includes personal and biographic trajectories because, as Lacan saw, there is a certain parallelism in this direction between the figure of the old ‘patriarch’, Jacob Freud, and the magnificent figure of the father in Totem and Taboo (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 23). Today, there is widespread debate precisely on the cultural premises sustaining Freud’s overall vision. How should we think about Freudian psychoanalysis without its structural references to the Judeo-Christian legacy—with all the fundamental shifts that Freud instantiated within that 317

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framework—or the allegoric function of Greek mythology and symbolism? What happens to psychoanalysis when it is thought of and applied beyond its original setting? To what extent does Islam, for instance, escape the paternal logic dominating the Judeo-Christian tradition? And what is the experience of analytic treatment for a non-European or non-‘Judeo-Christian’ analysand? Jean-Michel Hirt (1993), Salman Akhtar (2008), and Fethi Benslama (2002/2009)—but also Tobie Nathan and Georges Devereux in a dynamic dialogue with anthropological research dating back to Bronislaw Malinowski—are only some of those who have contributed to such an inquiry, leading to an increasingly vivid discussion. In the same direction,Yana Korobko (2016) has looked more recently at the specificity of analysis in Arab settings, and Gohar Homayounpour has considered the authority of other mythological and cultural formations, which can potentially challenge the universality of the Oedipus complex. In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (Homayounpour 2012), a suggestive emphasis is placed on the anxiety of disobedience allegedly underpinning ‘Iranian collective fantasy’, which should, more productively, be associated with the myth of Rustam and Sohrab in Ferdousi’s Shanameh (Book of Kings). Similarly, Omnia El Shakry (2017) has traced early conceptual twists in the Arab translation of psychoanalysis (including Freudian texts), which have allowed for the formation of an Arab Freud more resonant with the Islamic legacy. All these approaches bear witness to the specter of a fundamental disjunction, Islam or psychoanalysis, that many have been trying to challenge recently (with Islam inconveniently assuming here the twofold position of both a religion and a non-Western culture).1 Although this disjunction is aggravated by cultural presuppositions that touch on contemporary challenges and controversies, it reiterates an original tension, as discussed earlier, between psychoanalysis and religion. Freud himself was concerned that his critical approach to religion was conducive to ‘mistrust and ill-will’, not only toward his own person but toward psychoanalysis at large. If I now come forward with such displeasing pronouncements, people will be only too ready to make a displacement from my person to psychoanalysis. ‘Now we see’, they will say, ‘where psycho-analysis leads to.The mask has fallen; it leads to a denial of God and of a moral ideal, as we always suspected’. . . . An outcry of this kind will really be disagreeable to me on account of my many fellow-workers, some of whom do not by any means share my attitude to the problems of religion. (Freud 1961 [1927]: 36) In replying to potential criticism, Freud rebutted the possibility that psychoanalysis be squeezed into the fixed framework of an atheist Weltanschauung, highlighting its function as a simple method of research: In point of fact, psycho-analysis is a method of research. . . . If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion, tant pis for religion; but defenders of religion will by the right make use of psychoanalysis in order to give full value to the affective significance of religious doctrines. (Freud 1961 [1927]: 37)

Lacan and the Triumph of Religion This critical shift from an understanding of psychoanalysis as a materialist-oriented ‘vision’ to a neutral method of research offers a good opportunity to introduce Lacan’s attitude to religion. 318

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Lacan’s overall engagement with religious feelings remained relatively inclusive over time and skeptical toward any modernist dismissal of religion. Far from discharging the latter as a mere illusion, the very consolatory power that Freud ascribed derogatively to religion was for Lacan something that had, in itself, to be valorized. While praising the capacity of religion to offer guidance and relief, he even lamented a certain tendency by clergy to send ‘their flocks to psychoanalysts’, as well as the tendency on the part of religion to let ‘science resolve problems when questions translate into suffering that is a bit too hard to handle’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 19). Unlike Freud, Lacan was thus critical of ‘a certain flippancy in the way science disposes of a field [religion] regarding which it is not clear how it can so easily lighten its load’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 19). Lacan takes religion to fulfill, in its immediacy, a critical role in the psychic life of an individual, contributing to the formation of its symbolic universe. While accounting for certain ‘peculiar symptoms connected with the use of the hand’ of a Muslim analysand (Lacan 1991 [1953–54]: 196), Lacan dismisses the ‘classical’ reference to infantile masturbation in Seminar I, inquiring into the religious significance of these symptoms and the various meanings that Islamic law ascribes to the hand, including those related to theft and punishment. Central for Lacan is how this patient, who grew up in an Islamic environment, dealt with his Islamic ‘symbolic node’ to reveal his particular relationship with the law (Dunlap 2014: 3). While emphasizing the uniqueness of this relationship, Lacan observed that, ‘For every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation with the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone’ (Lacan 1991 [1953–54]: 197). Besides the symbolic role of religion in the psychological genesis of individuals, Lacan was also convinced of a certain proximity between religion and psychoanalysis in their respective approach to fundamental ethical questions. A key theme examined in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and resumed the same year in his 1960 Discourse to Catholics, is precisely that of ‘the morals that psychoanalysis can suggest, presuppose, or contain, and of the step forward psychoanalysis would perhaps allow us to take—how audacious!—in the moral realm’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 6). In this respect, Lacan’s reading of Freud emphasizes the drama of desire that Freud places right at the forefront of the ethical experience, a drama played out at the level of an experience that is articulated ‘using the very terms with which characteristically Judeo-Christian religious experience has itself historically developed and articulated it’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 26). This emphasis is particularly vivid in Totem and Taboo.The tension here between the preservation of desire and the ‘correlative principle of a prohibition that leads to the setting aside of this desire’ underpins, for Lacan, the very myth that Freud proposes to the modern man for whom God is dead; the idea that ‘the father prohibits desire effectively only because he is dead and, I will add, because he does not know it himself ’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 24). Here we can conclude with Lacan that the mourning of the father will contribute only toward making humankind’s desire more threatening and its prohibition more severe and long-lasting: ‘God is dead, nothing is permitted anymore’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 25). For Lacan, both psychoanalysis and religion contribute to the full disclosure of the nature of desire, which is structured as the chain of a discourse and remains unconscious. As Di Ciaccia puts it in a short note to the Italian edition of Lacan’s Discourse to Catholics, its focal point ‘is not the object that is sought, but an extreme within interiority that is, at the same time, an excluded inside; it is called sin for St. Paul, das Ding for Freud, the Thing for Lacan. It is the jouissance forever prohibited to the speaking being’ (Di Ciaccia 2006: 116). Lacan recognizes that both believers and nonbelievers find themselves ‘called upon to respond’ to St. Paul’s unsettling words: ‘I would not have known sin expect through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, 319

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taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 18). Lacan is keen not just to show here the influence that the Judeo-Christian tradition has exerted on early psychoanalytic reflection but, more substantially, to show how the ethical framework functioning in this tradition reverberates in psychoanalysis.With its tension between law and sin, a mechanism is enacted, which is ‘alive and well, perfectly perceptible and tangible to a psychoanalyst’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 18–19). We have seen that, for Freud, behind psychoanalysis’s uneasy relationship with religion stands a broader modernist incompatibility between religion and science. In contrast, for Lacan, a higher complementarity between the two should be recognized because the relation that science entertains with religion is more complex than Freud originally anticipated. The discourse of science has been able to unveil the disappearance of any transcendental aesthetic by which harmony could be established between our intuitions and the world: ‘We know what’s what on earth and in heaven—neither contains God—and the question is what we make appear there in the disjunctions constituted by our technology’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 36). Against widespread modernist assumptions, however, scientific progress has brought about neither the decline nor the disempowerment (lack of tools) of religion. This theme became increasingly central to Lacan, leading to his subsequent reevaluation of the role of religion, science, and psychoanalysis in his teachings. During a talk given in Rome in l974 under the heading The Triumph of Religion, Lacan targeted what appeared to him as the increasingly manifest anxiety [anguish] of scientists: There is something Freud didn’t talk about because it was taboo to him—namely, the scientist’s position. It too is an impossible position, but science does not yet have the slightest inkling that it is, which is lucky for science. Scientists are only now beginning to have anxiety attacks [crises of anguish]. (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 59) Lacan emphasizes that, as technology develops, it discloses the risks that are produced by its own achievements and that now even threaten human life. At the same time, it reveals that ‘science hasn’t the foggiest idea what it is doing’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 61). It is here that religion displays its full potential. Far from reflecting a declining power, we witness its triumph, which Lacan links in this text to its ability to deal with the unfurling of the Real that modern science has triggered: If science works at it, the real will expand and religion will thereby have still more reasons to soothe people’s hearts. Science is new and it will introduce all kinds of distressing things into each person’s life. Religion, above all the true religion [Christianity], is resourceful in ways we cannot even begin to suspect. . . . Religion is going to give meaning to the oddest experiments, the very ones that scientists themselves are just beginning to become anxious about. Religion will find colorful [truculent] meaning for those. (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 64–65) Although some critics have seen a positive stance in this passage, noting that ‘Lacan, especially in his later life, thought that some kind of meaning is crucial, even triumphant’ (Dunlap 2014: 162), we take this latter talk to display a more negative approach to religion than that in earlier remarks. Lacan’s emphasis on the capacity of religion to ‘find colorful [truculent] meaning’ while remaining coextensive with the growing invasiveness of the Real produced by science, reveals, as 320

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we shall soon see, the increasing inability of the symbolic order to ensure the overdetermination, flexibility, and reversibility of meanings in the signifying chain. In a more radical pronouncement, Lacan foresees a future in which religion ‘will be able to secrete meaning to such an extent that we will truly drown in it’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 66). Analogous to the designation of the psychotic, for whom ‘everything has become a sign’, the risk here is that this overproduction of truth and meanings will be the effect of a certain fixed relation to the symbolic order. At the same time, such a capacity by religion exposes the fragility of psychoanalysis that, in Freudian terms, may be a tool or method of research but that, for Lacan, is at the same time a symptom of the ‘discontents in civilization’ having emerged at a specific moment in the development of science. It is here that psychoanalysis and religion show their difference in terms both of function and destiny. While religion’s specific function for Lacan is precisely to ‘find correspondences between everything and everything else’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 66) and ‘cure men . . . so that they do not perceive what is not going well’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 71–72), the function of psychoanalysis is to deal with ‘what doesn’t work’. As Lacan put it, ‘it concerns itself with what we must call by its name—I must say that I am still the only one who has called it by this name—the real’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 61). Notwithstanding the profound impact of religion in the texture of psychoanalysis and their respective concern for key ethical problems, the latter remains irreducible to religion. Indeed, psychoanalysis does not stand as a form of confession and will never become—at least as Lacan would hope—a religion, not even in a secularized form. A different fate embraces their respective trajectory, entailing that if religion triumphs, then psychoanalysis will not: ‘either it will survive or it won’t’ (Lacan 2013 [1974]: 64). While denoting ‘the pessimism that marks Lacan’s later work about the liberating potential of psychoanalysis’ (Crockett 2015: 250), this fundamental disjunction reflects Lacan’s growing insistence from the 1960s onward regarding the challenges faced by symbolic authority—partly an effect of the very intrusion of the Real that he discussed in this latter text. According to Lacan, late industrialization would be responsible for an increasing erosion of paternal law, denoting the emergence of a complementary subjective model no longer organized around symbolic castration. The ‘decline of the Oedipus’ (Žižek 2000), the ‘end of the paternal dogma’ (Tort 2007), or Lacan’s pronouncement about the évaporation du père (‘melting into air of the father’) (Lacan 1969) are among the most quoted expressions depicting such a condition. Indeed, the debates of the last few decades have inquired into the social effects of this predicament when associated with, for instance, the type of libidinal economy instantiated by the capitalist discourse. In this contemporary context, earlier reflections on the hedonistic and dissipative nature of the capitalist discourse in pre-financial-crisis times have been coupled with new investigations into the biopolitics of neoliberal debt economy (Vanheule 2016; Stimilli 2017). While exposing the constant process of the production, consumption, and consummation of life in the form of indebtedness, a complementary reinforcement of imaginary formations may also be ascribed to this predicament. These formations freeze the fundamental ‘ex-centric’ and ‘ambivalent’ character of the subject, favoring narcissistic and paranoid solutions that propel an ideal of pure integrity. This overall debate can productively be linked to what Lacan saw as the potential rise of racism in the contemporary realm. For Lacan, the jubilation greeting the crisis of authoritarian (and patriarchal) forms of politics in the wake of the 1968 student protests risked obstructing a general reflection on the effects of the said displacement of the paternal metaphor. Two major, intertwined consequences would remain overlooked: on the one hand, the rise of a liberal and consumerist phantasm of freedom now conquering the hearts of the youth and. On the other, 321

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the rise of a general idolatry of the body, which might ultimately gain terrain behind the celebrated advent of a new community of brothers, thus favoring renewed forms of racism: and when we return to the root of the body, if we revalorize the word brother . . . you should know that what is arising, what one has not seen to its final consequences, and which for its part is rooted in the body, in the fraternity of the body, is racism, about which you have to hear the last word. (Lacan 1972: XII 12) Eric Laurent has recently observed that Lacan’s overall insistence on racism since the late 1960s was partly a response to a historical context dominated by optimism for the growing economic interdependence of nations and the creation of larger political units as the European community (Laurent 2014). Indeed, by 1967, while anticipating the problematic unfolding of globalization in the following decades, Lacan had already noticed that ‘Our future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hardline extension of the process of segregation’ (Lacan 1995 [1967]: 13). A few years later, in an interview with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan openly pointed to the effects of a lack of orientation of jouissance resulting from increasing cultural hybridization: ‘With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies—unheard of before the melting pot’ (Lacan 1990 [1973]: 32). In a context in which our jouissance has gone ‘off track’ and is no longer orienting us, and where world financialization and cultural and political integration contribute to the intensification of a generalized ‘melting pot’, a rejection of the jouissance of others offers preeminent solutions to this derailing. With this in mind, Laurent notes that We have no knowledge of the jouissance from which we might take our orientation. We know only how to reject the jouissance of others. . . . This is not culture shock, but the shock of different forms of jouissance.This manifold jouissance splits the social bond apart, hence the temptation of calling upon a unifying God. (Laurent 2014: n.p.) When reflecting on our contemporary context, one effect of this racialized logic is the increasing visibility of xenophobic populisms and religious fundamentalisms in Europe, which mobilize new forms of hypertrophic division.What these phenomena seem to have in common today is the attempt to solve what they frequently perceive to be a general sense of social and psychic disaggregation.While striving to restore an ideal of unity and integrity (e.g., the populist idealization of ‘the people’ as a moral and indivisible unit, or the fundamentalist celebration of the unity of God and truth), here a radical rejection of the jouissance of the other accompanies the endorsement of new practices for dividing peoples. A demand for seclusion and separation is thus instantiated along ethnic, political, or religious lines, while, more generally, the dislocating power of global structural forces is resisted (i.e., globalization, financialization). In the context of the European debt crisis, this has also entailed rejecting the economic theology that underpins neoliberal globalization and sustains the image of the market as, among other things, the only legitimate ‘faith’ within a secularized world. It is in the light of this scenario that the recent terrorist attacks in Europe can perhaps be rigorously interpreted.They reflect what Lacan describes in his concluding remarks to Miller as the return of God’s ‘baneful past’: ‘Even if God, thus newly strengthened, should end up existing, this bodes nothing better than a return of his baneful past’ (Lacan 1990 [1973]: 33). 322

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Radicalization and Terror Our epoch has been described as the age of ‘planetary terror’ and ‘permanent civil war’ (Di Cesare 2017; Agamben 2015). Moving from a conceptual discussion of psychoanalysis and religion to an applied analysis of contemporary challenges, we would like now to consider briefly what can perhaps be described as a frèrocité of global jihadism—a neologism coined by Lacan that combines the term ‘ferocity’ with the French ‘brother’ (frère). Such a discussion allows us to assume a useful perspective from which to observe the segregating effects that Lacan ascribes to a renewed ‘fraternity of the body’ in a scenario marked by symbolic derail. In Jihad and Death (2017), Oliver Roy investigates the fascination with death expressed by contemporary global jihadism in its fantasy of the caliphate and its pronounced commitment to violence. Controversial as it might be—we will soon posit a caveat in this regard—Roy takes global jihadism to supplant the type of political and cultural characterization that had qualified mainstream radical groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah. What an inquiry into Islamic terror reveals is that ‘there is no direct link between social, political, and religious mobilizations and the descent into terrorism’ (Roy 2017: 4). For Roy, what is at stake is a worldwide process of the deculturation of religion. Increasingly detached from conventional territorial, cultural, and even political references, the radicalized youngsters found in various parts of the world, but particularly in Europe, couple this process with a general reconstruction of religion as fundamentally ‘separate’ from the social bond. By looking in particular at the sociology of European jihadists—mostly second- and thirdgeneration Muslims, born-again Muslims, and converts in their early twenties—Roy notices a tendency to create insulated micro-communities under the banner of a fantasmatic Islamic vanguard (al-tayfa al-mansura). In renouncing the culturally rooted Islam of their parents in favor of a virtual relationship with the global, transnational, and—we could say here—deterritorialized community of Muslims, this vanguard engages in a general process of ‘desocialization’ from the rest of society and of organic reconstruction of social ties along fraternal lines. One unusual figure in this respect is the overrepresentation of sets of siblings among the commandos involved in recent terrorist attacks in Europe. Roy describes this phenomenon as being far ‘too systematic to be merely incidental’ in bearing little resemblance in other radical formations, whether in the far left or far right or in mainstream Islamist groups (Roy 2017: 25). A biological and corporeal trait is thus added to the spiritual comradeship that already unites members of jihadist groups. At the same time, this ideal and material tie extends to siblings in laws, finally realizing a generational tension between the ‘peers’ culture of the vanguard and the religious, cultural, and social determinations of their parents: They are not necessarily rebelling against their parents personally, but against what they represent: humiliation, concessions made to society, and what they perceive as religious ignorance. In fact, they turn the generational relationship around.They ‘know better’ than their parents, or at least say they do. They become the masters of the truth; they even try to (re)convert their parents. (Roy 2017: 25) The generational reversal underscored by Roy parallels a more analytical type of torsion because it appears to align to the general subversion that the capitalist discourse enacts on a social level. As we know, a central function of the master discourse in Lacanian psychoanalysis is to organize prohibition and desire. However, the capitalist discourse operates a ‘little inversion’ of it, allowing 323

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the barred subject to upturn its location by moving from the position of truth to the position of the agent. This turnaround within the original Lacanian formulation of the master discourse permits the split subject to gain control over truth, thus enfranchising itself from the organizing function of the Law. In this respect, one key trait defining the psychology of contemporary terrorists may be located in the generational nihilism that the figure of the suicidal mass killer embodies in the West.This blind and ‘absolute’ violence—from Latin absolutus, ‘free from ties, unrestricted’—best reflects the deadly and spectral jouissance of a total enfranchisement from the Law. According to Roy, contemporary Islamic terror should find its paradigmatic reference in Columbine syndrome, where the young attackers engage in an outburst of indiscriminate violence, administering death and announcing their grandiose narrative of solitary heroism, rage, and contempt with statements and pictures posted on social media. As far as radicalized young Muslims are concerned, both their violence and overall narrative is certainly accompanied by substantial references to a suffering Muslim ummah that requires vengeance against political oppressors and purification of iniquity and unbelief. Despite the recognition of this reality, Roy nonetheless observes that their profile is actually characterized by a ‘paucity of religious knowledge’ and limited understanding of the struggles affecting Muslims in specific settings (e.g., Palestine). Disconnected, then, from the concrete local realities of the ummah, these radicals establish a relationship more imaginary than real with the victims they ought to defend and the enemies they combat. Indeed, one paradoxical upshot noted by Roy is that in committing to global jihad outside the frontiers of Europe, these radicals often remain trapped in inextricable civil and sectarian wars, mostly engaging in belligerent actions against other Muslims, sometimes against mainstream Islamist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, but rarely against the ‘crusaders’ they originally meant to oppose. Two remarks follow from this scenario, which may better help us elucidate the terms of the discussion we have raised so far. First, given this general context, organizations such as al-Qaeda and Daesh (Islamic State) are not, for Roy, the cause of radicalization but instead play a crucial role in offering a theological rationalization to radicalization. It follows that what is at stake is not radical Islam as such but the Islamization of radicalism, which allows global jihadism to saturate the imaginary of a rebellious and often already radicalized youth becoming the measure of their general revolt. The ability of Daesh in this context is to ‘provide a paradigm for action that fits in with a grand world strategy that will fascinate youngsters with diverse motivations’ (Roy 2017: 72). It is here that religion—in its global jihadist rendering—makes its best use, in my view, of that capacity to secrete ‘colorful meaning’ that Lacan posited as central to our times. A direct relation is thus established between the increasing expansion of the Real that Lacan linked to science—but which more broadly connects with the contemporary global processes of the desocialization, deculturation, and marketization of life—and the ability of religion ‘to soothe people’s hearts’ and appease their anguish. Second, this religious and theological rationalization and secretion of meanings takes root within a preexisting youth culture, often organized around an aesthetics of violence in which narcissistic, consumerist, and nihilistic drives coalesce in a context marked by symbolic derail. In this respect, Roy’s reference to Columbine syndrome is particularly productive in highlighting that behind the religious narrative that young jihadists hold, essential social traits are shared at some profound level between religious and nonreligious suicide killers. Here, we are often reminded that rage, resentment, and generalized contempt mix together in the epic plan of high school shooters to work toward the accomplishment of wholesale destruction. Such an approach is well exemplified in the original aspiration of the two school shooters 324

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at the Columbine High School to blow up the entire school. The aesthetics of violence that perpetrators stage in their action often draw on a common imaginary of youth culture made up of figures from cinema, music, video games, and TV series. Both the statements posted on social media prior to the attacks and camera recordings made subsequently magnify and reproduce the horror of the assault endlessly, disclosing the anguish of the victims and the viewpoint of the attackers. A desire for death—and not just the death of the other but also their own—combines here with the pervasive consumption and commodification of death. By exposing and showing ‘the horror of the flesh’ in its real and absolute dimension, this death economy expresses overlapping interlaced trajectories. Although pursuing a verification of symbolic authority and its crisis to some extent—we cannot avoid detecting a certain outstanding exposure of the ‘body of the condemned’, which points to a return of the Foucauldian ‘spectacle of the scaffold’—it simultaneously sustains a narcissistic wish to leave a durable impression on the world, as we shall soon see. In the case of global jihadism, this narcissistic drive fuels key tactical objectives, allowing jihadist organizations to use images and videos as tools of mediatic jihad. Employing this approach, Daesh has been particularly successful in implementing it in its propaganda activity. Dreadful videos of individual beheadings supplant the aseptic images normally associated with media coverage of war in the West (which removes individual instances of blood and bodies), bringing to the forefront what is the repressed, individualized, and corporeal dimension of death, then to be sublimated in the hyperreal imaginary of blood and violence of Hollywood cinema. It is in this aesthetics of violence that I suggest with Baudrillard that ‘the spectacle of terrorism imposes the terrorism of the spectacle’ (Baudrillard 2001).Whether in the macro propaganda activity of Daesh or the single terrorist actions of suicide mass killers, the speechless anguish of the other requires exposure and solicitation. The victims in contemporary suicide attacks across the West are transformed into a terrified and powerless quarry to whom, in a sadistic fashion, an unresolved castration can ultimately be transferred. In contrast, attackers reconstitute themselves as empowered superheroes. Despite common underlying challenges and traits, however, we think that the eschatological imaginary orienting the jihadist drive signals a difference between Islamic terror and nonreligious mass killing and cannot just be dismissed as purely imaginary support. Fethi Benslama observes in his analysis of Islamic radicalization that most of the radicalized youth in question are teenagers and young adults who might experience a sort of moratorium period of adolescence, which prolongs the structural state of crisis through which the identity of the young is normally constituted (Benslama 2016: 41). While it is typical of this age to pass through a painful process of disidentification and reidentification marked by intense phases of depression and exaltation, this condition is felt with dramatic intensity by those who are most exposed to global processes of deracination and desocialization played out in contemporary society. In this sense, radicalization functions as a ‘way of healing’ for the young, especially those whose social, cultural, and family roots—a term constituting the very etymology of radical (radix)—have faded away under global challenges, while the possibility to ‘root again’ is increasingly restricted (Benslama 2016: 51). For Benslama, Islamism intervenes here as an ‘anti-political utopia’ offering a way out of this condition (Benslama 2016: 51). Emerging as a fundamentally anti-modern discourse aimed at the restoration of the traditional and patriarchal shield, Islamism stands in all its forms as a symptom of the crisis of Islamic civilization. We now witness the transformation of the Muslim into a super-Muslim. The existential imperative of its melancholic imaginary is not to ‘become’ but to ‘go back to being’, to find roots in that perfect Islamic society displayed only in the past, within the Golden Age of Islam. 325

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While agreeing with Roy that no ‘political-programmatic end’ informs jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda and Daesh (Benslama 2016: 25), Benslama extends this apolitical feature to any other Islamist manifestation, including mainstream groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Nahda, and so on. Conversely, I would rather retain a canonical distinction here between global jihadism and mainstream Islamism, highlighting the eminently political and modern tone that has long informed the agenda of mainstream groups, whether in their anti-colonial struggle or in their involvement in contemporary domestic politics. I would thereby conclude that dismissing political determinations behind global jihadism too in the manner of both Roy and Benslama risks downplaying a vital component behind current phenomena of radicalization. Their approach risks overemphasizing mental pathology to disconnect, as François Burgat notes, ‘the European and Middle Eastern political theatres’, ultimately ‘exonerating’ Europe ‘of any responsibility’ (Burgat 2015). To bear such an approach to these phenomena is not to deny some diminished political capacity of global jihadism, although we should restrict it to a millenarian and apocalyptical trajectory informing the jihadist galaxy. Originally articulated as a radical alternative in the thought of Sayyid Qutb, this trajectory, which we could perhaps term apocalyptic jihadism, signals an abandonment of political jihad in favor of a radical quest for salvation and purification based on the eschatological ideal of the perfect Islamic society. It reflects Qutb’s pessimistic impression that Islamic society might be lost forever in ‘the vast ocean of jahiliyyah [unbelief] which has encompassed the entire world’ and could be recoverable only after the Last Day (Qutb 2006 [1964]: 12). The spectral dimension of the Islamic society—as one that no longer inhabits the plane of history but will be fully disclosed in the afterlife—allows here for a lugubrious encounter, resonating with the increasingly armed and apocalyptic precipitation of globalized capitalism. In the face of a market that is more and more presented by a global fideistic discourse posing as an eschatological revelation—as best exemplified by Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man (Di Cesare 2017)—in its millenarian incarnation, global jihadism opposes what we could call an eschatology of generalized catastrophe. It is specifically in relation to this apocalyptic trajectory that Benslama’s and Roy’s characterizations of Islamic radicalization gain particular efficacy, notably when considered in the light of that overall enfeeblement of the social bond and segregating drives that Lacan long emphasized in his later work. While highlighting the intricacies underlying political, theological and socioeconomic factors, we might then describe the apocalyptic eschatology that Islamic terror instantiates as a response to a context in which deracination and precariousness emerge as holistic existential conditions. This approach demands that we fully underscore the impact of massive processes of uprooting and displacement, much as Roy and Benslama have done. At the same time, it also requires that the effects of the increasingly authoritarian and armed logic of financialization be thoroughly traced. Central here is how that global homogenization of the markets to which Lacan pointed has been now fully permeated by an economic theology of a generalized indebtedness that, as a reaction, has stirred another dramatic type of self-immolation typified by the young Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi at the beginning of the Arab uprisings.While families, local milieus, and cultural and social environments are less and less able to offer solid roots, the precarities of working life produced by a neoliberal economic order have contributed to dismantling the old symbolic and imaginary parameters of wealth and social and political integration. In the case of Europe, these precarities have also contributed to the displacing crisis of its self-representation, while, in the wider sense, they have aggravated the type of social erosion that the capitalist discourse promotes (Mura 2015).We can conclude here that they have deprived young generations—now 326

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transformed into the social precariat we have come to know—both of time and of their ability to project into the future: to be the master of their present and future destiny. It is at this moment that contemporary jihadist eschatology achieves primary symbolic appeal as a discourse about time and truth. Apocalyptic jihadism hence articulates its solutions in the light of this general scenario, standing as an invitation to find new ‘roots’ in the afterlife, as I would follow Benslama in stating. Such celestial re-rooting best evidences the return of God’s ‘baneful past’ that Lacan indicated in his interview to Miller, signaling a reversion of his well-known statement: ‘God is dead, nothing is permitted anymore’ (Lacan 2013 [1960]: 25). If God is no longer dead, his vengeful return is instead announced in the actions of the Islamic vanguard, manifesting the reality that everything is again permitted within the hands of said vanguard. Here, terror realizes the fantasy of an absolute liberation of the jihadi, an embodiment of divine violence that eradicates a corrupt human law, finally restoring divine justice. At the individual level, a ‘furious desire of sacrifice’ permits the jihadist to reemerge in the afterlife and reunite with God, thus realizing an ideal of purity through martyrdom. Immolation and sacrifice finally enable the jihadist to disrupt the sign of time and corruption of the body while canceling any trace of singularity. As Benslama puts it, in escaping psychic dissolution, the desire for death allows the subject to find a unified identity finally liberated from all psychic symptoms. It is thus unity that death bestows, reflecting not only self-sacrifice and renunciation but also what Lacan termed the supreme narcissism of the Lost Cause (Benslama 2016: 59).

Conclusion This chapter began with a brief genealogy of psychoanalytic thinking in its broad reflections on religion. It first looked at Freud’s early modernist dismissal of religion, comparing this with Lacan’s valorization of the ethical quests that religion and psychoanalysis are said to share at the heart of their discourse. It then examined Lacan’s later pessimism in opposing the ‘triumph of religion’ in our times to an increasingly uncertain future for psychoanalysis. Moving from a conceptual discussion of these themes to an applied analysis of contemporary challenges, the chapter highlighted the contribution of psychoanalysis to an understanding of the aesthetics of violence informing the eschatology of Islamic terror within contemporary global jihadism. Within the framework of such an eschatology, emphasis was put on the desire for self-immolation and sacrifice that infuses contemporary jihadism and that allows the super-Muslim to reunite with God while achieving a final enfranchisement from the organizing function of the law: they convert because of their desire to be above the law in the name of the law, a law they assume as superior to all others, through which they ennoble anti-social tendencies and sacralize homicidal impulse. The super-Muslim seeks a jouissance, which we would term ‘incest man-God’, for he claims to be confused with his presumed Creator up to the point that he can act in His name. . . . If the Muslim seeks God, the superMuslim believed he has been found by Him. (Benslama 2016: 89) In moving beyond Benslama’s characterization of Islamism, however, a distinction was crucially established between apocalyptic jihadism, which assumes salvation and purification as its supreme objectives, and all those Islamist and even jihadist formations that are substantively committed to a political agenda (whether at a national or transnational level). The latter will act from within the unfolding of time, placing the ummah in ‘the now’ of history, when concrete 327

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political interests may be posited and some form of compromise can always be found, even if this requires engaging in ‘political’ violence. In the extreme form of killing, this split reflects the implacable choice between killing oneself to kill others or killing to be killed. By traversing this second route, far from affirming the historical grounding of the ummah and defending its concrete political interests, any opposition to unbelief is devoted to the salvific celebration of catastrophe and, at the same time, to the necessary purification required for the afterlife. Resistance to unbelief is not therefore aimed at the paradoxical preservation of the community of believers, which would inevitably postpone the Day of Judgment (yawm ad-din). With the ummah posited only as a quest for the afterlife, this eschatology of catastrophe neither restrains nor withholds but rather hurries toward a final reunion at the end of time.

Note 1. A pioneering international conference on this theme, ‘Islamic Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalytic Islam’, was organized by the College of Psychoanalysts UK, Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages (CIDRAL) at the University of Manchester on 26–28 June 2017. For a detailed review, see Mehdi 2017.

References Agamben, G. (2015) Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Akhtar, S. (2008) The Crescent and the Couch: Cross-Currents Between Islam and Psychoanalysis, Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. Baudrillard, J. (2001) ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, Le Monde, 2 November. Benslama, F. (2009) [2002] Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benslama, F. (2016) Un furieux désir de sacrifice: Le surmusulman, Paris: Seuil [quotes translated by the author]. Burgat, F. (2015) ‘A Response to Olivier Roy’s “Islamisation of radicalism” ’, The New Arab, 15 December. Crockett, Clayton (2015) ‘The Triumph of Theology’, in Pound, M., Crockett, C. and Davis, C. (eds.) Theology After Lacan:The Passion for the Real, Cambridge: James Clarke and Co Ltd. Di Cesare, D. (2017) Terrore e modernità, Torino: Einaudi. Di Ciaccia, A. (2006) ‘Note del curatore’, in Lacan, J. (ed.) Dei Nomi-del-Padre seguito da Il trionfo della Religione, Torino: Einaudi. Dunlap, A. (2014) Lacan and Religion, London: Routledge. El Shakry, O. (2017) The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1957) ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, in Strachey, J. (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XI, 1910: Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1961) The Future of an Illusion, 1927, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Freud, S. (2001) Totem and Taboo, 1913, London: Routledge. Hirt, J.M. (1993) Le Miroir du prophète, psychanalyse et islam, Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. Homayounpour, G. (2012) Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Korobko, Y. (2016) Arabs in Treatment: Development of Mental Health System and Psychoanalysis in the AraboIslamic World, Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Lacan, J. (1969) ‘Intervention sur l’exposé de M. de Certeau: “Ce que Freud fait de l’histoire. Note à propos de: Une névrose démoniaque au XVIIe siècle, Congrès de Strasbourg, le 12 octobre 1968” ’, Lettres de L’école Freudienne, (7). Lacan, J. (1972) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XIX: Ou pire . . . Or Worse, 1971–72, Gallagher, Cormac (trans.), published at www.lacaninIreland.com (seminar, 21.06.1972). Lacan, J. (1990) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1991) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, Book I, New York:W.W. Norton & Co.

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Religion and Islamic Radicalization Lacan, J. (1995) ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’, Analysis, (6), 1–13. Lacan, J. (2013a) ‘Discourse to Catholics, 1960’, in The Triumph of Religion: Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lacan, J. (2013b) ‘Triumph of Religion, 1974’, in The Triumph of Religion: Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Laurent, É. (2014) ‘Racism 2.0’, Price, A.R. (trans.), http://ampblog2006.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/lq-inenglish-racism-20-by-eric-laurent.html; originally published as Laurent, Éric, ‘Le racisme 2.0’, Lacan Quotidien, 371(26 January), 1–6. Mehdi, Z. (2017) ‘In Focus: The Other Side of Islamophobia: A Review of the Conference on Islam and Psychoanalysis—University of Manchester, June 26–28, 2017’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, (14), 252–255. Mura, A. (2015) ‘Disorienting Austerity:The Indebted Citizen as the New Soul of Europe’, in Isin, E. (ed.), Citizenship After Orientalism:Transforming Political Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Palmer, M. (1997) Freud and Jung on Religion, London: Routledge. Qutb, S. (2006) [1964] Milestones, New Delhi: Islamic Book Service. Roy, O. (2017) Jihad and Death:The Global Appeal of Islamic State, London: Hurst & Company. Stimilli, E. (2017) The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Tort, M. (2007) La fin du dogme paternel, Paris: Flammarion. Vanheule, S. (2016) ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1948. Žižek, S. (2000) The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London:Verso.

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26 POPULISM Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perelló

Populism seems to be today’s pejorative buzzword in the global political lexicon. It is the word on which the contempt of most of the academics, journalists, and politicians from the right to the leftwing political specter seems to converge. Usually this common rejection associates populism with something considered profoundly vulgar, aesthetically ugly, morally wrong; with the lack of civic culture, civility, and respect for institutions; with what contradicts political correctness; even with authoritarianism, demagogy, and so on. It evokes something uncanny that arouses exasperated disdain. They just cannot stand populism. This is the reason why we should not be surprised when we witness the mass media using this word in a pejorative way to vilify a government or a political party or to describe the personality of a politician or leader with whom they disagree; when we find that within the political arena, politicians use it as a lethal weapon to discredit an adversary; or, within the academic field, when it easily drags academics toward normative sermons. Immediately, we can hypothesize that if populism provokes such aversion, it must be because there is something worth the attention about it—maybe something that has to do with the political potency of this category. In this chapter, we will summarize, first, three general (mainstream) lines of thought about populism: the first emanates from the sociology of modernization; the second is associated with a class struggle perspective; and the third involves a democracy-based analysis This summary will mainly see how these perspectives cannot ‘rescue’ populism from its marginal and vilified position within the field of the social sciences at large. Second, we will introduce the psychoanalytic turn that opens up a new, innovative avenue of research. To achieve this goal, we will follow the theoretical orientation of Ernesto Laclau (2005), whose work played a fundamental role in the systematization of the notion of populism; instead of approaching populism from a predetermined model of rationality, he enriched his perspective by using psychoanalytic categories to locate the reason, the logic, that constitutes populist configurations. Third, we will discuss how this expanded schema of social rationality activated an intense debate within the field of psychoanalytic political theory, where one can encounter lively supporters such as Jorge Alemán (2016) and sophisticated detractors such as Slavoj Žižek (2009).

Tracing Populism If we trace back the main theoretical works about populism, we can organize them around three general lines of thought related to the notions of modernization, class struggle, and democracy. 330

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The classical position of the sociology of modernization characterized populism from a functionalist perspective and directly linked it to a particular phase of social development. Populism functioned as a device that allowed the transition from a traditional society into a modern, industrialized one. For instance, Gino Germani (1968 [1956])—particularly referring to Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s—suggested that the process of industrialization and urbanization had created a large mass of people available for political action. But the problem with the masses was that they had intervened ‘early’ in the process of political development, disrupting the proper institutional framework, upsetting the expected path toward modernization and, therefore, threatening liberal democratic arrangements. In any case, every populist experience was considered to be the expression of an irrational archaism, unable to move along the proper course of modernization. The impossibility for the Latin American experience to follow the ‘European model’ of social change, namely liberal parties and a politicized working class, led Germani to consider populism as a hostile and external phenomenon to liberal democracy— indeed as a pathology that should be explained in sociological terms and, of course, be avoided or, failing this, urgently corrected. The class-based perspective formulated the general argument that populism was the expression of an interclass alliance that did not match the class struggle expected to be led by the workers. Populisms were a diversion from the supposedly ‘orthodox’ or ‘correct’ path, because they dropped the strategic anti-capitalist aim. This argument traversed the traditional analysis that made populism indistinguishable from Bonapartism and also those works that—in the cases of 1920s in Italy and 1930s in Germany—directly associated populism with fascism. And it even pervaded more sophisticated studies, such as the one presented by Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero (1971) regarding the case of Peronism; they stated that populism was a peculiar case of class alliance that far from showing the ‘irrationality’ of the working class, rather expressed its pragmatism. In the Argentinean context of industrialization through import substitutions (an industrialization without an industrial revolution—that is to say, an industrialization that did not follow the European pattern), the emerging working class realized that its demands (particularly those related to income distribution) matched the needs of small-scale entrepreneurs and employers that depended on the domestic market. The ensuing interclass alliance was accompanied by a third element: the state apparatus that supported it. Therefore, the authors concluded that the participation of the working class became an essential aspect to carry out the hegemonic project of a sector of the property-owner class (the small-scale entrepreneurs) and state bureaucracy. This project tended to represent the working class in two different ways: first, as consumers (enlarging the domestic market) and, second, through widening the scope of social and political rights and legitimizing this through popular demonstrations. Nevertheless, in any case, the working class was distracted from achieving its own class interest, its main and definitive goal. In democracy-based analyses, we can encounter a different perspective that did not take for granted that populisms were a threat to democracy or some kind of deviation. They involved a schema highlighting the participatory dimensions of populism as its main political input. Furthermore, far from being considered an accident within democracy, populism was seen as its necessary form. Because a democracy without populism would become a pure institutional procedure, such an elitist form of government would eventually meet its own destruction through populism. This was, for instance, the position put forward by Peter Worsley (1969) and Margaret Canovan (1999). Worsley stated that populism had not only proved that representative democracy had reduced participation to a mere formal matter but also highlighted the value and exercise of participation over such institutional procedures. In this sense, he considered that the direct relation between the leader and the people referred to the idea of a general participation 331

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in politics, and it should not be judged a priori as authoritarian, at least not without first considering the particular context of its emergence. All those who only registered the liberal side of democracy (the procedural side of it) missed the point that populism is compatible with democracy so far as it claims to represent the people through more direct ways of popular participation. Canovan strengthened this argument by affirming that populism is a constitutive dimension of democracy because it is produced by the ineradicable gap that any liberal democratic regime generates (between its opposing, redemptive, and pragmatic faces). And she defined populism as an appeal to the people against the structures of power and the values of the elites (Canovan 1999: 3). In this context, understood mainly at a formal/structural level, populism may acquire different ideological contents, depending on the context and the establishment against which it mobilizes. If the general orientation of sociology of modernization and class-based analysis established that populism was an anomaly or a deviation that either threatened the proper mechanism of the liberal democratic arrangements or altered the expected behavior of the workers in the class struggle, a democracy-based analysis constituted a valuable background for thinking populism free from stereotypes and prejudice, bringing to the surface the complexity of its relation to democracy. However, the psychoanalytical turn allowed one to go much further, by considering populism in its relation to politics itself. In this aspect, the work of Laclau occupies an outstanding place. On the one hand, he reconsidered populism through psychoanalysis to develop its affective dimension. Refusing to consider the idea that populisms constituted an ‘excessive’ phenomenon as opposed to rational political forms, he attempted ‘to enlarge the model of rationality’ (Laclau 2005: 13), ‘to bring to light the specific logics inherent in that “excess” and to argue that, far from corresponding to marginal phenomena, they are inscribed in the actual working of any communitarian space’ (Laclau 2005: x). In this vein, he purported to elucidate its relation not only with democracy or with radical politics but also with ‘the political’ itself, highlighting its nodal function in the constitution of what we call reality. On the other hand, Lacan’s contribution triggered a gigantic debate within the field of psychoanalytic political theory itself, which still continues today.

The Psychoanalytic Turn When a theoretical intervention seems to make a difference, it ‘is never restricted to the field of its initial formulation. It always produces some kind of restructuration of the ontological horizon within which knowledge had moved so far’ (Laclau, qtd. in Butler et al. 2000: 72). Arguably, psychoanalysis is the kind of theoretical intervention that made such a difference. The influence of the psychoanalytic intervention should not be considered exclusively as the emergence of a new field for psychological or medical work or as a new stream for philosophical reflection or for political theory but rather as a modification at the ontological level that enables one to rethink the entire field of social objectivity. If ‘we are still living in the century of Freud’ (Laclau in Butler et al. 2000: 72), we should not be surprised by the fact that a large part of the most challenging intellectual contributions, those which ‘have a say’, are mainly the ones that developed the effects of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. To explore how Laclau put psychoanalysis at the core of his notion of populism, we need first to acknowledge that his approach to psychoanalysis started earlier, with the post-Marxist shift that he facilitated with Chantal Mouffe (1985). They took Marxism where Gramsci and Althusser had left it; and in a deconstructivist gesture, they not only reversed the classic Marxist topology of the base-superstructure model but in effect also displaced it onto the discursive field. And with the use of many psychoanalytic elements and conceptual innovations, they started building the theory of hegemony anew. 332

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Once they stated that ‘Synonymy, metonymy, metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 110); they highlighted the analogies between the discursive and the social field and recast social relations as such as practices conditioned by their meaning-producing capacity. In this way, Laclau and Mouffe suggested that the structuration of the social corresponds to a rhetorical model, and—like in psychoanalysis—they understood that all discourse is overdetermined, that it is never linear, one-dimensional, or continuous. Consequently, they also left aside any idea of linear temporality, absolute beginning, or manifest directionality; there is no final determinism here, no objective laws that rule the development of history. That is to say, there is no longer a preestablished subject of history (the proletariat) marching toward a preestablished destiny (the socialist society). Following but also criticizing Althusser, they assumed the notion of overdetermination, returning to Freud’s conception. According to Laclau and Mouffe, Althusser had reduced the complexity implied in this notion when he linked it to a determination-in-the-last-instance of the economy over the superstructure, smuggling essentialism back. With Freud (1971 [1900]), instead, what we had was radical contingency. Freud highlighted the concept of overdetermination when he studied the constitutive mechanisms operative in dreams. He concluded that analyzing dreams consisted in retracing the dreamwork—the operation of the unconscious. For that reason, Freud introduced a set of concepts, mainly the mechanisms of condensation and displacement, and the notions of nodal point and overdetermination. As a result, from a Lacanian perspective, ‘the essence of the topic that Lacan deduced from the Freudian dream-work was that of rhetoric’ (Rabinovich 1986: 27–28).This orientation was structured through two rules: metaphor and metonymy, relating metaphor with condensation and metonymy with displacement. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe appropriated the mechanisms of dream formation to radicalize Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Metaphor/metonymy—condensation/displacement—were translated into the two logics that constitute hegemony: in their own jargon, equivalence and difference. And the nodal point turned into the empty signifier. Hence, hegemony came to deal with the impossibility of any discourse to cover it all—in other words, to suture the constitutive antagonism that prevents any ‘objectivity’ to close in as a coherent totality transparent to itself. ‘The social is articulation insofar as “society” is impossible’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 114) became their paradigmatic phrase to metaphorically convey the idea that no symbolic order can fully capture reality. What is possible, at most, is a hegemonically articulated order. This radicalized notion of hegemony became the key concept, not only to think politics but also ‘the political’—that is to say, the constitution of reality as such. Every ‘objectivity’, identity, or meaning has a hegemonic structure; moreover, every universality itself has a hegemonic structure. The task of hegemony is impossible—that is, to represent what it is not representable—but at the same time, it is necessary in order to produce signification.There is a hegemonic articulation when a— particular—element assumes the representation of a totality that is completely immeasurable in itself. This element—which turns into an empty signifier—assumes such representation because it is overdetermined as it condenses the largest number of associative chains. In any case, every ‘totality’ (order, identity, meaning, etc.) is always an effect of representation based on the intervention of a particularity.That is why representation in hegemonic articulations is constitutively distorted and takes place in a tense negotiation between the particular and the universal. Related to hegemony, another key concept was antagonism. Laclau and Mouffe defined it as the ‘limit of all objectivity’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 141). If the social exists only as a partial effort to construct society, antagonism—as a testimony of the impossibility of a final suture—is the ‘experience’ of social limit. Antagonism—far from being an objective relationship—involves that which is radically excluded: the condition of possibility and impossibility of every order. 333

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And just as there is antagonism, there is also the possibility of hegemonic articulation. This definition of antagonism was once celebrated by Žižek: ‘Laclau and Mouffe have, so to speak, reinvented the Lacanian notion of the real as impossible; they have made it useful as a tool for social and ideological analysis’ (Žižek 1990: 249). The consequences of understanding antagonism as an insurmountable traumatic core around which every socio-symbolic order is inevitably structured, was not only that any idea of full totality had to be left aside but also that any notion of emancipation as something definitive and complete, something that fulfills all demands—that is to say, that refounds the whole order as such—had to be abandoned. So, the task of a radical democratic project is thoroughly political: to articulate (hegemonically) a political force capable of facilitating the various differences to struggle for a diversity of emancipations. Emancipations that do not have a teleological destiny are never perennially obtained, so they remain always at risk. Psychoanalytic-inspired critics did not wait. Glynos and Stavrakakis (2004) claimed that Laclau was using psychoanalytic elements in his rhetorical model of the theory of hegemony without taking into account the affective dimension—more precisely, jouissance. The absence of this dimension was understood as a kind of downplaying of the affective aspect involved in the configuration of hegemonic formations. However, on several occasions, Laclau showed that he was implicitly aware of the importance of this aspect: ‘the only possible conclusion is that the dimension of affect is not something to be added to a process of signification but something without which signification, in the first place, would not take place’ (Laclau 2004: 302). Laclau’s work, specifically On Populist Reason (2005), responded to this claim with a ‘closer embrace of psychoanalysis’. Radical democratic politics were now directly linked to populism. Populism was defined as a hegemonic form of politics capable of ‘touching’ the status quo that acquires its particular content depending on the correlation of forces within a given context. It was specifically characterized by the figure of ‘the people’, which dichotomizes the social space into two camps of enunciation (‘us, the people’ and ‘them, the enemies of the people’) and the emergence of a leader. The rhetorical model of the logic of equivalence and the logic of difference was crosscut by the affective dimension through three aspects: (1) by Laclau assuming Freud’s thesis on the centrality of the libido; (2) by equating the logic of the object petit a with the logic of hegemony; and (3) by introducing the notion of social heterogeneity, which, from our perspective, may be compared to the Lacanian surplus-jouissance. These three points merit some detailed attention: 1. To think about ‘the people’, Laclau followed Freud’s decision of leaving aside suggestion as a means to explain group unity and placing libido in a key position to understand the nature of the social bond. Every social bond ‘would be a libidinal bond; as such, it relates to everything that concerns “love” ’ (Laclau 2005: 53). Let us remember that after analyzing a paradigmatic type of mass—highly organized, lasting, artificial, and with a leadership—that is, the Church and the army—Freud established that the ensuing libidinal tie is constructed through identification and idealization. But Laclau also found in Freud another model of social aggregation from the one involving a leader—that is, a group that was able ‘by means of too much “organization” to acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual’ (Freud 1922 [1921]: 80). For Laclau these two models do not apply to different kinds of groups, but rather they constitute the two social logics that enter into the constitution of all social groups. Therefore, ‘the people’ of populism presupposes not only affective investment (identification and idealization) but also organization. Regarding leadership, the populist leader cannot merely be the narcissistic despotic father— as in the primitive horde of Totem and Taboo (Freud 2004 [1919])—since his right to rule will always be based on a common quality shared with the other group members who recognize this feature in him or her in a particularly pronounced way. That is the reason why the leader is always a primus inter pares, largely responsible for the community. 334

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2. Strengthening his previous argument that all universality exhibits a hegemonic structure, Laclau stated that something additional has to be considered: there is nothing in the materiality of the particular parts which predetermines one or the other to function as a whole. Nevertheless, once a certain part has assumed such a function, it is its very materiality as a part which becomes a source of enjoyment. (Laclau 2005: 115) That is to say, it is a radical investment that makes a part assume such a function. Laclau explored the notion of radical investment from through the arguments of Žižek and Joan Copjec; from Žižek, he took the idea of nomination to build his own definition of the social productivity of naming, and from Copjec, he took the notion of the partial object of jouissance. As a result, he left aside the early idea of representation involved in hegemonic articulations to move on to the notion of radical investment. Now, then, it will be the name that makes the Thing exist: ‘The logic of the object petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are simply identical’, affirmed Laclau (2005: 116). The partial object of jouissance does not imply a function of representation regarding the inaccessible Thing, but rather the Lacanian formulae of sublimation: to elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing. It becomes clear that with this movement, Laclau established Lacanian jouissance at the core of his notion of hegemony and therefore in the constitution of any universality, of reality itself. And it is also clear regarding populism, that what Laclau called the social productivity of naming is the idea that the names of ‘the people’ are what give unity to a set of heterogeneities. Nomination thus turns out to constitute a fundamental dimension of populism, not only because the chain of equivalence becomes an effect of naming but also because it is related directly to the leader and the singularity of every populist formation: An assemblage of heterogeneous elements kept equivalentially together only by a name is, however, necessarily a singularity. The less a society is kept together by immanent differential mechanisms, the more it depends, for its coherence, on this transcendent, singular moment. But the extreme form of singularity is an individuality. In this way, almost imperceptibly, the equivalential logic leads to singularity, and singularity to identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leader. (Laclau 2005: 100) 3. Laclau made another move regarding his early take on hegemony when he circumscribed the notion of heterogeneity, separating it from the concept of antagonism and defining it through the circumlocution of ‘the people’: The break involved in this kind of exclusion is more radical than the one that is inherent to the antagonistic exclusion: while antagonism still presupposes some sort of discursive inscription, the kind of outside that we are now discussing presupposes exteriority not just to something within a space of representation, but to the space of representation as such. We will call this type of exteriority social heterogeneity. (Laclau 2005: 140) With the introduction of heterogeneity, Laclau displaced the notion of antagonism to the symbolic-imaginary register; antagonism inhabits discourse and presupposes a (distorted) way of inscription, contingent but at the same time necessary for the system’s constitution. The 335

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heterogeneous, on the contrary, does not get inscribed; it is the real as a remainder that insists as the leftovers of the process of signification itself. Here Laclau draws on Georges Bataille to develop his notion of heterogeneity. Bataille (1985) defined the heterogeneous as ‘unproductive expenditures’: all that is ‘rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value’ (Bataille 1985: 142). Laclau and Bataille coincided in conceiving heterogeneity as an excess that involves an affective dimension, in as much as the heterogeneous elements provoke ambivalent affective reactions like fascination and rejection. But there is a fundamental divergence, as Alejandro Groppo indicated in a detailed comparison: ‘although in Bataille the heterogeneous opposes the logic of homogeneity, it is—in the last instance—dialectizable’ (Groppo 2010: 72). On the contrary, for Laclau, social heterogeneity cannot be dialectically surpassed: ‘Heterogeneity is primordial and irreducible, it will show itself, in the first place, as excess. This excess cannot be mastered by any sleight of hand, whether by a dialectical reversal or some other means’ (Laclau 2005: 223). Here Laclau’s recourse to Lacan becomes clear: the non-dialectizable excess is ‘equivalent to what Lacan called caput mortuum, the residue left in a tube after a chemical experiment’ (Laclau 2005: 140). Because as Roudinesco (1994: 207) suggested, Lacan used Bataille’s ‘heterogeneity’ to invent his notion of the real as a remainder and also diverged regarding the insurmountable nature of heterogeneity. Evidently, Laclau’s equation between the heterogeneous as the non-dialectizable excess and Lacan’s caput mortumm is far from arbitrary. We can move a step forward and take the equation even further. If we consider heterogeneity as that which cannot be subjugated by the exchange system of commensurability and proportions, as what cannot enter into the system of signification, what is impossible to assimilate—that is to say, as an ‘unproductive expenditure’, a pure waste—then we can interpret Laclau’s heterogeneity as analogous to Lacan’s surplus-jouissance. If we ask ourselves the same question with Lacan—what is jouissance?—we find that his same answer also suits Laclau: ‘Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance (instance). Jouissance is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien)’ (Lacan 1998 [1972]). Last but not least, another decisive aspect of heterogeneity is that it cannot be understood as a mere exteriority. Heterogeneity destabilizes the external/internal binary. Lacan created the neologism extimacy [extimité] to denominate the complex relation between the internal and the external: the most intimate sphere to the subject is experienced as a foreign body (Miller 1994). Therefore, when considering Laclau’s take on ‘the people’ of populism, we have to bear in mind that ‘the people’ is a figure traversed by the heterogeneous as a constitutive extimacy. On the one hand, the people is crossed by the incalculable, the undomesticable—that is, the heterogeneous that cannot be mastered by the logic of difference and the logic of equivalence; and, on the other hand, the people is a politically constructed figure that puts a series of differences within an equivalential chain to create a popular subjectivity. In other words, Laclau’s populist assemblage cannot ultimately inscribe the heterogeneity that inhabits the plurality of demands articulated in a chain of equivalence.The people, as such, is the result of a radical construction and implies an insuperable gap between the real (heterogeneous) and the contingent modes of its symbolization.

Supporting and Detracting Populism: Alemán and Žižek Laclau’s conceptualization of populism opened up an enormous debate within the framework of global psychoanalytic political theory that aroused opponents and supporters. We will present the arguments of two renowned intellectuals to summarize the antagonistic positions involved. Let us start with Alemán (2016), one of the most prominent psychoanalyst theoreticians of the Spanishspeaking world, who openly supported the Latin American populist tide and elaborated a political 336

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reflection that put Laclau against Laclau to defend populism.With Laclau,Alemán argued that we can escape neoliberalism only through a hegemonic (populist) experience. Against Laclau, Alemán stated that neoliberalism is not a hegemonic articulation. Regarding this second aspect, Alemán proposed to take Lacan’s notion of capitalist discourse to rethink capitalism in its neoliberal mutation. Capitalist discourse refers to a circularity that has no outside; actually, it functions as a ‘counter discourse’ given that its own circular movement—which implies an incessant ‘return to the same place’—attempts to fully cover over the symbolic universe. Capitalism in the neoliberal mode behaves as an ‘acephalous force’ that spreads out unlimitedly reaching even the last confines of life. And that is precisely where the novelty of neoliberalism lies: on the capacity of producing subjectivities that are configured by the business, competitive and managerial paradigm of our own existence. (Alemán 2016: 15) The symbolic universe that traverses neoliberalism acts as a rational device that pretends to promote different ways of subjectivity, but it incessantly repeats the same within the unlimited circuit of commodities. However, Alemán also points out that the peculiarity of neoliberalism is that it is the first historical regime that tries to unify the two different dimensions of the symbolic order of language: on the one hand, the subject traversed by language—that is to say, the dependence of the speaking being on the structural dimension of the constitution of subjectivity (the living being is captured by language—even before being born and after death—to turn him/her into a subject)—and, on the other hand, the sociohistorically built domination (the contingent discursive configurations of different epochs). Although they appear to be mixed together, they follow different logics. The first one involves a dependence, impossible to be eliminated. The second one is a sociohistorical construction capable of transformations. In this sense, the specificity of neoliberalism would involve any attempt to ‘take the first symbolic dependence over, and affect not only the bodies but also to capture the living being—by the word—in its structural dependence’ (Alemán 2016: 14). The consequences will be that structural dependence, which involves the symbolic identification that allows the subject to be part of a transgenerational chain, is devastated. In other words, if structural dependence constitutes a condition of the possibility of historical legacies and common inheritances, the neoliberal regime intends to build a ‘new human’ that originates in her or her own present time without any ‘cause’ or symbolic legacy, but precarious and fluid as commodities themselves. Capitalist discourse in its neoliberal mode attempts a totalization in as much as it connects every place by contiguity, reduces every difference to its circular circuit of commodities, and consequently blocks the possibility of being interrupted; therefore, any other experience of the subject becomes impossible. However, this is precisely where Alemán agrees with Laclau. Because if the capitalist discourse proposes an unlimited circuit where nothing is impossible, hegemony—on the contrary—puts limit-imposing frontier effects through the articulation of elements that never nullify the differences between themselves and assumes the impossibility of society. Moreover, hegemony rejects any attempt of totalization and supposes a kind of formation that supports the gap, allowing the emergence of subjectivities that escape from the neoliberal placement.That is why neoliberalism hates hegemonic articulations and any thinking about emancipations (Alemán 2016: 17). Therefore, populism is not a resignation of the radicalism of revolutionary transformation, but it is even more radical because in a materialist way, populism admits the impasses and the 337

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impossibilities that show up when the excluded and not represented part tries to constitute a hegemonic alternative to the dominant power. (Alemán 2016: 21) Populism—strongly asserts Alemán, once again pitting Laclau against Laclau—can only be a left-wing expression as it is always contingent, built around the emptiness of the subject and the unstable equivalence of non-satisfied demands. Then, one should not use the word populism to designate neoliberal fascist expressions. The right-wing positions do not deserve such a gift. On the contrary, the kernel of Žižek’s argument is that populism can never be an emancipatory type of agency, because it always involves a ‘long-term proto-fascist tendency’ (Žižek 2009: 280). Indeed, he derives this conclusion from a critique of Laclau’s argument. First, he accepts the idea that populism can be thought of as an abstract—formal—logic of politics; a ‘kind of transcendental-formal political dispositif’ (Žižek 2009: 276) that can express different political positions from the right to the left of the political spectrum. But second, he criticizes Laclau’s position concerning the abstract logic of populism, which needs to be ‘supplemented by the pseudo-concreteness of a figure that is selected as the enemy, the singular agent behind all the threats to the people’ (Žižek 2009: 280). The problem would be that populisms always project the constitutive antagonism of any social order onto a positive entity—that is, onto an external enemy whose destruction would bring justice and balance back. Consequently, the target is always the ‘enemy or intruder’ that is spoiling the system, but never the system as such. That is why populisms never fight the proper battle that everybody on the left must be willing to face: the one against capitalism itself and not, for instance, against an enemy such as financial manipulators. And that is also why Žižek affirms that ‘Laclau likes to emphasize that Society does not exist, nor does the people, and the problem with populism is that, within its horizon, the people does exist’ (Žižek 2009: 281). ‘The people’ of populism would be a ‘unified people’ inasmuch as it needs an ‘external/reified enemy’ to antagonize. In a few words, Žižek reduces populism to a political expression that would enact the idea of ‘the people-as-one’. In this respect, the questions that could initially be asked are the following: How could the people become a unified entity when it is built on an unstable equivalence initially constituted by differences? Is Žižek not completely ignoring Laclau’s argument regarding the object petit a that renders the plenitude (the Thing) inaccessible? Is it possible to directly assume a political struggle against ‘the system as such’, avoiding the antagonism that emerges when ‘touching’ concrete interests that forces us to face concrete enemies to defeat? Is it possible to struggle against financial capitalism—or capitalism as such—without antagonizing the concrete financial manipulators? Here again universal struggle seems to pass through the particular.

Conclusion If we consider Laclau’s extended model of populist reason and rationality, we can point to at least three aspects that summarize how he introduced some important conceptual innovations to remedy the shortcomings of the three aforementioned mainstream lines of thought. First—following Freud—Laclau destabilized the rational/irrational binary when he introduced the thesis of the libido. The sociology of modernization and the class struggle perspective were trapped in this binary opposition. On the one hand, according to the sociology of modernization, populism is the expression of an ‘irrational’ archaism, and on the other hand, according to the class struggle perspective, populism is an expression of a ‘rational’ pragmatic strategy of the working class in a class alliance, although it did not follow the expected path. On the contrary, for Laclau the rational or pragmatic aspect is only one of the logics that is present in every 338

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political construction. We always have the organizational dimension (‘the rational side’) and the leadership dimension that involves the libidinal bond (‘the irrational side’) entering into the constitution of each and every social group. However, Laclau’s position goes far beyond the mere idea of considering these dimensions as two sides of the same coin in that he also stated that political constructions are always overdetermined. And as we have already mentioned, overdetermination responds to the logic of the primary process of the unconscious and not to the logic of the secondary process associated with consciousness. That is to say, libido pervades the organizational dimension too. This first aspect is directly linked to the second one, which deals with the question of the subject. The three ‘orthodox’ lines of thought rely on a complete conscious agency of the subject.The subject may make ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ decisions, but they are in every case conscious ones: it may deviate from the due course of modernization; the working class may skip its assigned historical task through a pragmatic decision; or it may even decide to participate in rekindling liberal democracy. However, Laclau’s notion of the subject—taken from psychoanalysis— does not correspond to a conscious subject. This became clear when he introduced the concept of dislocation (1990) in his theoretical development. Dislocation is the failure of the structure to achieve closure as such; therefore, it is the source of freedom. In Laclau’s own words, Dislocation is the source of freedom. But this is not the freedom of a subject with a positive identity—in which case it would just be a structural locus—rather it is a freedom of a structural fault which can only construct an identity through acts of identification. (Laclau 1990: 76) Structural dislocation is considered the source of freedom because it is where the absence of structural determinations of the subject emerges. For that reason, the structural gap becomes the place of the subject, the moment of a decision beyond the structure. Dislocation is the place of the subject, in as much as it is the place of a lack where the subject equals ‘the pure form of the structure’s dislocation, of its ineradicable distance from itself ’ (Laclau 1990: 76). In Lacanian words, Laclau’s subject is a subject constituted by lack. Third, ‘the people’ of populism, from Laclau’s perspective, is constituted through an act of nomination. Unlike the three previous lines of reflection on populism that take ‘the people’ as already assembled or in the making, Laclau’s ‘people’ is produced through an act of naming.This is an act of creation: the proper name names and brings forth something new. If, for instance, we take the subject as a class subject, we find that it is commensurable, conscious, located within a determinate social structure, conceptually built, and so on; but if we consider the subject as the subject of lack, we find that the act of naming is a consequence of the subject of lack that is incommensurable and unconscious and that occupies an indeterminate place within the structure. That is why we can say that ‘the people’ becomes the name of the subject; in other words, Laclau’s proposal challenges us to think about the people of populism as a radical construction through an act of naming and not as merely a subsumption of elements under a conceptual category. At this point, Lacan can help us conclude. He stated that the signifying battery lacks the signifier that names the subject, and consequently, he did not specifically define it. However, we find that Lacan’s notion of the subject emerges from his definition of the signifier—that is, from his statement that ‘a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier’ (Lacan 2006a: 694). If we follow Marchart (2005) and take Lacan’s definition seriously, we could translate it into Laclausian terms and say that a signifier—the leader—represents the subject—the people—to 339

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other(s) signifiers(s): all the elements that participate in the articulation. Naming is constitutively linked to that which is unrepresentable, to what remains heterogeneous to the play of differences, but once it has been named, it acquires access to the system of signification. The proper name, the name of the people, can be understood only in relation to what is heterogeneous, defined in opposition to the homogeneous camp (the social, the signifier, etc.). Laclau’s populist articulation is the result of such a radical nomination; in this way, all that was discarded by the three previous lines of thought as irrational, excessive, hostile, and so on tends to inhabit ‘the people’ as an irremovable guest.

References Alemán, J. (2016) Horizontes neoliberales en la subjetividad, Buenos Aires: Grama Ediciones. Bataille, G. (1985) ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927– 1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 137–160. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London and New York:Verso. Canovan, M. (1999) ‘Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy’, Political Studies, XLVII(1), 2–16. Freud, S. (1922 [1921]) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in International Psycho-Analytical Library, No. 6, London,Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press. Freud, S. (1971 [1900]) ‘The Dream Work’, in Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 277–310. Freud, S. (2004 [1919]) Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, London: Taylor & Francis. Germani, G. (1968 [1956]) Política y sociedad en una época de transición, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paidós. Glynos, J. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2004) ‘Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing out the Limits of Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan’, in Critchley, S. and Marchart, O. (eds.) Laclau: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. Groppo, A. (2010) ‘Heterogeneidad y política en Bataille y Laclau’, Studia Politicae, (20), 59–73. Lacan, J. (1998 [1972]) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Miler, J-A (ed.), Fink, B (trans.), New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2006a [1960]) ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Écrits:The First Complete Edition in English, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 671–702. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London:Verso. Laclau, E. (2004) ‘Glimpsing the Future’, in Critchley, S. and Marchart, O. (eds.) Laclau: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London and New York:Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, M. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London:Verso. Marchart, O. (2005) ‘In the Name of the People: Populist Reason and the Subject of the Political’, Diacritics, 35(3), 3–19. Miller, J.A. (1994) ‘Extimacy’, in Bracher, Mark et al. (eds.) Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, New York: NYU Press. Murmis, M. and Portantiero, J.C. (1971) Estudios sobre los orígenes del peronismo, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Rabinovich, D. (1986) Sexualidad y significante, Buenos Aires: Manantial. Roudinesco, É. (1994) Lacan. Esbozo de una vida, historia de un sistema de pensamiento, Buenos Aires: FCE. Worsley, P. (1969) ‘The Concept of Populism’, in Ionescu, G. and Gellner, E. (eds.) Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, London: Macmillan. Žižek, S. (1990) ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’, in Laclau, E. (ed.) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2009) ‘Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough in Practice, But Not in Theory’, in Žižek, S. (ed.) In Defense of Lost Causes, London and New York:Verso, 264–333.

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27 ARTS Cecilia Sjöholm

Walter Benjamin famously stated in the 1920s that in modernity, the self-alienation of humankind ‘has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order.This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art’ (Benjamin 2006: 242). Theodor Adorno in turn formulated in one of the most quoted passages from his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’ that ‘This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art’ (Adorno 1991–2: 92–93). What this means is that modern art does not give away political messages at the level of content. They appear, rather, as symbolic objects of political conflicts: between class and other forms of identity, freedom and oppression, solidarity and nihilism. These conflicts are integrated into the way that the work is used, performed, and mediated. The vast array of political conflicts of the 20th century have informed the movements of modernism and are still negotiated in new artforms today. At the heart of these negotiations lie phenomena that psychoanalysis, ever since Freud, has observed as forces of culture: desires, drives, and various forms of transformation. Freud’s writings on culture, such as Civilization and Its Discontents, point to the limits of politics; aggression is located at the heart of Western civilization (Freud 1961: 56–62). What art can do is sublimate; sublimation is the transformation of drives into expressions of culture. This is the challenge for Freud. It has been taken up, not least by Benjamin and Adorno, in the attempts to understand the migration of the political into art. The most important writers today to have taken up the challenge are Slavoj Žižek, who has continued the legacy of Jacques Lacan, and perhaps most importantly Julia Kristeva, who considers psychoanalysis and art to be political practices per se. Another perspective on the relation between psychoanalysis and politics, no less important, is offered by artists themselves. Psychoanalysis is relevant not just for the understanding of political movements and orientations in art. Indeed, and this is what will also interest us here, psychoanalytic concepts and observations often lie at the core of the strife to rethink art’s political possibilities. Artists, writers, and filmmakers of the 20th century and beyond have resorted to psychoanalysis to negotiate the artistic process politically. This chapter will focus on three concepts illuminating that strife: the subject, the object, and the negotiations of pleasure. Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex and its permutations stand at the heart of all of these.What is at stake is not so much what the political can be or how we can engage in politics through art but rather how art can work with these three bolts of the oedipal. How are we to understand the 341

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subject’s ability or nonability to act? How are we to understand the object of desire, and how can its objecthood be made political? And finally, how can the experience of (artistic) pleasure be inserted within a political context?

Politics of Oedipus/Paralysis of Hamlet Freud made the Oedipus complex a model of desire. As has often been noted, the Freudian subject is typically male, and the object of desire is coded as feminine. As Habermas noted, Freud discovered the internalization of patriarchal laws (Habermas 1987: 284). In other words, Oedipus is not to be understood as a metaphysical model of how the individual develops certain features of desires and drives. These are distinctly to be understood in a social context. To Adorno, who used the model in the Dialectics of Enlightenment, desire is inherently attached to a certain form of subjectivity, which is white, male, and colonial (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). The other, as woman, nature, or body, is distinctly separate from such a subject and therefore can be controlled and dominated. In this perspective, colonialism and patriarchy are discourses of strength and exploitation.They encompass the belief that the subject of desire is a representation of power and ability. However, this belief is not quite what Freud is after. It is also contrasted by modern tragedy. In this way, the artform that appears to first have given rise to the Oedipus complex, Greek tragedy, is in fact—and paradoxically—preceded by modern tragedy. This means that Freud’s model was never bereft of all the problems that presented themselves with the modern account, which was offered by Shakespeare. Indeed, in Shakespearean tragedy, the plot is always political: it is about power, secrecy, domination, and manipulation. Freud’s account of the oedipal structure was first introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1995: 282–283).Yet, its first protagonist was not so much Oedipus as it was Hamlet. Hamlet’s aversion to sexuality and his incapacity to act are both signs of repression, Freud argues. He is a subject of self-loathing, incapable of acting out. From a political perspective, Hamlet is a figure of alienation. If Oedipus is a model of the subject of desire, then Hamlet is a subject of paralysis. Unable to act, he becomes a symbol for inertia. Lacan considered Hamlet a tragedy of desire. Paralysis comes with the foreclosure of desire, and the figure of Hamlet becomes a ‘failed’ Oedipus. In his understanding of Hamlet’s paralysis, Lacan quotes Freud, who in turn quotes Goethe in saying that Hamlet is inhibited in action by thinking too much (Freud 1995: 282–283). This would be the easy way to explain paralysis: it is eternally reflected in the forms of philosophy, poetry, or art. Paralysis is frozen by definition, in contrast to the doings of praxis. The philosopher, the artist, and the poet are melancholic individuals unable to move beyond the subjugation of passivity. But Lacan does not buy such analysis. Paralysis, to Lacan, is not necessarily contrasted to action, or rather, it is not contrasted to acting out (Lacan 2013: 301). In fact, Hamlet does act out. Throughout the play, Hamlet is plagued by the urge to revenge the murder of his father, committed by Claudius, who also marries Hamlet’s mother. In a sudden flash, Hamlet kills Polonius, Ophelia’s father, whom he mistakes for his stepfather, Claudius, behind the curtain, in the bedroom of his mother, Gertrud. This is indicative of how we should conceive of Hamlet. He is in fact doubled by Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father and entered into marriage with his mother. The oedipal structure is all too obvious. In Hamlet’s acting out, he is not just the cold subject of passive melancholy and pretentious madness; he is also the cold subject able to kill. This reframes the subject of paralysis. Hamlet may be a failed Oedipus, from a symbolic viewpoint. He kills Claudius, his stepfather, and not his father. But it is not the failure or success of the paternal killing that is at stake here. It is rather the aim of the action and the way it is framed within the play. 342

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The act of Oedipus, Lacan argues, supports the life of Oedipus (Lacan 2013: 376). It is committed by a hero who acts unknowingly, who has no idea about what this entails. With Hamlet it is the other way around. Hamlet knows that he is guilty. He knows that he is paralyzed and incapable.The figure of Hamlet, therefore, is radically different from Oedipus; Hamlet walks eyes open into his own downfall. He willingly becomes a part of political schemes, injustices, and repression. Hamlet is a modern subject of an action who is inseparable from desire; but it is not desire that comes first but rather the action itself. With Lacan, one could argue, then, that the oedipal drama of the birth of desire is transformed into the Hamletian drama of the end of desire, of the eclipse of desire where unconscious fantasies are replaced by a paralyzing and guilty form of knowledge. Hamlet knows all too well what is going on. Why, asks Lacan, are the moderns, with their self-reflection, more neurotic than the ancients? The answer to this has to do with knowledge (Lacan 2013: 376). Hamlet knows that he is guilty (Lacan 2013: 293). What characterizes Hamlet, then, in contrast to Oedipus, is a cynical form of reason; he knows what he should do (revenge his father and reveal the usurpation of power by his uncle), but he is unable to perform the required actions. This is also what makes Hamlet a tragedy of modern political reason. We know what is to be done, but we cannot do it. Hamlet’s inertia is a symbol for this, as is the result of his acting out: he produces not a response or remedy to the state of political repression under which he lives; instead, he produces more confusion and disaster. In ‘Education after Auschwitz’, Adorno argues that Freud’s most perspicuous contribution to cultural analysis was the insight that ‘civilization itself produces and increasingly reinforces anticivilization’ (Adorno 2005: 191). This implies that one cannot do anything about the structures that produce civilization. The moment that the remedies against its sicknesses are proposed, their undoing has already begun. Reason is undermined, since civilization has already produced the forms of its excess: the superego, subjugation, and excessive coldness. To Adorno, the excess of reason that we live with produces neither cynicism nor guilt. It simply produces profound political indifference. In Adorno’s writings, we find an analysis not only of what comes after Oedipus but also of what comes after Hamlet. This is to be found in Europe of the Cold War in the 1950s, in Beckett’s plays. Shakespeare’s hero is grimly foreshortened by Samuel Beckett in The Endgame—‘the last, liquidated dramatic subject echoing the first’, as Adorno writes. The Shakespearian subject is transposed from Hamlet to Hamm (Adorno 2000: 343). This brings with it an entirely new schema for the antagonisms implicating subjectivity. The problem of political paralysis, in Beckett’s drama, is no longer something that is inside the individual. It is unveiled, instead, in the fragmentary scenery and imagery of the play. Hamm is blind, cynical, and bitter, without hope and without future. In this way, he is the undoing of individuality, the displacing of character for Schein, or illusion, the undoing both of subject and reality: here ‘the downfall of the individual brings the entire construction of bourgeois existence down with it’ (Adorno 2000: 370). The melancholy and neurosis of Hamlet is given up and replaced with the fragmentary being of Hamm. Hamm is also associated with one of Noah’s sons and thereby with the flood: the progenitor of blacks, who replaces the white ‘master race’ in a Freudian negation, Adorno argues. This minor remark is of course referring to Hamm symbolizing the end of the white male European subject. The kind of subjectivity that is going down here is the northern, melancholic white male unable to act: Hamlet. Hamm exposes the absolute vacuity behind such a form of subjectivity. Beckett stares right into the ‘limitedness of limitless self-sufficient progress’ (Adorno 2002: 224) The catastrophes that his time have produced—the atom-bomb, the concentration camp— are all the products of cold reason. Beckett, picturing his characters immobile in dustbins, points to the ultimate form of paralysis that reason has produced. To Adorno, art can picture this, but 343

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art remains as impotent as reason: ‘art in the face of mortal threat becomes ideology through the harmlessness of its mere form’ (Adorno 2002: 250) Beckett’s drama, in this way, points to the political paralysis that has followed from Oedipus over to Hamlet to Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell. The undoing of the oedipal subject as a subject of action ultimately points to the paralysis of postwar politics. To Freud, Oedipus is a subject of desire as well as of action. In Shakespeare’s drama on Hamlet, the subject is frozen. As Adorno has demonstrated in his readings of Hamlet and Beckett, the image of the frozen subject is deeply political. As will be discussed in the next section, the undoing of the subject of action, as demonstrated in modernist art, has, as its counterpart, the absolute reverence of the object of art. The considerations of the object within Marxism and psychoanalysis have developed in parallel movements and do have certain things in common. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis point to the fetishization of the object as one of the most prominent features of our times. As the next section will demonstrate, the aesthetic object may be seen as a model of fetishization but also as the object through which fetishization may be negotiated as such.

The ‘Preponderance’ of the Object and Its Vicissitudes in Art At the other end of the oedipal subject appears the object of desire. In critical theory, the concept of the object and its multiple forms has been given an extraordinary amount of attention. Adorno appeals to the ‘preponderance’ of the object in Negative Dialectics, by which the subject becomes defined by features of the object (Adorno 1999: 183–184). In Marxist though and in psychoanalytic thought, the object has been defined as an object of desire. From a Marxist point of view, the object is something we could trade for social status. Consumer goods are symbols for social exchange. Commodity fetishism, after all, is one of the cornerstones of Marxist theory. The value of the object falls back on the subject. The Marxist individual is a subject of desire, whose wishes are projected onto an object bestowed with glow and radiance. Its shine has less to do with its appearance than with the projections of the subject. Its value is, so to speak, fetishized. In bourgeois society, objects of art are fetishes per se; they are bestowed with a magic power supposed to permeate a certain class of individuals. The object in psychoanalysis is not a thing but another person, a structure discovered by Freud in Studies on Hysteria (1895). This was then brought into artistic practices and into the analysis of art. It would have been difficult to imagine Hans Castorp’s obsession with Clavdia Chauchat in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain without its Freudian undercurrents or Gustav von Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio in Death in Venice. In Freud’s own writings, the analysis of figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo served to unravel the method of the analyst detective through a certain phallic logic, by which the fetishization of the artwork, in da Vinci’s case the male body, became an integral part of artistic sublimation (Freud 1990). Cinema, which has been overwhelmingly occupied with the darker side of the Oedipus complex, reworked these psychoanalytic undercurrents. No one may doubt the perversion of the Freudian desires and drives in the stabbing of the nude victims of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), as his dead mother is revealed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Most often, however, it is the nude female body that is conceived as the classic object of aesthetic pleasure. One can only think about the many paintings in which we are expected to peek at the nude body as a form of secret pleasure: Rubens’s Susanna im bade, Édouard Manet’s Olympia, and Pablo Picasso’s Le déjeunder sur l´herbe, Les demoiselles d´Avignon. Literature offers similar forms of voyeurism and has done so since the 18th century: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 344

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allows us to peek into a young girl’s bedroom, as does Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Anne Desclos’s The Story of O. The female body isn’t the only one to have been objectified; the male body—from Apollo to boy bands—has also been made objects of scopic lust. What makes the fetish distinct is not its nature but how it incorporates fantasies. The human body is an object that is sculpted and remade to fit ideological agendas. The aesthetic relation is not always coded through a distinctly identified subject or object, with a viewer engaging in a fetishized body. Psychoanalysis, at the next level, indicates in which way the aesthetic field can be regarded as a wider concern than one merely applied to works of art as objects of pleasure. Lacan, abstracting the Freudian model of Oedipus, introduced objet petit a as cause of desire (Lacan 1998). The structural correlation between object, desire, and the subject remained, but it was detached from its original bourgeois setting. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the fetishization of the object through the gaze became even more pronounced but at the same time coupled with a dark underlining. It reaches the death drive through objet petit a’s ambivalent status between desire and drive. In Lacan’s own lectures, this relation was introduced through the analysis of a work of art: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the younger, a 16th-century painting in which the gaze of the viewer is drawn toward the image of a skull inserted in the painting as a trompe l´oeuil effect. The objet petit a reworks the notion of object and makes it a thing of fantasy and thus, as Slavoj Žižek has shown, of ideology (Žižek 2009). As demonstrated by Lacan in his looking at the painting, aesthetic pleasure is ambivalent.The gaze directed toward the image is perforated by the fascination of absences and fears as much as the pleasure taken in the contemplation of beauty (Lacan 1998: 85–90). It is this, also, that makes emancipation difficult; the object of dominance, in the form of the female body, for instance, is idealized and feared at the same time. Therefore, artistic practices are unable to reach at the kernel of political emancipation in a direct manner: fantasies that keep us dominated and subjugated are inevitable.They can, however, be traversed. In psychoanalytic terms, this means that they can be recognized and undone. Artistic practices can translate this by other means: the discourses of the object can be affirmed and challenged by the same means.

Challenging the Object Artistic practices of the 20th century and beyond have been greatly influenced by psychoanalysis. If politics, as Adorno suggested, has migrated into the work of art—a suggestion much in line with contemporary theories of art’s autonomy—this has to do not with art’s content but with artistic practices as such. Radical movements within the arts—from the surrealists of the 1930s to the performance artists of the 1960s and to today’s street art activists—have used and abused the fetishistic power of the object to make powerful political points. The birth of new forms of art in the 1960s—installations, performances, and so on—challenged the idea of art’s fate as an object, a commodity, in a market. The creation of works that simply disappeared challenged not only the cultural and economic value of art but also, at least in its inception, a system in which collectors could invest in art and thus perpetuate a market based on the exploitation of art. Marxism, critical theory, and psychoanalysis refer to the object as a matter of desire, from a social, economic, or unconscious point of view—a framework which has been simply naturalized. To return to the question of desire from a psychoanalytic viewpoint entails therefore not the unraveling of a ‘truth’ of the unconscious but rather the disruption of discourses of objectification and fetishization. Whatever the aim may be—a critique of normativity, a critique of Western hegemonization, a revisiting of the role of gender in political life, or a new kind of illumination of the relation between slavery and mastery—the confrontation with artistic objects can be used to rethink fundamental issues in politics. 345

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Frantz Fanon, for example, has introduced relations of race and power, undoing the racialized naturalization of the object (Fanon 2008). Contemporary artists such as filmmaker Steve MacQueen has integrated Fanon’s undoing of the scopic drive as a naturalized phenomenon and pointed to its inherent racial construction. Judith Butler, in turn, has criticized the heteronormative conditioning of psychoanalysis in general. Through a reading of Antigone, she has criticized the dependence on a patriarchal family structure, which is held to be ‘symbolic’ rather than biological or social but still normative and normalizing (Butler 2000: 19; Sjöholm 2005). Antigone also reveals a political crisis, for instance through the rewriting of Fémi Òsófisan and the undercurrents of slavery and colonial motives. These readings use Antigone to rethink fundamental issues in politics. She has become a model that offers a turn toward, and a new perspective on, gender, subjectivity, and agency in Western cultural and intellectual history: ‘abandoning Antigone is not something we are simply free to do’, as Bonnie Honig has put it (Honig 2013: 37). The question of Antigone’s desire can be read as a critique of the object. Whereas Marxism, critical theory, and psychoanalysis refer to the object as a construct of desire, from a social, economic, or unconscious point of view, Antigone points to its immediate undoing: the object is not to be had; it slips away as a thing of the dead already from its inception. Our desire is not directed toward an object; it is caused by a split inherent in subjectivity as such. If we are to use Antigone, then, to return to the object as cause of desire, it is not to unravel its ‘truth’ but rather to disrupt and do away with discourses where the object is naturalized and fetishized. In this, the fantasy of the object is traversed. For all these reasons, from a political viewpoint, Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter, stands as one of the most powerful political figures in contemporary culture. As this section has shown, then, art has a privileged position when it comes to unraveling the complex ideological structures that fetishize the object and make the subject split and foreign to itself. As the next section will discuss, art may also point to the adverse and perverse consequences of this split. Julia Kristeva has shown the adverse side of the fetishization of the object to be nihilation and disgust. Kristeva is one of several feminist thinkers and artists who have shown the relation to the object to be one of the most poignant political questions of our time.

Abjection, Fascism, and Fantasy The structural conditioning of the object through a psychoanalytic perspective has been challenged from many viewpoints. As Luce Irigaray has shown in her philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, the long speculative tradition has confused the male gaze, logos, and the metaphysics of presence (Irigaray 1985). Kristeva has challenged the dependence of psychoanalysis on a phallic logic and its reliance on the infallible structure of the ultimately desired object (Kristeva 1982). When any simple conception of the aesthetic object as a thing of pleasure is annihilated, the result is, however, not simply that the male gaze of dominance and the female body of submission are overrun. In other words, the destruction of the ideological object is not always emancipatory. At the limits of the oedipal structure, we also find forms of being where aesthetic revolt is deeply nihilistic, sometimes racist or fascist. Julia Kristeva has thus renewed the question of the object through the concept of abjection. Abjection is a form of exclusion of the unconscious, which results in a liminal phenomenon that can be situated neither in the subject nor in the object.The abject appears in forms that fascinate us: through disgust and other corporeal reactions. As Rosalind Krauss has shown, the abject in art can also be called l’informe, the formless. It belongs to a tradition in 20th-century art that has existed alongside other forms of modernism (Bois and Krauss 2000). Abject art is to Kristeva a form of revolt. It is a political revolt, but unchained from ideals. This is also what makes it the artistic equivalent of political nihilism. Abject art introjects forms of politicized abjection—for 346

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instance, in the form of the anti-Semitic writings of Ferdinand Céline. Kristeva has used his novels to analyze subjectivities that are dominated by the abject; fleeting and elusive, they are empty, fortified castles whose desires are shallow. The abject prevents desire from doing its work. This affects not just object choice and sexuality but subjectivity as such. It becomes hollow, incapable of pleasure (Kristeva 1982). Certainly, there can be an emancipatory potential to the abject. This might lie in its critical reflection, as it does in the work of Georges Bataille and Cindy Sherman, for instance—through Bataille’s challenge of capitalism in obscene novels and Sherman’s provocation in an imagery of distaste. But abjection is not emancipatory per se. It may destabilize the fetish-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture. But abjection is sometimes entrenched in the same limitations that it challenges—as in the case of the fascist-leaning Céline in his critique of society. We may take as an example a film that evokes this phenomenon: White Material (2010) by Claire Denis, a French filmmaker who evokes the liaison between the intimate and the political. The film is set in an African country without a name, in a non-determined time. It describes the final disintegration of a colonial power. But the film as such does not give a historical, social, or political description. It is, like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, an allegory about human disintegration, where issues of war, racism, and so on affect a few characters who become increasingly isolated, detached from any distinct social or political context. The film’s main protagonist, Isabelle Huppert, is a farmer who refuses to escape the attacks of insurgents against the government and against the remnants of colonialism, and she eventually goes under. But the final catastrophe only releases a sense of annihilation, which has been present for a long time. The white woman is caught up in her own universe, unable to perceive the world around her. Her son is a Céline-like figure, filled with hate, loathing, and self-disgust. He is as attached to his mother in that he is filled with hate for her. His inability to act leads to disaster: he is almost killed in an encounter with child soldiers. The experience causes a change. He shaves his hair, unveils his tattoos, steals his father’s gun, and departs on a trip of drugs and violence with the gang that almost killed him. At the same time, he dresses as a white supremacist. His nihilism, confusion, and self-hatred are total. At the end of the film, he is burned to death in a barn by government forces. As we encounter his black body, we see the fulfillment of the logic of abjection: the violence that has been directed toward others is really about destroying the self. The confusion about identity, which has taken its expression as racism and violence, is also about the foreclosure of the self. Again, we confront, as in the writings on Céline in Kristeva’s analysis, the disintegration of a phallic structure in a fascist personality and its ensuing closure of psychic spaces. What Denis’s film points to is not only the aftermath of colonialism. She shows how processes of subjugation and dominance involving the drives can arise in any society, especially when going through social and political disintegration. Set against a background without specific details or description, in a state between dream and wake, the film makes fantasy a central feature of political dramas. As this chapter has argued, the psychoanalytic notion of the Oedipus complex, and its permutations into various notions of the subject-object relation, is the backbone of the political dimension of psychoanalysis as such. The previous section has shown Julia Kristeva’s perspective on the relation between subject and object to be pointing to its inherent political dimension and its negotiation within the domain of art. As will be discussed in the next section, the political dimension of art, then, lies not in forms of representation but rather in how the ‘intimate’ domain—that is, the unconscious relation to the object—is capable of transforming our political awareness. The political dimension of art, as well as of philosophical reflection and psychoanalytic discourse, lies not in its content or its form of expression but rather in how the subjectobject relation is negotiated and transformed. 347

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Psychoanalysis and the Critique of Representation To Adorno and Horkheimer, popular culture is engaged in producing a culture of fantasy (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). In the wake of Adorno and Horkheimer’s writings, evoking psychoanalysis, Kristeva offers a critique of the fixation on visual images in contemporary culture. This fixation on visual imagery is an aid to what psychoanalysis, such as in the writings of Lacan, perceives as fantasy: a psychic fixation on something that appears ‘natural’ and real but that has its ground in ideology, perhaps even in a form of oppression. Kristeva contrasts images to imagination, which opens psychic space in a different way. The psychoanalytic concept of fantasy is not the same as imagination. Whereas fantasy is fixation, imagination is a mobile aid to thought and judgment; Kristeva’s thesis is that the symptoms of today’s ‘maladies’—depression, hysteria, abjection—are produced by an incapacity to move beyond stale forms of visual imagery. When imagination no longer functions, we are run over by ‘images without imagination’, killing the capacity to think and feel.This is also the effect of fantasy. Since the capacity to imagine is in peril by the submission to fantasy, a threat emerges: the threat of the destruction of psychical space—the space of producing new images, of thought, of feeling, of new beginnings. To Kristeva, the emancipation of this space must be the beginning of all political action (Kristeva 2003). So how are we going to avoid being destroyed by too many dead images? Kristeva talks about the ‘intimate revolt’ (Kristeva 2003). By this, she refers to the liberation of psychic space through artistic processes on the one hand and philosophy and psychoanalysis on the other. Only in the field of the arts is it possible to fully affirm such a revolt. Kristeva is not referring to a political or moral revolution but rather to the possibility of gaining access to the spaces that now remain closed behind the domination of ready-made fantasies. The greatest malady of today is, according to Kristeva, that we do not engage in the revolt but instead we remain passive and closed up (Kristeva 2003: 57). In contrast to the Marxist tradition and to Lacan, Kristeva considers the life of sensory experience to have political value. She is interested in bonding, corporeality, sensory experience, emotions and affectivity, our experience of the world. The processes of art are emotional and affective as well as corporeal. What art can do is counter the risk of having our inner life killed by too many dead images. The task of a revolt of the ‘intimate’, as Kristeva calls it, would therefore not be to push art closer to politics in the sense of political negotiations of the everyday but rather the opposite. It consists in showing how sensibility is always politicized. In this, Kristeva’s line is not far from that of Jacques Rancière, although to Rancière, artistic practices do not come close to psychoanalytic practices. To Kristeva, they are altogether intertwined. To Kristeva, and to Žižek, the question of politics begins with the falling apart of a strong symbolic order. But to Kristeva, political revolt does not ultimately begin by the overturning of a political order through the means of the collective or the state. Instead, art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis hold the means of evoking new political engagements.

Countering Pleasure As argued at the beginning of this chapter, the cornerstone of the relation between psychoanalysis and art lies in the negotiation of the subject-object relation. This cannot be considered without giving attention to the question of pleasure: certainly, there is a lot of pleasure in Kristeva’s notion of intimacy; the political potential of art, then, has not only to do with ideas or forms of awareness but also very much with how art succeeds in releasing pleasures and fancies in a universe with little constraints. In the following, the political and ideological implications 348

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of aesthetic pleasure will be considered, in particular through the feminist critique offered by the revolutionary artists active in the 1960s. ‘There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague’, Immanuel Levinas wrote (Levinas 1989: 142). In our time, the idea of enjoyment is perhaps all too linked to ideas of the body and sexuality. The kind of pleasure that Levinas refers to, however, does not point to a sexuality of which one should feel ashamed. It has to do with the fact that art cuts out a piece of reality as Schein, the shine of semblance, cutting itself free from every form of responsibility. It allows us to enjoy in a moment when we are released from the weight of reality. In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, aesthetic pleasure becomes a pillar of the selfreflexivity of the transcendental subject (Kant 1987). Pleasure, to Kant, is sensed as a moment that we wish to retain; the pleasure of the gaze is sensed through the very wish to prolong it. As critic Laura Mulvey has shown in one of the most important papers to introduce politics into the analysis of cinematic art, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the oedipal structure is inherent in the cinema in this way (Mulvey 1975). The camera lives off its retention on the female body and its skin, making pleasure the affect by which the scopic drive—that is, the perverted intensity of viewing, is reproduced. As Adorno and Horkheimer noted in their critique, the cultural industry lives off the promise of a pleasure that will never be fulfilled. But still, the promise of pleasure is also what undoes a politics of popular culture (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). But what happens when the gaze is redirected, when it is no longer evident that the aesthetic object is an object of contemplative pleasure? A long line of 20th-century artists have challenged the hegemony of phallic pleasure: Claude Cahun, Dorotea Tanning, Toyen, Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, and many more, not least Louise Bourgeois, whose phallic sculptures strive to capture sheer pleasure at the cost of power. All of these artists explored Freudian themes in the postwar art scene: dreams, mythology, sexuality, aggression, and identity and its porousness. Psychoanalytically inspired imagery was used as emancipatory tools, in the work toward artistic practices that widened the scope of what art can be and what an artist can do. During the 1960s, many artists, female artists in particular, took up the legacy of those mentioned in the preceding paragraph and explored the political relation between gaze, pleasure, and objectification, undoing the oedipal structure not only from the viewpoint of the object but also through the experience of pleasure itself. While the modernist project explored streams of consciousness, the self, the object, and so on, performance artists brought the female body into the limelight.The aim was not to evoke pleasure through the scopic gaze but to return that gaze. Yoko Ono, Carole Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Shigeko Kubota, and Judy Chicago all challenged the logic of phallic pleasure. Carolee Schneeman writes, I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material—a further dimension of the construction. . . . I am both image maker and image.The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will. (www.caroleeschneemann.com/eyebody.html) Her photographic images in Eye body, Transformative Actions, from 1963, confront the pleasure of the gaze—for instance, as she lies on her back with a snake on her chest. Returning the pleasure of the gaze, the work makes the body into a polymorphous tool with its tentacles motivated by pleasure. Meat Joy, in turn, is an erotic ritual with men and women rolling around with colors and raw meat, a collective ritual of pleasure. In Interior Scroll (1975), a performance that remains in the form of photos, Schneeman pulls a thread with paper clips from the vagina with 349

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the following message: ‘My work has to do with cutting through the idealized (mostly male) mythology of the abstracted self ’. The subject, its pleasures, and the discourses of art are being mutually undone, in artistic practices that cut across the critique of the ‘preponderance’ of the object, the dominance of the male self, and the submission of the body.

From Pleasure to Enjoyment Artists like Carolee Schneemann and thinkers like Julia Kristeva have clearly pointed to the inherent subversive possibilities of pleasure in art. Scheemann relies on the reversal of the subject-object relation, and Kristeva questions any clear-cut distinction between subject and object in the experience of art. To both, the power of art is in many ways enough; as has been indicated in this chapter, both consider art to be subversive through how it addresses and subverts the relation between subject, object, and pleasure. With Jacques Lacan’s concept of enjoyment, however, new dimensions are evoked with regard to the relation between subject, object, and pleasure. Slavoj Žižek has argued that the production of pleasure has long since been overtaken by the production of enjoyment (Žižek 1996). Enjoyment signals the collapse of distinctions between suffering and pleasure. Enjoyment is a term developed from Freud’s notion of the drives and Lacan’s jouissance. In Freud’s text from 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he introduced the concept of the death drive. Freud has difficulties in talking about it because sexuality still rules and because the beyond appears at first to simply be a way to postpone pleasure. Freud talks about it as the compulsion to repeat, which gives pleasure a ‘demonic’ character (Freud 1989: 55–73). Freud later transfers the organic explanation of the death drive to culture. Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1929, shows the drive as a liminal phenomenon, which exists in the gaps and discrepancies of culture (Freud 1961: 86–87). The drive is a fiction situated between the somatic and the mental; a drive can be sublimated into objects of art. To Lacan, enjoyment directs us beyond sublimation toward the sublime: the modern subject is therefore caught in the pangs between desire (which has an object) and enjoyment (which has none). To Žižek, the strong, symbolic systems of 20th-century Europe, and their subsequent disintegration into a postcommunist world and a hypertrophied liberalism, have produced a specific form of fantasy: the search for pleasure has given way to a command of enjoyment. The dominant fantasy today, according to Žižek, is that our enjoyment, to which we believe ourselves to have a right, is never attained, because someone or something is stopping it. This logic can be exemplified by the film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Luis Buñuel, a director whose work in many ways must be regarded as a counterpart to Žižek’s theorization. The film circles around an event that never takes place: a dinner. It was shown for the first time in 1972, when the protests against the war in Vietnam echoed at its strongest and were finally achieving results, when feminism had begun to take root, and when the protests against the petty bourgeoisie in Western Europe became increasingly politicized. The theme of the film, the dinner, encircles one of the most holy rituals of the bourgeoisie. Like all of Bunuel’s films, it is built on the surrealist logic of unexpected encounters, chances, and dreams—but also failures, mistakes, the inability to conceive of reality, and the failure to control one’s impulses. The dinner guests are at a restaurant, which is suddenly transformed into a funeral office. They appear in a military coup and are being shot at. The hosts are suddenly overtaken by strong sexual impulses and disappear. Or suddenly, when they finally are at the table, the curtains on the wall are drawn apart, and they find themselves exposed on a stage: a scene of exhibitionism and scopophilia. Bunuel clearly exposes the thin layers of bourgeois manners as bad covers of the desires and drives of sexuality, aggression, and perversion that dominate our times. But what is also 350

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important, Žižek argues in The Plague of Fantasies, is the repetition of the failed encounter: the dinner never takes place. At the heart lies a failed encounter: it is in this failure that we find the function of fantasy (Žižek 1996: 128–130). There is a perverse structure hidden in this belief in the failed encounter: what happens, Žižek argues, is that the dinner guests deliver themselves to the fantasy that chance will always stop them from what they want. The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie has a counterpart in The Exterminating Angel, which in turn is about a dinner which no one is allowed to leave. It takes place in the same bourgeois setting, with the difference that the dinner never ends. There does not appear to be a cause for this: the guests simply remain, eat up, and drink up for hours, days, and weeks.The film ends with scenes of sacrifice: this is the ground zero of the movie. The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie is about not being allowed to enter. The Exterminating Angel is about not being allowed to leave. They are two side of the same inability, Žižek argues (Žižek 1996: 128–130). They are at the limit at which we keep hanging to gain something: enjoyment, power, the release of aggression, and so on. At the same time, it is this hanging on, this insertion in fantasy, that keeps reproducing political paralysis. Here, we have come full circle. The paralysis that haunted the modern subject of tragedy, Hamlet, is being repeated. And this is perhaps what psychoanalysis points to most clearly through its reflection on artistic practices: politics may have migrated into the object of art. We can use that migration and discover new dimensions of our being that have a political bearing. But psychoanalysis, above all, points to ours limits as political beings. The tragic logic of desire, over and over again, brings us to the brim of freedom. There, perhaps, we perish.

Conclusion Sigmund Freud already recognized that psychoanalysis offers a unique and necessary perspective on politics. As the first part of this chapter argued, the particular formation of the subject of action that is posited by psychoanalysis offers a key to its political relevance. Art offers multiple figures symbolizing the impact of the unconscious on the capacity or incapacity of action, from Oedipus to Hamlet, the latter being the figure who, in the writings of Jacques Lacan, most clearly points to the paralysis of the modern subject. In the 20th century, Hamlet became a symbol, also in the work of Adorno and Beckett for instance, for the dead-end of modern subjectivity. Adorno, therefore, turned to the analysis of the object, and the aesthetic object in particular, to negotiate emancipatory potentials elsewhere. However, he failed to fully recognize the fetishistic tendencies involved in the reverence of art. As this chapter has gone on to demonstrate, feminist artists and thinkers in turn, have been subverting in particular the fetishistic relation to the object of art, where women were often represented as symbols of pleasure. In a certain sense, when the gaze of pleasure fetishizes the female body, the relation between subject and object appears to be oedipal. However, as Julia Kristeva has shown, psychoanalysis may also be used to challenge fundamental presuppositions concerning the relation between the subject, the object, and negotiations of pleasure. The backbone of art’s influence on the political sphere, from her point of view, lies in the possibility of a radical transformation of this relation. As argued in the final part of this chapter, however, this driving force of art, demonstrated by Kristeva, points also to the psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment, which has been used by Slavoj Žižek in particular to demonstrate the passivizing ideology that plagues our times. Psychoanalysis, therefore, both points to the political use of art and demonstrates its shortcomings. The psychoanalytic subversion of the subject through art can, as Kristeva has shown, be used for political purposes. But it can also make the subject of action withdraw into the sphere of 351

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paralysis: knowing too much and, at the same time, knowing too little, as Lacan showed regarding Hamlet. In this way, psychoanalysis and art both demonstrate the fragility of the political subject.

References Adorno, T.W. (1991–2) Notes to Literature, 2 vols, Weber Nicholsen, S. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno,T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997) Dialectics of Enlightenment, Cumming, John (trans.), London:Verso. Adorno, T.W. (1999) Negative Dialectics, Ashton, E.B. (trans.), London: Continuum. Adorno, T.W. (2000) The Adorno Reader, O´Connor, B. (ed.), London: Wiley-Blackwell. Adorno, T.W. (2002) Aesthetic Theory, Adorno, G. and Tiedemann, R. (eds.) Hullot-Kentor, Robert (trans.), London: Continuum. Adorno, T.W. (2005) ’Education After Auschwitz’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, Pickford, H.W. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 191–204. Benjamin, W (2006) Selected Writings, Jennings, M.W., Eiland, H. and Smith, G. (eds.) Livingstone, R. and others (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bois,Y.-A. and Krauss, R. (2000) Formless: A User’s Guide, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Butler, J. (2000) Antigone’s Claim, New York: Columbia University Press. Fanon, F. (2008) Black Skin White Masks, Philcox, Richard (trans.), Rev ed., London: Grove Press. Freud, S. (1995) The Interpretation of Dreams, Strachey, J. (trans.), New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1961) Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Freud, S. (1989) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Freud, S. (1990) Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,Tyson, A. (trans.), London:W.W. Norton & Co. Habermas, J. (1987): Knowledge and Human Interests, Shapiro, Jeremy J. (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press. Honig, B. (2013) Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, Gill, G. (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kant, I. (1987) Critique of Judgment, Pluhar, W. (trans.), London: Hackett. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Roudiez, L. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (2003) Intimate Revolt: The Power and Limits of Psychoanalysis, New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Sheridan, A. (trans.), London: Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (2013) Le Désir et son Interpretation, Paris: Édition de la Martinière. Levinas, I (1989) The Levinas Reader, Hand, S. (ed.), London: Blackwell. Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Sjöholm, C. (2005) The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Žižek, S. (1996) The Plague of Fantasies, London:Verso. Žižek, S. (2009) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London:Verso.

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PART V

Challenges and Controversies

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On 30 September 1939, one week after Sigmund Freud’s death, a lengthy obituary appeared in The Lancet, in which the anonymous author quoted extensively from an equally anonymous, ‘intimate impression’ of Freud by one of his close colleagues (NN 1939).This impression, which we now know to have been relayed by the British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, contains an interesting anecdote about Freud’s alleged dislike for unnuanced, dogmatic thinking: ‘Once when a heated discussion on political topics arose, he was accused of being neither black nor red, Fascist nor Socialist; his amused reply was, “No, one should be flesh colour”—the colour of ordinary men’ (Riviere 1973 [1939]: 130). The peculiar construction of this sentence has always made me think that ‘the colour of ordinary men’ represents Riviere’s own interpretation of Freud’s bon mot rather than a clarification that he added to it himself. Plausible as her reading may be, perhaps Freud’s witticism should not be taken to imply here that amid a heated discussion, the founder of psychoanalysis jokingly confessed to being a political populist nor, for that matter, that the beige politics of ‘ordinary men’ appealed more to him than the more vibrantly colored varieties of their politically affiliated counterparts. Indeed, I think it would be mistaken to regard ‘flesh color’ as a metaphor for ‘neutral’ or ‘colorless’, not in the least because the human skin tone is many-hued and never achromatic. Rather than conveying political indifference, Freud’s quip may thus have been intended more precisely as an encouragement for people to stay truthful to their haecceity and as a protreptic for political systems to stay attuned to the fundamentals of the human condition, as Freud himself had conceived them—recognizing human diversity while acknowledging human beings’ visceral and universal propensity to egotism, interpersonal violence, self-destructiveness and illusory self-governance. Given Freud’s inveterately pessimistic outlook on life, which is clearly reflected in his bleak perspective on humanity, this position is hardly humanistic, yet it is emphatically subjectivist and vaguely reminiscent of the Protagorean homo mensura theorem.1 If this is how Freud’s political stance should be captured, then the question is to what extent it also affected, infiltrated and permeated his brainchild—the theory and method of psychoanalysis— in its construction and applications. Obviously, psychoanalysis was not invented as a new social theory, for the purposes of ideology critique or political analysis, but rather as a theory of human mental functioning, a treatment paradigm for the neuroses, and a broadly applicable method of investigation.2 Yet Freud’s primary aim of developing an innovative, clinical science of the mind does not preclude his discipline from being shaped by his own values, and from these values to 355

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endow psychoanalysis with a political status, or with a certain outlook on sociopolitical configurations. This may explain why quite a few of the early Freudians were not just medical doctors but politically conscious clinicians with a social reform agenda. It may further explain why, from the 1920s, various prominent psychoanalysts entered the political arena and why, over the past century, psychoanalytic theory has proven exceptionally fertile soil for political philosophers and social theorists, to the point where some scholars have considered it to be an indispensable conceptual tool for any serious analysis of the sociopolitical and cultural fabric. The fact that, with very few exceptions, the politically minded early Freudians were either left-leaning social democrats or erstwhile Marxists, and that over the years Freudian theory has been employed primarily, if not exclusively, by leftist scholars, could also prompt the conclusion that psychoanalysis is intrinsically ‘red’, at least in terms of the European political color-coding system. However, in this chapter, it is argued that this conclusion is too simple and that, much like Freud’s own politics, psychoanalysis too remains distinctly ‘flesh colored’, which renders it both protean and atopic, neither achromatic nor reducible to an instantly recognizable shade. After having probed deeper into Freud’s (admittedly sparse) comments on politics, this chapter shall demonstrate how his political views and values were carried over into his (exceedingly elaborate) theoretical and clinical inventions, where they took the form of a (self-) critically subjectivist doctrine, containing a unique mixture of conservative and progressivist principles. On account of this, psychoanalysis was at one point outlawed by the political regime that was initially considered by many to be most aligned to its basic tenets, yet for this reason, psychoanalysis has occasionally also been able to maintain itself under those sociopolitical circumstances that would seem most hostile to its premises. Even though it may come across as inherently left-wing, individualist, and Jewish, psychoanalysis has shown itself to be politically versatile and ideologically malleable, which has contributed greatly to its transnational reception and cross-cultural sustainability, albeit in many instances at the cost of some of its most cherished principles.

Freud’s Cynical Skepticism Contrary to quite a few of his compatriots, when the American writer Max Eastman arrived at Berggasse 19, on Friday 25 March 1927, it was not with the intention of starting an analysis with Sigmund Freud. Eastman had already tried his hand at psychoanalysis with Smith Ely Jelliffe and Abraham Arden Brill in New York (O’Neill 1991: 11–12, 54; Gifford 1991: 138; Hale 1995: 68–69; North 1999: 66; Irmscher 2017: 106, 241), and according to his most recent biographer, he only ever thought of asking Freud to refer him to another psychoanalyst while he resided in Europe, rather than expecting the great man himself to have enough time for him or to be willing to take him on (Irmscher 2015; 2017: 191). Nonetheless, by his own admission, when Herr Professor greeted him with the question ‘What did you want?’ he simply replied ‘Not a thing. . . . I just wanted to look you over’ (Eastman 1942: 265). It was the start of a rather awkward, tense and uncomfortable conversation about the reification of the unconscious, Bolshevism, and American politics, which did not stop Freud from intermittently producing effusive bursts of laughter and suggesting to his guest that he write a volume called The Miscarriage of American Civilization (Eastman 1942: 272). No doubt emboldened by a favorable comment that he had received from his psychoanalytic ‘Father Confessor’ (Eastman 1942: 263) about a section on Marx and Freud in his recently published book Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution (Eastman 1926), and eager to get his interlocutor to show his cards, Eastman asked Freud: ‘What are you politically?’ (Eastman 1942: 270). The answer was as unceremonious as it was gnomic. Without elaborating, and immediately taking the conversation in a different direction, Freud 356

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responded: ‘Politically I am just nothing’ (Eastman 1942: 270). Taken together, Freud’s recommendation to Eastman about the one book he should definitely write, and his response to the American’s attempt at getting him to declare his political hand, betray a personal attitude toward politics that I can only describe as ‘cynical skepticism’, although one could probably also see in it an exemplification of what Lacan once designated as Freud’s ‘political agnosticism’ (Lacan 2006[1966]: 728). Ever since his first (and only) visit to the United States—during the late Summer of 1909— yet to some extent already before he had seen the New World with his own eyes, Freud had developed a visceral (and some would say irrational) aversion to almost everything American. Although his lectures at Clark University were well received and he could have capitalized on the opportunity to greatly enhance the international profile of psychoanalysis, the United States made Freud sick—literally and metaphorically. Apart from his utter distaste for what he perceived to be the Americans’ vulgar obsession with money, which incited him to refer to the United States as ‘Dollaria’ (Noth 2014: 276), Freud also deplored the fact that the United States had downgraded the father ideal (Nunberg and Federn 1974: 14), which had purportedly resulted in the progressive decline of (male) authority, so that women were now prone to rule (over men) and public morals were less than enlightened (Freud 1927; Freud 1961[1927c]: 49). In his critique of the United States, Freud would often seem to present himself as a male chauvinist, ultra-conservative, right-wing ideologist, yet in reality his position was much more complex and nuanced. Instead of simply proclaiming that patriarchy is a necessary precondition for social integration and stability, he felt that the Americans were living under the neurotic illusion that unconstrained liberal enterprise would bring individual happiness and socioeconomic wealth. Instead of simply arguing in favor of the maintenance of clearly identifiable, (masculine) power structures, he was deeply skeptical about the American conviction that a stable society could be built on the pillars of individual liberty, voluntarist self-fashioning and personal ambition. What he particularly despised was that the typically American, self-indulgent belief in the dream of limitless opportunity had simply lured citizens into a false sense of freedom and prosperity; in reality, they were constantly being forced into repression by evangelical Christian family values, highly restrictive sexual morals, pietistic fanaticism and dubious prohibition laws.3 In addition, many of the things Freud hated about the Americans—their love of money, reckless ambition and unrestrained narcissism—he would have had to recognize also in himself (Falzeder 2012: 97), so that his stance toward the United States was perhaps ambivalent at best and disingenuous at worst. Freud’s undisguised hatred for American capitalism could easily be seen as the manifest corollary of his latent affinity with socialist or social-democratic regimes. And indeed, on the other side of Europe, Russian communism commanded Freud’s attention in a much more sympathetic vein, although here too his feelings remained generally mixed, to the point where he could never bring himself to acknowledging the Bolshevik revolution as containing the promise of a new social utopia. Just prior to Eastman’s venturing to draw out his interlocutor’s political allegiance, Freud conceded that Bolshevism had led to ‘an intensely interesting experiment’ (Eastman 1942: 270), yet he was not prepared to place a bet on its successful realization. Two years later, on the eve of the Great Depression, he expressed his skepticism about the success of the communist experiment in a famous passage in Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1961[1930a]). According to Freud, the communist belief that private property is responsible for the corruption of the human spirit, and that its radical abolition will create the circumstances for harmonious social development, was a false psychological premise, because it ignores the fact that aggressiveness is an ‘indestructible feature of human nature’, which will continue to disrupt civilization even when other, more insidious forms of proprietorship, such as people’s presumed exclusive sexual 357

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rights over their partners within the family, are in turn abolished and replaced with complete sexual freedom (Freud 1961 [1930a]: 113–114). In ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’, Freud went so far as to label Russian Bolshevism as but another type of religion, governed by its own millenarian illusions and rife with its own sanctions and prohibitions (Freud 1964[1933a]: 180), whereas in one of his final meditations on the matter—at a time when the Soviet Union had been firmly established—he did not hesitate to claim that the withdrawal of religious opium and the installation of a certain degree of sexual liberty had been purchased only at the cost of ‘the most cruel coercion’ and the complete removal of freedom of thought (Freud 1964[1939a]: 54). Hovering between the Christian piety of the Americans and the secular New Economic Politics of the Russians, he admitted that the latter appeared ‘like the message of a better future’, yet his self-confessed skepticism prevented him from being too hopeful: The future will tell us; perhaps it will show that the experiment was undertaken prematurely, that a sweeping alteration of the social order has little prospect of success until new discoveries have increased our control over the forces of Nature and so made easier the satisfaction of our needs. (Freud 1964 [1933a]: 181) What transpires from these brief fragments is that in the realm of politics, Freud generally voted with his feet, abandoning the scene rather than committing himself to one or the other type of sociopolitical agenda. Ernest Jones reports that Freud never voted for the Austrian Christian-Social Party, owing to their strong anti-Semitic manifesto, yet that he did not vote for the Socialist Party either, although he could appreciate their social reform policies. Only when a third, significantly smaller Liberal Party sent a candidate to the local election would he be enticed to vote (Jones 1955: 391). However, his skepticism toward politics did not stop him from arguing in favor of strong, intellectually superior leadership as the hallmark of a stable social order (Freud 1961[1927c]: 8–9) which, in the last instance, would have to be embodied by an enlightened despot. As he wrote to Albert Einstein in 1932:‘The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason’ (Freud 1964[1933b]: 213). When, in April 1933, the Italian playwright Giovacchino Forzano, whose daughter was in analysis with Freud’s pupil Edoardo Weiss, asked Freud for a personal gift for his friend Mussolini, he took a copy of this open letter to Einstein and inscribed it with the words: ‘Benito Mussolini with the respectful greeting of an old man who recognizes in the ruler the cultural hero’ (Accerboni 1988; Roazen 1991; Roudinesco 2016[2014]: 359). It would no doubt be comforting to many were this inscription be just another unequivocal staple of Freud’s gallows humor—much like the phrase ‘I can recommend the Gestapo very much to everyone’, with which he signed a ‘certificate of fair treatment’ just before the Nazis allowed him to leave for London (M. Freud 1957: 217)—yet we cannot be so sure of the sardonic irony in his salute to Il Duce. Edoardo Weiss, who first detailed the precise context of this puzzling episode, wrote that the statement reflected Freud’s acknowledgment of the archaeological excavations that Mussolini was promoting at the time (Weiss 1991: 20), whereas others have categorically refused to see in it anything else than classic Freudian sarcasm (Carloni 1989), or an encrypted dismissal of Mussolini’s belligerence (Finchelstein 2009), as if it would have been unthinkable for Freud to applaud the Italian leader’s political authority and his iron regime of law and order. Freud’s persistent disenchantment with political systems—capitalist and communist, conservative and progressivist, reactionary and revolutionary—and his concurrent, mostly idle prospect of seeing social stability ensured through citizens’ voluntary submission to instinctual renunciations that are imposed by the power of reason may constitute a more accurate interpretation 358

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of his ‘flesh-colored’ politics than Riviere’s reliance on the figuration of ordinary people. When he responded to Eastman with the sally that he was nothing politically, one could detect in this an echo of Freud’s political skepticism and a declaration that the psychoanalytic science that he practiced had nothing to do with politics. Even then, it may also amount to Freud’s concealed admission of a fundamental impossibility: the impossibility for the scientist to become a politician, the impossibility for science to have political import. As he said to Joseph Wortis, by way of retort to the communist allegations against psychoanalysis: ‘A science cannot be bourgeois . . . since it is only concerned with facts that are true everywhere’ (Wortis 1984: 59). And perhaps Freud’s sally epitomised the impossibility of politics itself, insofar as it remains doomed to fail in its attempts to extinguish the discontents in civilization and to sustain a stable social order. At this point, politics (or government) would rejoin psychoanalysis (and education) among the impossible professions (Freud 1961[1925f]: 273; 1964[1937c]: 248)—intrinsically futile procedures for inducing long-term psychosocial happiness and inherently flawed practices for guaranteeing prolonged individual and social well-being.

The Protean Politics of Psychoanalysis One of the most challenging issues for historians of psychoanalysis is to explain how Freud’s invention was received and assimilated cross-culturally and transhistorically, under different political regimes. To be clear, it is not so much the description of the implantation and dissemination of psychoanalysis across the globe that poses a problem, but rather the explication why it managed to thrive and survive under certain political constellations and why it was rendered anathema under others. Over the years, quite a few scholars have argued that psychoanalysis cannot prosper under authoritarian (dictatorial or totalitarian) political conditions and is able to maintain itself only within democratic societies, in which personal autonomy, self-governance and freedom of speech are unrestricted (Roudinesco 1994: 82–85; Lear 1999: 19; Goggin and Brockman Goggin 2000: 40; Widmer 2004[1995]: 279; Parker 2011: 192). In addition, it has sometimes been posited that predominantly collectivist societies, such as Japan, could never accommodate the individualist principles on which psychoanalysis is based (Moloney 1953), whereby Jacques Lacan even went so far as to proclaim that the Japanese subject is ‘unanalyzable’ (Lacan 1977[1976]; 2001[1972]), thus making ‘the couch of the Rising Sun’ both ineffective and superfluous. Mutatis mutandis, there is a lingering popular belief that psychoanalysis cannot flourish under Islamic rule, in which politics are inextricably linked to religion, because individual liberties are constrained and the sociocultural values of group cohesion, sexual restraint and gender segregation run counter to the psychoanalytic emphasis on the emergence of the unconscious, sexual subject. Persuasive as some of these arguments and opinions may be, the historical and contemporary geopolitics of psychoanalysis are in reality much more complicated, so much so that the logic behind the political reception of psychoanalysis seems fuzzy and inconsistent. Given the fact that psychoanalysis was invented by a Jew, however godless he may have felt, one could have expected it to become strictly proscribed under the fiercely anti-Semitic Nazi ideology, yet it miraculously endured, despite the forced emigration of most of its practitioners, including Freud himself.When the Nazis gained power in Germany in January 1933, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and Institute was not disbanded or outlawed, although Freud’s books had been burned by the German Student Union in May 1933, in a massive auto-da-fé of some 20,000 volumes of subversive ideas. Instead, it was put under the directorship of Matthias Heinrich Göring, a neuropsychiatrist and Adlerian psychotherapist who was the cousin of Hermann Göring—one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi party. In keeping with the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi ideology, Göring could not accept the presence of Jewish practitioners and 359

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so proceeded to enact a gradual ‘Aryanization’ of the Society’s membership, yet at the same time he did not think one should throw out the baby with the bathwater. Alongside a number of non-Jewish German psychoanalysts, he negotiated with Ernest Jones, in his capacity as president of the International Psycho-Analytic Association (IPA), for psychoanalysis to be subsumed under the auspices of a new German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, which would gradually gain momentum under the sobriquet of the Göring Institute. At one point, Jones wrote to Freud’s daughter Anna that he preferred psychoanalysis ‘to be practiced by Gentiles in Germany than not at all’ (Lockot 1994: 43, note 42), while in an attempt to secure the discipline’s survival he even dared to claim that psychoanalysis was not inherently unfriendly to the Nazi worldview (Lockot 1994: 51; Zaretsky 2004: 227). Until the end of World War II, the Göring Institute received extensive financial support from the Nazi government for the enhancement of its research activities and for the strategic development of its treatment facilities. In 1936, around the time an Aryanized version of psychoanalysis was officially introduced in Germany, Freudian doctrine was formally prohibited in the Soviet Union, even though prerevolutionary Russia had been the first non-European country to wholeheartedly embrace Freud’s ideas and despite the fact that after the October Revolution of 1917, psychoanalysis continued to flourish under Lenin’s rule. Many of the members of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, which was officially established in 1922, were also high-ranking figures in the ruling Communist party, and for many years psychoanalysis benefited in the newly created Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from high-level political endorsements, following Trotsky’s influential statement, in Literature and Revolution, that ‘the psychoanalytic theory of Freud . . . can be reconciled with materialism’ (Trotsky 1960[1924]: 220). The subsequent blacklisting of psychoanalysis in the USSR during the mid 1930s is due to a confluence of various sociopolitical changes and personal motives. The gradual replacement of Lenin’s New Economic Politics with Stalin’s increasingly austere five-year plans, and the concurrent rise of the Stakhanovite movement, coincided with the substitution of the values of productivity and discipline for creativity and play, which rendered psychoanalysis all but useless. Likewise, the gradual exchange of Lenin’s fairly liberal sexual morals for a repressive glorification of the proletarian family (and the re-criminalization of homosexuality and abortion) rendered psychoanalysis potentially dangerous.4 Furthermore, the gradual displacement of Lenin’s revolutionary interpretation of Marx and Hegel toward the systematization of the communist ideology, and the simultaneous closure of the Soviet federation to capitalist Western influences, rendered psychoanalysis intellectually wrong and suspicious. On top of all this, Trotsky’s historical approval of psychoanalysis was the perfidious icing on an already dubious cake. Until the official reinstatement of psychoanalysis by Boris Yeltsin in July 1996, Freudian ideas remained circumspect in the USSR, although it is fair to say that following Stalin’s death, it slowly became acceptable again for psychologists to refer to the unconscious, albeit in a decisively Pavlovian sense—repressed psychic complexes being just a special case of the conflictual relationship between inhibition and excitation. If psychoanalysis remains exceptionally widespread in large parts of Latin America, especially in Argentina and Brazil, then it is tempting to see this as the combined outcome of popular demands for in-depth, long-term healing processes in the aftermath of the traumatic legacy of brutal military dictatorships and the celebration of a sociocultural sphere of playfulness, eroticism, creativity and personal expression. It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that recent historiographical research has shown how the dissemination of psychoanalysis in these countries benefited substantially from the repressive authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s (Plotkin 2012; Russo 2012).To mention but two examples of this seemingly paradoxical, counterintuitive correlation between the socioeconomic success of psychoanalysis and political authoritarianism, 360

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I can refer to the repercussions of the right-wing coup in Argentina of March 1976 and to the development of psychoanalysis in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. It is widely believed that following the removal from office of Isabel Perón and the installation of a military junta in Argentina, psychoanalysts were targeted as ideological criminals, resulting in the disappearance and emigration of a sizable number of clinicians. However, the Argentine historian Mariano Ben Plotkin has argued convincingly that the military junta persecuted psychoanalysts not on account of their profession but owing to their left-leaning political allegiances and that, if anything, psychoanalysis was consolidated during the second half of the 1970s, with the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association even receiving a ministerial grant to offset the cost of a large conference (Plotkin 2001: 219–220; 2012: 199). In Brazil, psychoanalytic practices equally proliferated during the long years of Statesponsored repression. In this respect, the Brazilian academic Jane A. Russo has demonstrated that this expansion was not merely the result of ordinary citizens turning inwards and seeking psychic healing when they are prevented from influencing the public sphere, but the corollary of a complex interplay between international psychoanalysis and local politics, whereby a number of factors stand out (Russo 2012). After World War II, the IPA agreed that Werner Kemper, a former Nazi-supporter and member of the Göring Institute, could set up a psychoanalytic training program in Rio de Janeiro (Kemper 1973). Throughout the years of political repression, the Brazilian psychoanalytic societies never publicly denounced the regime, and they even turned a blind eye to one of its members assisting in the torture of political dissidents (Langer and Bauleo 1973; Besserman Vianna 1997[1994]; Allouch 1997; Nobus 2004).The ultra-conservative, rightwing collaborationism in the official Brazilian psychoanalytic societies sparked a libertarian psychoanalytic counter-movement, fueled by leftist Lacanians trained in Paris, which led not only to internal divisions in the Brazilian psychoanalytic landscape but also to the further growth and popularization of psychoanalytic culture (Russo 2009; 2012: 180–181). To round off this succinct survey of the fuzzy logic underpinning the reception of psychoanalysis within different sociopolitical regimes, I should also say a few words about the fate of Freudian ideas in Japan and in Islamic countries. Although the theory of psychoanalysis was introduced in Japan as early as 1917, by virtue of the academic psychologist Yoshihide Kubo (Oyama et al. 2001: 401), who was also responsible for coining 精神分析 (seishin bunseki), the Japanese term for psychoanalysis, which literally means ‘analysis of the soul’ (Kubo 1917), the history of psychoanalytic practice in the land of the rising sun is inextricably linked to the psychiatrist Heisaku Kosawa, who was the first Japanese citizen to lie down on Freud’s couch, in 1932, and who was instrumental in the creation of the Japanese Psychoanalytic Society, in 1953 (Okonogi 2009). Conscientious and enthusiastic about his clinical training, Kosawa nonetheless shared with Freud a fundamental reservation regarding the foundations of psychoanalytic theory. In his opinion, the Oedipus complex did not apply to mainstream Japanese family life and ought to be replaced with a more culturally adequate ‘Ajase complex’, as derived from an ancient Buddhist legend in which a boy called Ajase (broken finger) tries to take revenge on his murderous mother yet fails to do so because he is immobilized by petrifying guilt and a mysterious skin disease that drives everyone away from him. Freud was not impressed. In response to Kosawa’s paper on the topic, he wrote: ‘I have received your essay. I have read it and will put it away.You do not seem to consider using it any time soon’ (Freud 1932). Freud’s lukewarm reception did not stop Kosawa from assembling the distinctive features of the Ajase-myth, as the central psychic conflict of the Japanese people, into the theoretical cornerstone of Japanese psychoanalysis. This cardinal revision of Freudian theory became even more prominent in the works of Takeo Doi, the most distinguished Japanese Freudian of the postwar period, who designated the key pathological impact of the Ajase complex as a ‘dependency neurosis’ (amae). For Doi, 361

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Japanese children do not regard their father as an obstacle in their unconscious pursuit of the mother, and they do not end up identifying with him in order to achieve psychic independence. Instead, they are constantly subjugated to an externally self-effacing yet extremely dominant mother, whose psychic power they wish to annihilate but whose command of unconditional love they can never fully relinquish. Whereas the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is driven by the child’s ‘choice’ of paternal autonomy against the incestuous maternal union (Freud 1961[1924d]), the Ajase complex precludes the rupture of maternal dependency and imbues all of the child’s attempts at securing some form of autonomy with a self-destructive sense of guilt. Much more than the importance of community bonds and social obedience in Japanese society, it is this singular distribution of power within the Japanese family that explains, according to Doi, why traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, unlike Jungian analytic psychology and (post-) Kleinian perspectives, has had so much difficulty establishing itself in Japan as a clinical practice (Doi 1973[1971]). As to Islam, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent jihadist terror attacks, numerous scholars have tried to account for the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, Muslim extremism, religious fanaticism, ‘radicalization’ and suicide bombing, with the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis. Whereas the Islamic religion and customs were all but ignored as psychoanalytic objects of study until the dawn of the 21st century and the emergence of a new type of global warfare, Islam now features highly on the psychoanalytic agenda, although primarily in its contingent yet persistent associations with terrorism, oppression and human rights violations—as a problem that needs to be addressed, a question that needs to be answered. At present, there is a dearth of scholarly research—in Arabic as well as in Western languages—on the reception of psychoanalysis in the Arab-speaking world and, more broadly, within Muslim societies.5 The critical expositions that do exist are often written by ‘Westernized’ clinicians—psychoanalytic practitioners who received their training in France, the United Kingdom, or the United States and who did not return to their home country afterwards—and implicitly filtered by allegedly superior, Western liberal values such as freedom of expression, individualism, voluntarism, self-governance, community participation and interethnic tolerance. More problematically, the contemporary Western perception of the Muslim world as intrinsically divisive, barbaric and ‘backward’ regularly appears to cloud scholarly judgments about the cultural histories of Islam and the place of psychoanalysis within it. The lack of detailed historiographical research on Muslim or Arabic psychoanalysis could easily be attributed to a simple observation: the Muslim Freud does not and cannot exist. On the occasion of its centenary in 2010, the IPA published a collection of essays on the global dissemination of psychoanalysis (Loewenberg and Thompson 2011). Among the hundred or so constituent organizations of the IPA in 2010, a mere two were operative in countries with a Muslim majority population: Lebanon and Turkey. Neither country is particularly representative of an Islamic nation, because both are politically secular, with no official state religion. This observation could in itself spark a discussion as to the reasons for this peculiar absence. Without directly referring to the dissemination of psychoanalysis under the auspices of the IPA—or under those of its main rival, the Lacanian World Association for Psychoanalysis (WAP), which would have shown a similar pattern—Jacques Derrida asked, as always, the impossible question: ‘Why does psychoanalysis never get a foothold in the vast territory of the Arabo-Islamic culture?’ (Derrida 2002[2000]: 255). Derrida himself insinuated that it may have something to do with the European theater, the Judeo-Christian stage on which the discipline was performed, yet this proposition does not explain why the ‘Europeanness’ of psychoanalysis did not constitute an insuperable barrier to the Japanese, for example. 362

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Other scholars have been much less tentative in their answers. Psychoanalysis never arrived on the Arabo-Islamic shores, because the Muslim belief system is inherently hostile to it, and this hostility stems from its fundamental intolerance and antipathy toward rationality, science, freedom of thought, emancipation, gender equality, modernity and democracy (Chamoun 2005; Benslama 2009[2002]: 1–67). As Massad (2015: 275–311) has argued, these answers are tainted by the belief that Islamic thought is intrinsically irrational, puritanical, autocratic and oppressive. Yet they also assume that psychoanalysis is synonymous with science, freedom and equality, whereas these values and principles are not at all constitutive of psychoanalytic doctrine. If anything, Massad averred, ‘psychoanalysis undid and undoes the liberal sovereign subject, when it demonstrates time and again that this subject is not sovereign at all and indeed is not always, if ever, in command of her/his actions, let alone her/his choices’ (Massad 2015: 302). Of course, it is not entirely true that psychoanalysis never got a foothold in the Arabo-Islamic culture. Just because there are no constituent organizations of the IPA or the WAP in Muslim countries does not imply that psychoanalysis does not exist there. At the most, it implies that psychoanalysis is not organized, institutionalized and professionalized in ‘officially sanctioned’ clinical training programs, but it does not preclude healthcare professionals employing psychoanalytic techniques in their private practice and sharing their experiences with like-minded practitioners in small, informal groups or nationally recognized institutions. In addition, the absence of formal psychoanalytic (training) centers does not de facto entail that Freudian ideas are inaccessible, prohibited, or nonexistent. Massad has demonstrated that, at least in Egypt, academic books on psychoanalysis and the unconscious already started to appear in the late 1920s (Massad 2015: 276), whereas El Shakry has meticulously documented the Egyptian integration of psychoanalysis and Islamic mysticism (Sufism) during the second half of the 20th century, when many of Freud’s works also began to circulate in Arabic translations (El Shakry 2017). In other Muslim nations, such as Morocco, the implantation of psychoanalysis, as a Western alternative to traditional healing practices, was a direct result of French colonialism, which was as much responsible for its emergence as for foretelling its subsequent disappearance (Bennani 1996).

Conclusion Those scholars who continue to believe that psychoanalysis cannot sustain itself under conditions of political authoritarianism will undoubtedly argue that the way Freud’s ideas were recuperated and implemented in the Göring Institute epitomized a complete deracination of psychoanalysis. Likewise, they will feel inclined to insist that the suppression of psychoanalysis in the USSR was a direct consequence of its subsidence into a closed, totalitarian state; that the Argentine and Brazilian dictatorships only tolerated Freudian theory insofar as it had been stripped of its critical, progressivist dimensions; and that a proper space for psychoanalysis will be created in the Arabo-Muslim world only when theocracy is abolished and a ‘modern’, democratic form of governance is established. They will posit that the geopolitical dissemination of psychoanalysis is directly proportional to the democratization of the public sphere and will no doubt refer to how the Russian glasnost and the modernization of China have created new opportunities for the implantation of psychoanalysis in these countries. Apart from the fact that this line of reasoning may be more indicative of the authors’ ongoing belief in the superiority of Western liberal values than of their recognition of the historical and transnational realities of psychoanalysis, it is also based on an implicit reification of psychoanalysis as a unitary doctrine, as if only one type of psychoanalysis, notably the theory and practice advocated by Freud, is truly deserving of this name—all modifications and adaptations of the Freudian norm representing non-psychoanalytic betrayals of the one true spirit. This 363

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very argument emboldened Lacan during the 1950s to put his own theory under the aegis of a mandatory ‘return to Freud’ (Lacan 2006[1955]), yet in doing so, he did not bemoan the psychoanalytic deviations in totalitarian states but quite ironically its degradation into a form of ‘human engineering’ (Lacan 2006[1953]: 204) in one of the purportedly most-advanced democratic states in the world—the United States. Those taking Lacan seriously would thus already need to accept here that democracy is not a guarantee for psychoanalysis to subsist either. Those not taking Lacan seriously would proclaim that American ego psychology emanated directly from Freud’s second (most elaborate) topography of the mind—that is, the distinction between the id, the ego and the superego (Freud 1961[1923b])—and that Lacan’s own return to Freud was a pernicious deviation in its own right, especially where it descended into the clinical practice of the variable-length session. Whatever may have prompted Freud to intermittently expel intellectual dissidents from the psychoanalytic movement, it first of all needs to be acknowledged that there is no such thing as a Freudian norm, neither theoretically nor clinically. Between 1895 and 1939, between the seminal publication of the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud 1955[1895d]) and Freud’s death, Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was constantly changing, with new concepts being introduced on a regular basis and new insights leading to radical revisions and fundamental changes of perspective. Clinically, Freud’s technique is equally unsteadfast, which makes it next to impossible to formulate a clear answer to the question of how Freud practiced. Freud’s analytic stance differs from one period to another, in keeping with the theoretical advances, yet it also differs from one patient to another, as the handful of clinical testimonies that have been transmitted amply demonstrate. As a psychoanalyst, Freud was as ‘flesh-colored’ as his personal politics, so much so that with the formalization of psychoanalysis and the development of a certain psychoanalytic orthodoxy some of Freud’s clinical techniques could now easily appear as distinctly non-psychoanalytic. Unlike Freud, contemporary psychoanalysts are not supposed to feed their patients, to treat their own children, to provide their patients with a stipend, to allow patients to become colleagues and friends, and so on. In a recent study of the ‘political Freud’, Eli Zaretsky has argued that psychoanalysis has always promoted an ethics of self-reflection (Zaretsky 2015: 189), which is neither directly political nor strictly apolitical, although the discipline itself was born under the sign of a certain political configuration (the Austro-Hungarian Empire). While I broadly agree with Zaretsky’s argument, I think it is also fair to say that the way Freud adopted this ethics of self-reflection cannot be captured in a single formula and that we ought to ascertain in Freud’s theoretical and clinical position as a psychoanalyst the same atopic versatility that he aspired to in his selfconfessed ‘flesh-colored’ politics. To accept this implies that each psychoanalytic practitioner is expected to acknowledge the impossibility of a one-size-fits-all paradigm, to constantly reinvent his or her approach, and to adapt it creatively to the singular condition of the individual patient. This, I believe, is what the protean geopolitical situation of psychoanalysis has also evinced. As Edith Kurzweil argued back in 1989, every nation and every culture has (consciously or unconsciously) re-created psychoanalysis in accordance with its own traditions, values and beliefs (Kurzweil 1989). The Americans exchanged the analytic goal of subjective historical reconstruction for the aim of ego strengthening, whereas the Japanese replaced Oedipus with Ajase. If we do not take the Freudian norm as a benchmark, because it does not exist, then neither country has embraced the more truthful option, precisely because the ‘flesh-colored’ politics of psychoanalysis allows for and encourages this type of malleability. Hence, whether psychoanalysis will succeed in the Arabo-Muslim world depends not so much on Islamic democratization but rather on the extent to which Islamic countries find a suitable way to reinvent Freudian theory and practice, in keeping with their own sociocultural traditions. It is only insofar as 364

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contemporary Western psychoanalysts are willing to suspend their belief in the universal quality of their own (locally manufactured) export product that psychoanalysis may be given a chance to flourish transnationally.

Notes 1. My interpretation is indebted to Paul-Laurent Assoun’s discussion of Freud’s witticism, yet Assoun does recognize a ‘universal humanism’ in it (Assoun 1984: 261–262; 2003: 15–16). 2. This tripartite character of psychoanalysis is illustrated in many of Freud’s expository works. For example, see Freud 1959[1926f ]; 1961[1924f ]. 3. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud referred sarcastically to the American Frauenherrschaft (literally: women’s rule), which Strachey has translated rather lyrically as ‘petticoat government’ (Freud 1961[1927c]: 49). Again, this should not be interpreted simplistically as a clear example of Freud’s inveterate misogyny. It is rather a critique of how the American Woman’s Christian Temperance Union were not just suffrage activists but also the driving force behind various prohibitionist agendas, including the abolition of (Freud’s beloved) tobacco. 4. Some three years before the introduction of Stalin’s five-year plans, the Russian Freudian Aron Zalkind had already argued that a revolutionary politics would be successful only if the ‘New Man’ started ‘switching’ (Переключение) all repressed sexual energy toward the development of economically productive labor power, via a self-imposed regime of abstinence and asceticism. Although Zalkind believed that this principle was not dissimilar to Freud’s notion of sublimation, it brought him into conflict with Wilhelm Reich, who had advocated for the cultivation and release of sexual energy—that is, exactly the opposite solution to the social problem of repression. See Zalkind 2001[1929]; Horvat 2016: 78–80. 5. To the best of my knowledge, the only book in Arabic that comes close to offering a perspective on how Freud’s ideas were received in the Muslim world is by the Egyptian academic psychologist Ramadan (2000). The most important psychoanalytic study of Islam is by Benslama (2009[2002]), although it attracted a vehement and often polemical rebuttal by Massad (2015: 275–311) for its insidious reliance on the moral and intellectual superiority of Western liberal values.

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Psychoanalytic Geopolitics Irmscher, C. (2017) Max Eastman: A Life, New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press. Jones, E. (1955) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: Vol. II:Years of Maturity (1901–1919), New York, NY: Basic Books. Kemper, W.W. (1973) ‘Werner W. Kemper’, in Pongratz, L.J. (ed.) Psychotherapie in Selbstdarstellungen, Bern, Stuttgart and Wien: Hans Huber Verlag, 259–345. Kubo,Y. (1917) 精神分析, Tokyo: Shinrigaku Kenkyu. Kurzweil, E. (1989) The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective, New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press. Lacan, J. (1977[1976]) ‘Extraits de la discussion qui eut lieu après l’exposé de Jacques Aubert: “Galerie pour un portrait” aux Conférences du Champ freudien’, Analytica, 4, 16–18. Lacan, J. (2001[1972]) ‘Avis au lecteur japonais’, in Autres Écrits, Paris: du Seuil, 497–499. Lacan, J. (2006[1953]) ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, Fink, B. (trans.), New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 197–268. Lacan, J. (2006[1955]) ‘The Freudian Thing, or The Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, Fink, B. (trans.), New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 334–363. Lacan, J. (2006[1966]) ‘Science and Truth’, in Écrits, Fink, B. (trans.), New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 726–745. Langer, M. and Bauleo, A. (1973) ‘Algo más sobre la tortura’, Cuestionamos, 2, 93–94. Lear, J. (1999) Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Lockot, R. (1994) Die Reinigung der Psychoanalyse. Die Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft im Spiegel von Dokumenten und Zeitzeugen (1933–1951), Tübingen: Diskord. Loewenberg, P. and Thompson, N.L. (eds.) (2011) 100 Years of the IPA: The Centenary History of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910–2010, Evolution and Change, London: Karnac Books. Massad, J.A. (2015) Islam in Liberalism, Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Moloney, J.C. (1953) ‘Understanding the Paradox of Japanese Psychoanalysis’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34(4), 292–303. NN (1939) ‘Obituary’, The Lancet, 234(6057), 764–767. Nobus, D. (2004) ‘Pensamientos para epocas de violencia y tortura. ¿Hacia una ética de indiferencia?’, Giros de Aspas, 7, 53–77. North, M. (1999) Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Noth, I. (ed.) (2014) Sigmund Freud—Oskar Pfister. Briefwechsel 1909–1939, Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich. Nunberg, H. and Federn, E. (eds.) (1974) Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: Vol III: 1910–1911, Nunberg, M. and Collins, H. (trans.), New York, NY: International Universities Press. Okonogi, K. (2009) ‘Psychoanalysis in Japan’, in Akhtar, S. (ed.) Freud and the Far East: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the People and Culture of China, Japan, and Korea, Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson Inc., 9–25. O’Neill, W.L. (1991) The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers. Oyama, T., Sato, T. and Suzuki,Y. (2001) ‘Shaping of Scientific Psychology in Japan’, International Journal of Psychology, 36(6), 396–406. Parker, I. (2011) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Plotkin, M.B. (2001) Freud in the Pampas:The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plotkin, M.B. (2012) ‘The Diffusion of Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of Political Authoritarianism: The Case of Argentina, 1960s and 1970s’, in Damousi, J. and Plotkin, M.B. (eds.) Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 185–208. Ramadan, A.S.A. (2000). ‫ اإلسالم والتحليل النفسي عند فرو‬Mansoura: Library of Faith. Riviere, J. (1973[1939]) ‘An Intimate Impression’, in Ruitenbeek, H.M. (ed.) Freud as We Knew Him, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 128–131. Roazen, P. (1991) ‘Psychoanalytic Ethics: Edoardo Weiss, Freud, and Mussolini’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 27(4), 366–374. Roudinesco, É. (1994) Généalogies, Paris: Fayard. Roudinesco, É. (2016[2014]) Freud in His Time and Ours, Porter, C. (trans.), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

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29 PSY ETHICS Ian Parker

Ethics is everywhere today, the enclosure of it in ethics committees in universities and professional training organizations is symptomatic of the attempt to resolve it, to resolve the contradictions that comprise ethics, and of the failure to do that. Ethics is a field of battle: the very lack of agreement over what the key terms should be in the field of ethics is what marks it as a battleground. And ethics is crucial to the way we link theory and practice in what Freud (1937) called the impossible professions, those concerned with psychoanalyzing, governing, and educating (Britzman 2009). We should conceive of those professions in the broadest sense, to include all forms of psychotherapy and counseling, political organization and resistance, and pedagogy of all kinds. That psychoanalysis is included here by Freud as one of the impossible professions is an indication that simply ‘applying’ it to the other two, to government and education, will not solve the problem of ethics. I am going to explore this question of ethics by first mapping out what the battleground looks like at the moment, emphasizing what we need to refuse and reflecting on what that motif of refusal entails. I will then look at anti-psychiatry as one form of refusal, focusing on some contradictions in attempts to refuse medical psychiatry, before moving on to look at some similar debates around psychology and recent anti-psychology. Then I will resume and review some key differences of conceptual frame in thinking about ethics as such, looking in a little more detail at what psychoanalysis has to say about these differences, and end up by highlighting the role of critique, external, and an immanent critique of ethics, of the way that ‘ethics’ functions as a signifier linking theory and practice, one that calls for some version of anti-psychiatry and critical psychology alongside a form of anti-psychoanalysis.

Refusal What should we be suspicious of in the field of ethics, and how might we refuse the dominant terms of the debate? Most of what passes for ethics nowadays is so problematic because it is organized by a historically specific set of conceptual, competing, and overlapping grids that are discursively elaborated within the psy-complex. This term psy-complex, which appears in the wake of Michel Foucault’s (1979[1975]; 1981[1976]) analyses of surveillance and confession in contemporary capitalist society, operates as a form of critique and refusal; it characterizes a governmental apparatus and 369

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stands aside from it, even against it (Ingleby 1985; Rose 1985). The psy-complex is a meshwork of theories and practices concerning subjectivity, which reduces subjectivity to the individual self and to assemblages of social relationships that can be categorized and managed, understood, and adapted to society. That is, the self and social relationships are rendered intelligible within the frame of the psy-professions such as psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and this psycomplex also includes the interpretative practices that take place today in prisons, personnel departments, welfare services, and schools. Among the many contradictions that riddle the psycomplex, setting its component professions against each other, is the peculiar dialectic between psychologization, which renders social phenomena into the discourse of the psy-complex and de-psychologization, which evacuates subjectivity from our discourse about human behavior and matter, biological processes (De Vos 2012, 2016). The psy-complex is increasingly powerful as an apparatus, not only as a series of behavioral management devices but also as a filter through which our understanding of ethics is refracted; it frames what we think of as ethics. One of the ways the psy-complex reframes long-standing debates about ethics is by conflating ethics with morality. While morality is concerned with a system of moral codes, sets of rules governing how we should live, and corresponding images of the self that should enable us to aspire to adhering to those moral codes, ethics properly speaking concerns the reflexive position the human subject takes in relation to rules or to images of the self (Badiou 2001[1998]). So when the reflexive positioning of the subject, a process, is crystallized, turned into a substantive good, it is transformed from being of the ethical domain into being something moral. The psycomplex conflates ethics with morality in two ways, or through two conceptual routes. One is when subjectivity is viewed as an integrated substantive thing, when the human subject is treated as an ‘individual’ in the sense of being separate and undivided, as what critical work on the psy-complex speaks in terms of a ‘rational unitary subject’ (Henriques et al. 1998[1984]: 81). The other is when the individual is viewed as being bound into a social system, dependent on it for his or her sense of personal and community identity, with the community treated as ideally homogeneous or, at least, rational and unitary (Fryer and Fox 2015). The definition of the subject as psychological thus tends, in practice, to treat ethics as a form of morality. This brings us to education. When Freud refers to educating alongside governing and analyzing as three impossible professions, he actually speaks about analysis as a thing—that’s what immediately makes it ‘impossible’—and about ‘the bringing-up of children and the government of nations’ (Freud 1937: 401). Education as a field was, contemporaneously with the development of psychoanalysis and even more so today, becoming much more than a practice of ‘the bringing-up of children’. In the process, education provided a model for ethics that turned ethics into morality at the same moment as it reduced immoral subjects to the status of children to be tutored so that they might learn the difference between good and evil. For example, the bequests from 1906 to 1926 by Mrs. Sarah Fielden to support the Department of Education in the Victoria University of Manchester, the Training Colleges, and the Fielden Demonstration Schools named after her also quite explicitly attended to moral supervision, moral instruction and moral education (Victoria University of Manchester Department of Education 1911). Education thus becomes a field in which ethics already risks being treated as a moral enterprise, and the psy-complex in education accentuates that danger. In this way, education operates as a fraught resource and consequence of debates about the nature of ethics.When you educate others about ethics, you tend to moralize. This does not mean, however, that we should necessarily refuse education, and the same applies, for that matter, to government and to psychoanalysis. Rather, the specific forms of refusal of the psy-complex that Foucault’s work indicates are finely judged reflexive analyses, deconstructions we might say, that turn what is progressive about the production of subjectivity 370

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and liberating about it against what is reactionary and limiting (Derrida 1981). As we formulate the task of immanent critique as a process that inhabits the practice that it reflects on instead of pretending to stand outside it, pronouncing on it from a position of moral superiority, we are always already caught in a trap of language, of the dominant forms of language and binary oppositions that give it a sensible shape for us. The simple opposition between what is ‘limiting’ and what is ‘liberating’, in this case, could lead us to a romantic image of refusal—as if, when we refuse something, we are thereby free of it, we become free. One thing that Foucault and deconstruction have in common is that they take seriously the warning that there is no ‘outside’ of language or ‘escape’ from power; psychoanalysis adds the warning, and in this respect, Foucault is also himself profoundly psychoanalytic. That simple refusal, escape, or freedom is not only illusory but also incited by psychological discourse. When you follow the moral command to be free, you can be sure that you will end up more tightly enmeshed in what you thought you were opposing. This warning bears on what we are up to when we turn against psychiatry and psychology in the name of anti-psychiatry or critical psychology. The following sections of the paper track this argument through Thomas Szasz’s anti-psychiatric critique of medical psychiatry, critical psychology, and psychotherapy before showing how three different dominant conceptions of ethics that Szasz draws on tie him all the more closely to the psy-complex. This is a crucial task for psychoanalysts and for those working in the field of psychoanalytic political theory, because practitioners and political analysts need to be able to disentangle from dominant ideological and moralizing discourses about the ‘self ’.

Anti-psychiatry Let us turn to anti-psychiatry, a term that has itself been disowned by many of those dubbed as such. The exemplary anti-psychiatrist in academic and popular debate, someone who also refused the label, was Thomas Szasz. His refusal of medical psychiatry provides a pivotal point of critique which also neatly links together different elements of the psy-complex. Szasz was trained as a psychiatrist, and his refusal of it in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) was nuanced, mediated by right-wing libertarian politics in which his objection to it was that it amounted to a form of quackery, fake science. It was tempered by his insistence that anyone should be free to choose psychiatry if they wished but should not evade personal responsibility by doing so; he was, as he put it, ‘equally opposed to psychiatric coercions and to psychiatric excuses’ (Szasz 1997: 43). Szasz made his objection to left-wing critics of psychiatry clear in a book published a couple of years before he died called Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared (Szasz 2009).The differentia specifica of his critique was that each of his colleagues did, to varying degrees, rely on the free provision of institutional resources, of beds in state welfare facilities, or of medication that had not been directly and explicitly taken by someone who willingly took on the position of patient; so the argument was that R.D. Laing and Jacques Lacan, for example, had each sectioned—that is, compulsorily detained—patients at some point and that Franco Basaglia had offered overnight stays in the community mental health centers in Trieste. Szasz combined the ‘coercions’ and ‘excuses’ to reveal that each of these so-called anti-psychiatrists were really, underneath it all, psychiatrists. It is true that each and every leader of currents in the so-called anti-psychiatry movement had first been trained as a psychiatrist, including Basaglia (1987), Lacan (1993[1981]), Laing (1965); Félix Guattari, who worked at the Clinique de la Borde, which administered drug and electroshock treatments while he was coauthoring Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/1977); Marius Romme, creator of the Hearing Voices Movement (Romme 371

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and Escher 1989); and even Wolfgang Huber of the SPK in Heidelberg, the explicitly Marxist Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, whose slogan and manifesto was Turn Illness Into a Weapon (SPK undated [1972]). The same applies to the revolutionary black anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who tried to ensure that Blida-Joinville Hospital might serve as a place of sanctuary for fighters from the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria.The radical anti-psychiatrists were all trained as psychiatrists, and they remained psychiatrists, Szasz argued. One book that perfectly summarizes the moral-political principles at the heart of this conflict between rival traditions in the supposed anti-psychiatry movement is The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy by Thomas Szasz (Szasz 1988[1965]). The popular mistaken representation of Szasz as an anti-psychiatrist usually overlooks the fact that, in addition to his medical training and employment in the Department of Psychiatry at the Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, he was trained as a psychoanalyst in the Chicago Institute and that this was at the heart of his own practice. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis also exemplifies the way that a version of psychoanalysis that is in tune with the dominant culture can come to operate as a pedagogical instrument that turns ethics into morality; ‘Psychoanalysis is not a medical treatment’, he declares, ‘but an education’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 212). In this book, Szasz characterizes psychoanalysis as a ‘moral exercise’, as a ‘moral therapy’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 202), and he grounds it in a particular kind of culture, which he then explicitly endorses. That is, there is a rapid slide from an emphasis on patient choice, the ethical dimension— an already limited notion of ethics that, as the title promises, rests on the ‘autonomous’ functioning of the individual—to a free contract between individuals represented as a moral good. For Szasz, this moral position is intimately connected to politics. Psychoanalysis relies on a contract between two free agents, the analyst who sells a service and the analysand who buys it. The buyer-seller metaphor recurs throughout the book, though Szasz does not actually treat it as a metaphor; for him, it is a concrete fact about the nature of the society in which psychoanalysis happens. This fully contractual approach (Szasz 1988[1965]: 113) means that the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis for Szasz is not free association; that is something that Szasz is quite suspicious of. Rather, it is, he says, ‘a misleading concept’, ‘unnecessary’, and perhaps runs against the ethos of choice, that the analysand should decide what he or she wants to reveal about himself or herself (Szasz 1988[1965]: 38). Instead, the one rule that the analysand must follow is ‘that he pay the fee’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 102). The analyst is in the game to make a living, and the analysand has to decide what to make of the service that the analyst offers. This means that ‘the best safeguard is the economic basis of the analytic relationship’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 132), so ‘the financial transaction between analyst and analysand is an integral part of the analysis’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 154). What all this amounts to is the moral claim that the practice of psychoanalysis ‘is possible only in a capitalist society; competitive and pluralistic, such a society offers a variety of therapies for people in a quandary’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 191).

Critical Psychology Szasz’s argument as a contractual ‘moral’ approach rests on a model of the individual subject that is the mainstay of academic and professional psychology. To grasp the problems with his approach, we should explicitly locate Szasz and the question of ethics in recent debates over the nature of psychology and critical psychology. Szasz presents a quintessentially psychological version of psychoanalysis, and this is precisely why it corresponds so well with an educational and moralizing discourse about the self and social relations. Much of the time in the book, and in the rest of his work, Szasz describes the 372

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contractual nature of relations between discrete autonomous individuals as a given and inveighs against the attempts, in the form of various ‘coercions’ and ‘excuses’, to downplay or obscure those open, free relations.This representation of the individual as an ideally self-sufficient unit has, along with a critique of communitarian unitary conceptions of the social domain, been one of the main concerns of radical psychology and then critical psychology in and against its host discipline in recent years; this has been an internal critique that has come closest to anti-psychology as a repudiation of depoliticizing psychologizing research and application (Parker 2007). When Szasz acknowledges that not everyone can afford to undertake psychoanalysis, this is addressed quite peremptorily with the statement that ‘the poor and the uneducated’ need ‘jobs and money’ and ‘knowledge and skills’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 28); he then goes on, in the following paragraph, to attack ‘new psychiatric terms’ such as community psychiatry, family therapy and group psychotherapy, which he sees as ‘symptoms of an ominous trend’ in which ‘everyone will take care of everyone else, but no one will take care of himself ’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 28).Toward the end of the book, he quite consistently argues that free psychotherapy ‘would be neither contractual nor, in our terms, analytic’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 201).This is an argument that runs against an oftenhidden history of psychoanalytic provision in which Freud explicitly argued for and promoted free therapeutic welfare services through the psychoanalytic training organizations in Austria, Germany, and Hungary before the rise of fascism (Danto 2005), before the links between psychoanalysts and left-wing politics were effectively cut in the 1930s, ‘repressed’ we might say (Jacoby 1983). Szasz thus repeats a narrative that is common to many practicing psychoanalysts in private practice today and to critics of psychoanalysis, the claim that there is some kind of hierarchy of needs and capabilities in which psychoanalysis does and should figure only toward the top (Du Plessis 2011). This is a moral narrative that is repeated daily in many public clinics that use ‘psychological mindedness’ as a criterion to determine whether a patient is suited for analytic treatment (Coltart 1988). This is a criterion that, in practice, rests on the assumption that the patient should speak, at least begin to speak, in the way the middle-class therapist does. This moral narrative also warrants the peculiar and pervasive use of the term poverty in psychoanalytic writing to refer to internal mental processes rather than class inequality (Kumar 2012). One of few times in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis when Szasz refers to the weight of history or alludes to social-structural issues as a background condition for analytic work is when he acknowledges that it is not the case that ‘any contemporary society is completely open or free’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 95). This exists even in the United States, where the US Constitution is, he says, ‘our model of the analytic contract’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 130), because there are, he says, a ‘few social defects’ that are ‘undesirable’ and should not be ‘left uncorrected’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 95). He puts it thus: ‘Just as the United States inherits the Negro problems from its past, so does psychoanalysis inherit many problems from its medical history’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 95). This is one of the many instances in the book where a question of social organization is reduced to individual problems—here ‘the Negro problems’—and to the victim status of those who suffer; that victim status is surreptitiously reinforced by way of the implication that the victims are the cause, in this case that they are themselves ‘the Negro problems’. A certain kind of moral universe, of ‘contract’ and ‘autonomous’ individuality, thus ideologically blots out an ethical issue that other psychoanalytic writers such as Fanon (1967[1952], 1967[1961]) reworked as a political question about pervasive racism inside and outside clinical practice.

Ethics The problem here lies not only in the slide from ethics to morality but also in the way that ethics as such is reconfigured in the process. We turn now to different conceptions of ethics to show 373

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how the problems we have identified so far—Szasz’s reduction of sociopolitical phenomena to the level of individual psychology—can be conceptualized through classical debates that frame how we think about ethics. There are a number of different classical conceptions of ethics, discourses of ethics that now lend themselves to a moralizing of behavior and subjectivity, and they function in quite specific ways in different component parts of the psy-complex (Parker 2011). If we could map how they work, we could then be in a better position to know how to take up a different relation to them. A first dominant discourse of ethics revolves around the idea of a ‘Good’ as ideal to which we should aspire. Conceptions of good character and right action have a powerful rhetorical charge in popular discussions of ethics because they seem to tap into what is most profound about each individual human being, whether they are good or evil, whether they are capable of making the right choices in relation to others or even in relation to themselves. Moreover, these conceptions are potent also because they have such a long history in Western culture and can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, specifically to Aristotle (2004[350BCE]). In this discourse, to be ethical is to be what one is, to act in accord with one’s nature, and it is precisely that naturalistic essentialist notion of what the human being is that has made this Aristotelian ethics the core of traditional medical psychiatric practice. For example, it is one of the discourses that appears in Szasz’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he likens the relationship between patient and analyst to what he calls ‘the perennial problem between the sexes’, in which lovers each want something different; that is, ‘man, woman, and woman, man’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 100). It is the psychiatrist as master who knows what the different kinds of deep nature of human beings are, how to guide them to realize that nature, and whether to administer treatment to enable them to return to it. In this sense, Szasz too is a psychiatrist. He avoids diagnosis and the imposition of treatment, but there is a thread of psychiatric ethics present in his version of autonomous psychotherapy. A second kind of ethics emerges with capitalism, effectively as a moral judgment of individual responsibility that is more compatible with capitalism, so here the focus is not so much on abstract notions of the Good but rather on how it is possible to ensure the happiness of the greatest number of people through the distribution of rights and responsibilities. This is an eminently psychological view of the world; experimental psychology thrives on the description of forms of behavior and thinking that best adapt people to enter into commerce with each other and work to their best abilities. This utilitarian ethics that was elaborated by Jeremy Bentham (2009[1823]) in the early 19th century crystallizes the idea that human beings will arrive at the most ethical arrangement of their lives through contract. The contract between buyer and seller is at the heart of this moral order, including, of course, the contract one enters into to sell one’s labor power to another for a specific period of time. In place of the idea that there are different beings who work or rule, slaves or masters, everyone is autonomous, entering into a contract freely and should do so without let or hindrance. Szasz (1988[1965]: 110) puts it well, for example, when he says that ‘contracts are strategies in the service of an enlightened hedonism; they seek to maximise pleasures and to minimise pains’. It is in this sense that a thread of utilitarian ethics runs through his work, starting and ending with the autonomy of each individual buying and selling what is necessary for them, thus facilitating the happiness of all. A third discourse of ethics runs alongside those concerned with the Aristotelian Good or with Benthamite utilitarianism, and this third discourse, of ‘duty’, is particularly relevant to psychotherapy as a third component discipline of the psy-complex that often competes with psychiatry and psychology. In place of medical treatment to align us once again with our natural moral nature, and mainstream psychological attempts at behavioral or cognitive modification to enable us to contract relationships with each other more efficiently, psychotherapy tends to emphasize the ability of the person to choose for themselves. Choice is for them to make, aiming 374

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not only at options for the self but for choice that is relevant to the growth of the self. This is a notion of ethics elaborated by Immanuel Kant (2009[1785]), which is often interpreted as entailing a moral trajectory leading from a childish state of nonmoral ‘heteronomy’, in which we are directed by others to adult moral self-direction or autonomy. Here cultural enlightenment, that which makes psychotherapy possible as a project, is ideally replicated in each individual’s personal enlightenment so that, as Kant (1784) puts it in his answer to the question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ you ‘have courage to make use of your own understanding’. Foucault’s (1984) discussion of Kant’s argument mistakenly reframes him in developmental terms (Burman 2011). Szasz (1988[1965]: 106) also follows this line of argument, claiming, for example, that ‘small children cannot play contract games’—that is one reason he is against child psychotherapy. Also, he warns that the people whom he calls avoiders in psychotherapy will play the same game as children; they avoid responsibility and instead ‘hope to use autonomous psychotherapy to improve their skills in living heteronomously’, as directed by others (Szasz 1988[1965]: 74). For Kant, as for Szasz, this responsibility should not be avoided; it is a categorical imperative. More than a personal ideal or social convenience, this freedom is a duty, and its form as duty is more important than any particular content ascribed to it. This mapping of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy onto Aristotelian, Benthamite, and Kantian conceptions of ethics returns us, through our critique of them, to ethics as such. That is, we treat each of them not as a moral framework but as a set of questions about how we should act, including how we should act in relation to those frameworks. It is that different relation to a moral system or to a series of moral demands that we could refer to as being properly ‘ethical’.

Psychoanalysis The relation to a moral system of any kind is precisely what psychoanalysis is concerned with, but psychoanalysis is not one thing, and it operates both inside the psy-complex, and outside it; psychoanalysis is ‘outwith’ the psy-complex. The psy-complex refracts various discourses of ethics through morality, morality that comprises a particular ideological vision of what the social order as a moral order is and should be, and through moral injunctions that you should be, or should do this or that to be a moral being. Psychoanalysis enables us to grasp the nature of those moral injunctions as if they operated as a categorical imperative, in Kantian terms, to understand what is at stake in the distribution and allocation of costs and benefits that Bentham advocates and in the role that ideals play in an Aristotelian recommendation of the Good. We can see elements of each of these three ethical discourses at work in Freud’s writing, described and unraveled: ideals of all kinds are at the heart of Freud’s (1921) account of how we model our ego on the egos of others significant to us, those we directly identify with or those we set ourselves against; Freud’s (1930) exploration of the role of civilization in permitting and obstructing the realization of the drives requires an understanding of what we are contracting to when we enter a social world of any kind; and Freud (1918) alludes more than once to the superego as an instance, a command that operates as if it is a categorical imperative. One way of working with these descriptions is to treat them as given; psychoanalysis then turns into a normative moral system, and psychoanalytic treatment would indeed then operate as what Szasz calls ‘moral therapy’. So, when we are told that ‘Freud created a unique “instrument” for exploring the human condition and for enlarging personal freedom’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 95), this is true as far as it goes, but it does not go so far as to ask how this ‘personal freedom’ operates in the life of the analysand, the patient, as a moral good, as an opportunity for social contract, as 375

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a moral imperative, or as a superegoic injunction that you must be free. This is also why Szasz explicitly reformulates the aim of analytic work so that it is no longer ‘to help the patient gain access to his unconscious’ as he puts it—itself a rather problematic formulation—but rather, he argues, ‘the analytic enterprise’ should be seen in terms of ‘communications, rule-following, and game-playing’ (Szasz 1988[1965]: 201). Another way of working with these moral descriptions in ethical discourse is to refuse them, not simply to reject them outright but to appreciate how they work, appreciate them all the better to unravel them, to traverse them. It is against this background that it is understandable that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for many years insisted that psychoanalysis was, if anything, the opposite of ethics; it refuses to adhere to an ethical standpoint or to turn analytic practice into an ethical practice (De Kesel 2009). Lacan was trained first as a psychiatrist, carried on practicing as a medical doctor, including acting as Pablo Picasso’s personal physician, while working as an analyst, and Szasz (2009) has good cause to indict him for sectioning Picasso’s lover Dora Maar, though it would not be accurate to see Lacan as an anti-psychiatrist. The break over the question of ethics comes with Lacan’s (1992[1986]) seminar of 1959 to 1960, Seminar VII on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a seminar ironically carrying the same title as Szasz’s own book on the topic of ethics. Lacan’s intervention here operates as a form of deconstruction, taking seriously existing ethical discourse in order to place it under erasure, and, even more important than that, orienting psychoanalysts to an ethical practice.This ethical practice refuses to operate as a moral example to the analysand. Lacan had already set himself against a form of psychoanalysis, ego psychology, that adapted itself to US culture, in which adaptation of the analysand to society is brought about by way of identification between the ego of the analysand and his or her already analyzed analyst. Instead, Lacan (1992[1986]: 21–22) notes that ‘the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice’ and that ‘[i]ts practice is only a preliminary to moral action as such’. Lacan does not strictly demarcate ethics from morality, and there is some terminological slippage in his account as he tries to disentangle us from moralizing discourse to prepare the ground for ethical action (De Kesel 2009). The analysand works through how each of the moral strictures that define ethics in the different given culturo-historical discourses that guide their action operate, and they work through their relation to discourse as such, the discourse that bears them, the discourse to which they are subject and within which they have become human subjects. This is not to say that there is a given predictable destination for a subject doing this work as analysand nor that psychoanalysis is a ‘moral education’, but they do learn something about what happens when ethics is turned into morality and the weight of that morality in their own lives. I now briefly rehearse some of the aspects of the immanent critique Lacan elaborates in the course of the seminar as questions: How is it, for example, that what is assumed to be the Good of one master or the Good of a community can function as something horrifically dictatorial or oppressive for others? How is it that the attempt to balance costs and benefits of a distributive system might turn out to establish the rule from one determinate position that is always included when it pretends to be neutral and disinterested? How could it be that dutiful obedience to a moral law could result in forms of subjection that are even more destructive for the subject? The ground is then also laid for some alternative conceptions of ethics that include the problematic role of desire. Desire, which is so crucial to Lacanian psychoanalysis, is not an origin and end of action, something into which ethical questions can be resolved as if remaining true to one’s desire is equivalent to moral action. This might be the lesson of one of the ‘paradoxes’ that Lacan (1992[1986]: 319) formulates toward the end of Seminar VII, his proposition that ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire’. Instead, Lacan is posing this as one of the existential grounds of guilt, that, as Marc De Kesel (2009: 52) 376

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puts it in his commentary on Seminar VII, ‘One can also be guilty in relation to the demands of desire itself’. This should be read alongside Lacan’s oft-repeated dictum that desire is ‘the desire of the Other’ (Neill 2011: 40). Hence, ‘the force of a Last Judgement’ in the question that the subject receives from the Other is, ‘Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?’ (Lacan 1992[1986]: 314).

Conclusion The point is that only an immanent critique of the discourse of ethics will itself be ethical, because every supposed external standpoint, one which pretends to provide a so-called external critique, is actually implicated in what it describes. This, Lacan shows us, is the case for desire as such, the desire to define or regulate the field of ethics or of moral conduct; desire is always already conditioned and inhabited by what it sets itself against as an object of identification or of critique. These are not abstract questions; they define how we will act as analysts or analysands working in the tracks of the psy-complex, an apparatus that routinely misrepresents what subjectivity is and what it could be to its practitioners and to all of us. Ethics requires an immanent critique of the psy-complex, one which takes the concern with subjectivity seriously without subjecting ourselves to the terms in which psychiatry, psychology, or psychotherapy describes us. It calls for an immanent critique of education as a pedagogical practice that interrogates what learning is rather than repeating that education is a Good, a means to learn how to sell our labor power or a duty to which we should conform. It calls for an immanent critique of the psychotherapy registration organizations that latch onto ‘ethics’ as a signifier of the Good: at one moment as ‘codes of ethics’ to resolve the contradictions in their own practice and, at the next, as a version of what they term virtue ethics, which turns back again to notions of good character (Page and Pattison 2016). This understanding of ethics calls for a critique that attends to the particularities of the position assumed by the subject in relation to language and to the political stakes of an indeterminate open field of choices that characterize democratic politics (Stavrakakis 2007). And it calls for an immanent critique of psychoanalysis itself as a theoretical framework that is less than a century and a half old and that, in its development, reflects the moral presuppositions of its host society even in the moment that it tries to escape them. Perhaps Szasz is right to say that psychoanalysis is ideally suited to capitalism, but then that raises a question about both psychoanalysis and capitalism. Psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic political theory need to ask how we can reflect critically on capitalism, how we may refuse the conditions of possibility for psychoanalysis. We need to refuse to ‘apply’ psychoanalysis, because that ‘application’ is itself an indication that we are thereby in the domain of so-called exterior critique; how we refuse as well as what we refuse needs to be seen as an ethical process, interminable unraveling of what we set ourselves against. To engage in such an immanent process requires taking forward the ‘antipsychiatric’ arguments made by Thomas Szasz, but in such a way as to refuse the underlying psychiatric, psychological, and psychotherapeutic notions of ethics that he draws on and perpetuates in his own critiques.The task is to engage with anti-psychiatric, critical psychological—we might say ‘anti-psychological’ and anti-psychotherapeutic—conceptions of ethics to arrive at an internally contradictory form of psychoanalysis that would therefore also be anti-psychoanalytic.

References Aristotle (2004[350BCE]) The Nicomachean Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Badiou, A. (2001[1998]) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London:Verso.

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Ian Parker Basaglia, F. (1987) Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia, New York: Columbia University Press. Bentham, J. (2009[1823]) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, New York: Dover. Britzman, D. (2009) The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions, New York: SUNY Press. Burman, E. (2011) ‘Desiring Development? Psychoanalytic Contributions to Antidevelopmental Psychology’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(1), 56–74. Coltart, N. (1988) ‘The Assessment of Psychological-Mindedness in the Diagnostic Interview’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 819–820. Danto, E.A. (2005) Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, New York: Columbia University Press. De Kesel, M. (2009) Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, New York: State University of New York Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972/1977) Anti‑Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, New York:Viking. Derrida, J. (1981) Positions, London: Athlone Press. De Vos, J. (2012) Psychologisation in Times of Globalisation, London: Routledge. De Vos, J. (2016) The Metamorphoses of the Brain: Neurologisation and Its Discontents, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Du Plessis, R. (2011) ‘Social Class and Psychotherapy: A Critical Reading of Thomas Szasz’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, Psychology in Society, 42, 21–34. Fanon, F. (1967[1952]) Black Skin,White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967[1961]) The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1975/1979) Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1981[1976]) The History of Sexuality,Vol. I: An Introduction, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Foucault, M. (1984) ‘What is Englightenment?’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books. Freud, S. (1918) ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Freud, S. (1921) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. 18, London:Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Freud, S. (1930) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Freud, S. (1937) ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 18, 373–405. Fryer, D. and Fox, R. (2015) ‘Community Psychology: Subjectivity, Power, Collectivity’, in Parker, I. (ed.) Handbook of Critical Psychology, London and New York: Routledge. Henriques, J., Hollway,W., Urwin, C.,Venn, C. and Walkerdine,V. (1998[1984]) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London and New York: Routledge. Ingleby, D. (1985) ‘Professionals as Socializers:The “psy complex” ’, in Parker, I. (ed.) (2011) Critical Psychology: Critical Concepts in Psychology, Volume 1, Dominant Models of Psychology and Their Limits, London and New York: Routledge. Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression of Psychoanalysis, New York: Basic Books. Kant, I. (1784) ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’, www.marxists.org/reference/sub ject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm (accessed 12 December 2016). Kant, I. (2009[1785]) Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, New York: Harper. Kumar, M. (2012) ‘The Poverty in Psychoanalysis: “Poverty” of Psychoanalysis?’, Psychology and Developing Societies, 24(1), 1–34. Lacan, J. (1992[1986]) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, Porter, D. (trans. with notes), London and New York: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1993[1981]) The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: 1955–1956, Grigg, R. (trans. with notes), London and New York: Routledge. Laing, R.D. (1965) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Neill, C. (2011) Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, London: Palgrave. Parker, I. (2007) Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation, London: Pluto Press. Parker, I. (2011) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, London and New York: Routledge.

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Psy Ethics Romme, M. and Escher, A. (1989) ‘Hearing Voices’, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 15(2), 209–216. Page, M. and Pattison, S. (2016) ‘A New Code of Ethics for UKCP’, The Psychotherapist, 63, 27–28. Rose, N. (1985) The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England 1869–1939, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. SPK (undated[1972]) Turn Illness Into a Weapon: A Polemic and Call to Action by the Socialist Patients’ Collective of the University of Heidelberg, www.indybay.org/uploads/2013/11/14/turn_illness_into_a_weapon.pdf (accessed 7 December 2016). Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Szasz, T. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness, New York: Harper & Row. Szasz, T. (1988[1965]) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Szasz, T. (1997) ‘In Conversation with Thomas Kerr’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 21, 39–44. Szasz, T. (2009) Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Victoria University of Manchester Department of Education (1911) The Department of Education in the University of Manchester, 1890–1911, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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30 NEOLIBERALISM Valerie Walkerdine

In this chapter, some recent work on psychoanalysis and neoliberalism is discussed. In addressing this material, all written in the last few years, neoliberalism is situated in a longer history of liberalism as a mode of governance.This is important because the issues that are seen as arising in neoliberalism could be said to have a much longer history—one that is important to understand if we pay attention to how psychoanalysis might be used and understood. In this account, I pay particular attention to the dual function of psychoanalysis: as a practice operating in the governance of both liberalism and neoliberalism and as a critical enterprise that helps us to understand how neoliberalism works. Writing in 1990, Nikolas Rose considered what he then called advanced liberalism to be an intensification of liberalism as a mode of governance and argued that psychologization, or what he calls the psy sciences, became intense as a mode of governance itself (Rose 1990). Because that has intensified even more and had a greater reach since 1990, this chapter addresses the move from liberalism to neoliberalism but also considers the impact of class differences that not only underpin liberal modes of governance but can also be understood as continuing into neoliberalism. At any rate, as we will see, psychoanalytic approaches to neoliberalism are quite sparse, mostly postdating the financial crash of 2008. Although neoliberalism can be taken to date back at least to the 1970s, when work from the Chicago School (Milton Friedman) was taken up enthusiastically by Pinochet, it has been argued (Davies 2014) that it can be traced back to ordoliberalism in 1930s Germany (Venn 2018). Early indicators, at least in the UK context, were seen from the 1970s, when we began to see the closure of heavy industries, the movement of those industries to other parts of the world with lower labor costs, outsourcing and privatization and from 1979, the shift in investment strategies from industry to finance capital, the rise of the city, and thus the growing significance of financial capital.The advance in the service economy, the cosmopolitanization of city centers, and the rise in consumption as a marker of identity (Baudrillard 1998) all looked enticing and attractive to the middle class until the crash of 2008. But the working class were not so protected, and the effects of the various turns toward neoliberalism were felt from the 1970s onward. The differential effect on the middle class and working class is highly significant because different histories are created that are, in many ways, out of sync with each other.While nowadays, no job is safe and secure and professionals are subject to regulation and precarization just like everyone else, this was not, by and large, the case before 2008, at least not in the United Kingdom. The widespread new professional precarity was even initially applauded in some quarters as a new 380

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‘freedom’ (Lorey 2015); all the while, the working class became the object of more and more pathologization and surveillance. However, since 2008, austerity has become intensified, and it is this that has created a climate in which everyone, except the very rich, feels the impact of precarization, in every sphere of life. Former heavy industrial workers live in forgotten wastelands, benefits are cut, people who would formerly have entered manual trades become self-employed, and small businesses such as driving for Uber or transporting eBay purchases by driving around the country to pick them up sit alongside dog walking businesses. All this happens while state support of many kinds withers on the vine. How can this long history not help but have a crucial impact on any kind of psychoanalytic enquiry? The intensification of the regulation of all areas of life, with an increase in surveillance and a huge decrease in state support, certainly operates in a context in which discourses of the neoliberal individual have intensified to champion a self-formed individual who is totally responsible for what Rose (1990) calls the ‘biographical project of the self ’, without any safety nets. We are all now used to the constant media bombardment of self-improvement media (e.g., Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008;Walkerdine 2011;Tyler 2008;Tincknell 2011;Taylor 2016), the shaming of forms of personhood not felt to be good enough and the disgust of poverty porn of TV shows like Benefit Street, while, in work, aptitude and personality are taken to be prime indicators of fitness for forms of work (e.g., Scharff 2016; Walkerdine 2006). We are equally familiar with recent concerns about populism (Stavrakakis and Katsmbekis 2018), the rise of the far right and the popular support for, for example, Brexit and Trump. But how did we get here, and how might we understand this present conjuncture? Most recent psychoanalytic work concentrates on Otherness and the creation of populism.While this is important, I argue that we must understand these interventions within the context of the longer history of liberalism that paves the way for the creation of surveillance and of the huge class divisions that we now see in political and social responses.

The Long History of (Neo)liberalism To understand what we might call the psychic life of neoliberalism (Scharff 2016), we need also to understand the emergence of the governance of the psy under liberalism. In this account, I pay particular attention to the usually unremarked-on role of class in this context. Liberalism is usually understood as a mode of governance adopted in Europe during the 18th century. Foucault argued that liberalism offered a mode of what he called a micro-physics of power, in which power was no longer invested in a sovereign but had to be produced through technologies, discourses, and practices of subjectification—that is, modes of governing the everyday that aim to produce in every small moment of life the liberal citizen. This citizen is governed by the science of reason that aims to produce ‘docile subjects’: citizens accept the political order not because they are coerced but because they are made to become those subjects through what we might call the practices of reason (Walkerdine 1988).Those subjects who were not able to demonstrate the powers of reason could at least be shown to be reasonable. Thus, the aim of liberal governance was to produce the subjects that were easy to govern through creating the very practices through which the subjects were formed in terms of the production of knowledges and modes of practice, such as child-rearing, education, social work, and so forth. We can see in this approach how neoliberalism becomes an intensification of what was begun so long before, building on this foundation. This mode of governance, with its stress on scientific knowledge, relied on the emergent bourgeoisie to provide the bedrock of the professions that had to be built up for the technologies and practices of governance to operate. The education of the bourgeoisie indeed provided a bourgeois revolution in which those emerging 381

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knowledges were put to work. This means that a class dynamic was created, which was not simply one of economic exploitation because it also involved modes of regulation of the one class by the other. Notions of the normal were central, and these drew on bourgeois modes of reason, thus rendering pathological that which was considered outside the norm (Canguilhem 1991). In this way, otherness and difference became, as we know, the object of sciences of normality and pathology. Psychoanalysis was not immune from this understanding of a universal human mind. It is in this context that liberalism as a mode of governance made the role of the bourgeoisie crucial. In thinking about this, and on reading the recent psychoanalytic work on neoliberalism, one is led to question how middle-class professionals have been marshaled to regulate and judge the others, who their task is to support and serve. While there is now a huge amount of work that questions psychologization in relation to neoliberalism, there is little that puts it in the context of the complex dynamic between the bourgeoisie and the working class, which has been so effectively marshaled since the rise of liberalism and has so strongly produced the apparent splits in political positioning that have been witnessed in recent years. This struck me forcibly upon reading the recent work in this field and because of my own understanding of the complexities of working-class neoliberal experience in the context of long histories of industrialization and deindustrialization in the South Wales Valleys (Walkerdine 2010; Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012; Walkerdine in press). To put it simply, we need to deal seriously with what some of the psychoanalytic papers recognize: there is a complex dynamic taking place in which the relationality of class is played out in consulting rooms and in professional supervisions and team meetings. To think about a psychoanalytic engagement with neoliberalism, we need to build on an engagement with the histories, fantasies, and defenses both of middle-class professionals and working-class others, both singly and where they meet. This is an urgent task, which is crucial to the task of avoiding more distortions and projections onto the other in such volatile times. Although psychoanalysis was not aimed at patients becoming reasonable, or at any sense of a normative resolution to distress, it can be argued that it always strives for an understanding of the issues in a way that uses the power of rationality as the device through which to understand the power of the unruly and unconscious mind. That this relates to the emergence of reason as the prime motor of governance prepares the way for a reasoning hierarchy from primitive to civilized. Thus, the ‘educated and governing classes’ are the ones to whom psychoanalysis as both theory and practice is most available (Ryan 2017). In this context, psychoanalysis as a practice has been largely available to clients with money, and as a theory therefore executed also by those with a bourgeois and upper-class background, as Ryan makes clear. That those classes were precisely those recruited to the regulation of othered groups is testament to the central tenet of approaches to ‘mind’ that have emerged. While this current is there since the inception of psychoanalysis and since the educated and reasoning classes were entrusted to govern the unruliness of the animality of the other, it is hardly surprising that liberalism, from its inception, seeks to civilize and control this animality through self-discipline and reason or, more liberally, through the attempt to produce the other as a mirror image of the bourgeois subject, such that being able to think abstractly about their emotional states is open to them. Having established this as a mode of governance that enters into popular education from its inception (Jones and Williamson 1979) and in emerging theories of human development (Walkerdine 1984), the trend is well established by the emergence of neoliberalism in that what has to be produced is modes of rational self-regulation and self-responsibility, which then allows any failure to be understood as the absence of the correct kind of psychological attributes, personality, and behavior (Walkerdine 2006). We also need to acknowledge how deeply enticing aspects 382

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of neoliberalism are. Just as much as neoliberalism is regulative, it appears to offer possibilities of being able to be what one has always dreamed of being through a process of self-creation and regulation.

Post-2008 Psychoanalytic Work on Neoliberalism In thinking about the relatively recent psychoanalytic interest in neoliberalism, it is important to bear in mind that there has been a large increase in practices of responsibilization in every sphere of life, which should be understood alongside the proliferation of consumption choices offered by the market to be whosoever one wants. These dual processes continually exert pressure to be and to perform, inviting the possibility of success and making the subject responsible for failure (Scharff 2016) but equally building in loss of communality (Studdert and Walkerdine 2016), leading also to the necessity to condemn and ostracize those who apparently fail to adapt to this mode of existence (e.g., Jones 2011); those felt to be disgusting (Tyler 2013); and those who are shamed in the performance of work (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008; Walkerdine 2006, 2011). While there is a strong opposition to this within the recent literature, what is not remarked on nearly so much is how the ostracism, while taking a particular form under recent modes of neoliberal governance, can be traced to many long-standing traditions of governance, ones that aim precisely to govern by making them proto-bourgeois individuals. These have caught up professionals in their wake, being the ones made responsible for designating and managing such processes (Rizq 2014). The convoluted positioning of psy-professionals in their role as helpers and as members of an administrative and managerial class capable of abstract thought further underscores the complexities of the history. Topics covered by recent writing relate to abjection, shame and disgust, the regulation of professional practice, debt, voting against one’s interests, and antagonisms. Class dynamics are central to all these. In addition, this has produced a series of political antagonisms that have come into public attention via Brexit and the election of Trump, with attendant issues of post-truth (Kreitner 2016) and populism (Stavrakakis and Katsmbekis 2018; Latour 2016). Although all of the recent writing was produced before these events, it does set the scene for them. The differing class histories in relation to liberalism have found their apotheosis in neoliberalism, with different kinds of breakdowns for both classes. On one hand, we have poverty and all that goes with it: loss of industry, zero-hours contracts, sink estates, and forgotten communities. But on the other, we also find the loss of the professional and intellectual security that defined the middle class and the fears of their proletarianization, with insecure contracts, the cuts in public services, the failure of higher education to provide job security for young people, the unaffordability of property, and so forth. These sets of concerns are evident in the literature, and for the purposes of this chapter, one can concentrate on a number of examples of work in each respect that are typical of a wider set of concerns. One can begin this exploration with the work that uses and adapts Kristeva’s (1984) concept of abjection. I concentrate particularly on disgust as it relates to those who are considered to have failed to remake themselves into the neoliberal subject. Thus, I am interested here in those cast out, who become the object of disgust, because this allows us to engage with the action of othering, which is also later raised by other psychoanalytic commentators using different psychoanalytic frameworks. In her essay ‘The Powers of Horror’, Kristeva developed the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by/disturbs the social reason that underpins a social order (Kristeva 1984).The abject represents cast-off elements of the self, a traumatic exclusion of those elements that represent that which is seen as repulsive and disgusting. Kristeva used abjection as a way to understand xenophobia and anti-Semitism (Oliver 2009). 383

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Highly pertinent to this discussion is Ziarek’s (2001) argument that while Foucault concentrates on the disciplinary training of citizen’s bodies and Fanon on the epidermalization of oppression, Kristeva focuses on the impossibility of the separation of the socio-symbolic from drive and affect, which might contribute to an understanding of the othering of those cast out by neoliberalism. Abjection has been used in relation to neoliberalism by, for example, Ringrose and Walkerdine (2008) and Imogen Tyler (2013), who develops this concept in relation to those categories of people who are made abject or disgusting, repulsive, within neoliberalism. Tyler’s thesis is to make the abject ‘social’ and to understand the strategies of resistance to the act of being abjected. Her argument is about the role of the constitution of abject and disgusting othering within neoliberalism. Indeed, the project of shaming and remaking disgusting others and normalizing them is a central neoliberal project (Taylor 2016;Tincknell 2011; Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008). Shifting this to understand the uptake of the category as a defiled subject in order to use it as the basis for an oppositional identity is in line with a cultural studies reading of abjection. Tyler’s analysis is of how the outrageous disgusts of neoliberal governance are lived by those designated as disgusting, leading to the expression of having and being less than nothing, allowing for a politics of revolt, although I suggest that it equally can make for a desperation to be acceptable. What we could add to this is the complex dynamic of creating the disgust out of a repulsion of an aspect of oneself. If one thinks about strategies of governance in those terms, the production of this expulsion is as important as being the abjected. Here we need to turn also to middle-class sensibilities and thus to the long-held disgust at various others, contained within practices of governance itself, where the one class is the butt of impossible fantasies by the other. The previous overevaluation of the working class by the left—that is, those who will make the revolution and are the salt of the earth, only to denigrate them as deluded, suffused in ideology, stupid proto-fascists at a later moment—speaks also of a set of affects and fantasies that are inherent in approaches to liberal governance. It suggests that this dynamic is well worth exploring further than it has currently been explored. How is self-disgust being repudiated by projecting it onto others in the present (e.g., right-wing Brexit, voting Trump lovers, indolent welfare scroungers), and how does this build on the splitting and projection of the bourgeoisie onto working-class and colonial others in the past (Hoggett 2017)?

Fear and Loathing? Moving on to concerns with what we might call fear and loathing of the Other, while not using abjection as a framework, some recent work, in particular a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society in 2014, addresses issues of popular antagonisms and voting patterns. Papers are framed in relation to attempts to understand popular reactions to and critiques of ‘big government’ and why people ‘vote against their interests’, with concerns about pleasure and selftransgression, a denial of dependency, and thus a denial of relationality. That questions of antagonisms and voting patterns are the issues chosen to discuss means that the focus is on attempting to understand the other. Alford (2014) attempts to understand the right-wing politics of his two elderly house cleaners, whom he talks of as ‘voting against their interests’. Alford interprets the cleaners’ right-wing politics as evidence of a defense against their dependency on the professor and his wife as employers (who had occasionally given them small loans that had gone unrepaid). Yet we might want to understand just why the elderly cleaners might still be cleaning his home, why they never repay the loan, and why they play a right-wing radio channel while cleaning. So, if we think about the dual role of psychoanalysis as both a practice and a critical tool, we might consider how easy it is to pathologize the other, thus falling into the class antagonisms that, as I have argued, have held the bourgeoisie responsible for 384

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regulating those others. Thus, when Tyler writes about how the abjected understand and use their abjection, we might think of the dangers of the mobilization of this dynamic in psychoanalytic critique. Hence, when psychoanalysis is offered as a way of understanding neoliberalism, it can become a way of pathologizing otherness. My approach to this is to use it, rather, to understand, not the pathology of the lives of those so othered, but to render visible the effects of histories and circumstances on their bodies. As Joanna Ryan bravely points out (Ryan 2017) in her analysis of class and psychoanalysis, it is rare indeed for the middle and upper classes to ever engage in any analysis of their own situation and defenses. This seems to me to offer the possibility of a different kind of address to the experience of neoliberal governance. The first thing that we should note is that these concerns address liberalism’s others, since, as we know, there are concerns about the white working class that frame both these issues on both sides of the Atlantic.Thus, we understand that, as I have been at pains to suggest, these are liberal concerns about the threat of irrationalism or the lack of either ability to effectively reason or to be reasonable. As I have noted, such concerns have been present since the rise of liberal modes of governance and enshrined within modes of knowledge that attempt to explain and contain irrationality, most of which developed through the implementation of universal suffrage, free education, and so on and which also framed the rise in professionalism in which the bourgeoisie came to act as those who had the right to operate in judgment and governance of the practices of unreason. That neoliberalism is now operating both to cut down the government funding of such professions, with both the threat to once secure professional jobs and new approaches to ‘evidence’ through so-called evidence-based practice, allows us to understand some aspects of the effects of neoliberal changes as they affect professionals. However, we must also recognize the responses of liberal government to the threat of authoritarianism and thus to what is currently experienced by the bourgeoisie as a rise in popular proto-fascism in many countries. The other contributors to the aforementioned special issues of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society use a number of other psychoanalytic concepts to address the production of antagonisms and voting against one’s interests. Glynos (2014) uses the concept of ‘self-transgression’ to understand the unconscious pleasure of this process, through fantasy. Chernobas (2014) develops the concept of what he calls the Kansas syndrome, using Anna Freud’s defense of ‘identification with the aggressor’ to describe an obsequious reaction to the rich and an intolerant reaction to those below. Chernobas links this to the fascist movements of the past. But we might equally point to the significance of service for previous generations in which such obsequiousness was a condition of employment, experienced as a form of servitude (Steedman 2007). Equally, we could point to liberal scientific rationalities that postulated a hierarchy of characteristics, often presenting a social Darwinism in which there was both a class and racial form of hereditary superiority, to which all were subjected and indeed many must have feared, not least because such categories were commonly used in relation to poverty (e.g., pauperism, criminality, and madness) (see Ashurst and Venn 2014; Reay 2014). Layton (2014) and Rustin (2014) both point to the denial of relational needs and the shaming and repudiation of dependency needs. While these are hugely important points, the denial of relationality and mutual dependency could be related far more easily to their presence within (neo)liberalism as a mode of governance for the production of the rational individual through its micro-practices. Surely the denial of relationality itself is inherent in the production of the history not only of liberalism but also in the earlier approaches to colonization in which relational modes of being in Indigenous cultures were actively suppressed in favor of what was understood as a European mode of being ‘civilized’ (Csordas 1994). While Rustin clearly acknowledges the conception of the autonomous individual of (neo)liberalism as problematic in its elision of 385

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relationality, I argue that we have to understand how it comes to be a central part of governance and thus how this is lived and experienced. My argument is not about that difference but about the projection of that denial of relationality onto the popular classes, as a mode of explanation via a concept of a universal form of defense mechanism, when most historical accounts stress the central significance of mutual support for poor people, who need to help each other to survive, unlike the bourgeoisie, who could turn to service, to money, and to more of a likelihood of family stability.1 Studdert (2006) argues that the creation of the state-individual axis was directly related to the suppression of communal modes of organizing, which then came to be understood as reactionary. Rustin also points to the centrality of the unconscious projection and antagonism toward the poor and vulnerable, but he highlights the popular concern with UK members of parliament in claiming outrageous and unjustified expenses (a moat, a duckhouse) whereas bankers and corporations were not such a target as a problem.Yet in a day-to-day life in which money is tight, the outrage of a moat makes sense of the greed of the rich, whereas investment banking may be outside of the imagination of someone who has, for example, to learn a lesson never to go into debt by having been refused a loan of 5 pence (Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012). By comparison, it is easy from such a position to understand that the rich are scum, who exploit ordinary people or to fantasize having what they have. While Rustin is right to assert that possessive individualism is a state of mind, and indeed one asserted as normal within current modes of governance, just what that might mean to the woman who is looking to borrow 5 pence to feed her family or the one who is constantly invited to be and become whatever she wants through practices of self-management is another matter. While Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) might demonstrate that disrespect, powerlessness, and obesity cause illness and disease, I question Rustin’s interpretation that these, necessarily, produce diseases (addictions, obesity) as effects of poor self-esteem. Surely the need to choose between heating and food in winter (a not uncommon experience of benefit recipients in some of our research) is not the result of a problem with self-esteem as Rustin implies. Rather, we might look to the existential or annihilation anxieties generated by that necessity that are managed by poor, cheap food and alcohol, cheap drugs, or smoking, for example. Indeed, research both on an impoverished council estate and a deindustrialized community emphasizes the centrality and necessity of mutuality and complex communal forms of relationality, sometimes pathologized by the state (Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012; Studdert and Walkerdine 2016). What I am concerned about here is what could be understood as a patronizing gaze, which fails entirely to consider the defenses of the bourgeoisie itself, formed in the binary logics of liberalism and the dynamics and dialectics of global capital, and which fails to have any engagement with the complex daily dynamics of the lives of poor people. Lynne Layton situates her paper within the history of neoliberalism, recognizing this as creating a traumatogenic environment (Hollander and Guttwill 2006). Indeed, and in the United Kingdom at least, there was considerable blame placed on the working class by the left for having voted for Thatcher in 1979. But this fails to understand the petty bourgeois brilliance of offering to working-class people the conditions that appeared to mirror those already unproblematically available to the middle class—that is, home and share ownership. By packaging the selling off of public housing to tenants and the selling off of public utilities to create a ‘shareowning democracy’, Thatcher effectively capitalized on the ‘proper envy’ (Steedman 1986) of the desire to have something that the middle class took for granted. As Layton notes, those who previously had worked in industry moved from being the ‘salt of the earth’ to a state of vulnerability configured as shameful. Layton offers examples of the kind of splitting prevalent under neoliberalism: omnipotent versions of autonomy versus degraded narcissistic versions of 386

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dependence. She points to how this fantasy of autonomy is turned into a competition to ‘maximize investment’, by people running themselves ragged to get on and experiencing shame in resting. Layton describes this constant effort to get on with no possible thought for those around them as social narcissism (see also Baudrillard’s 1998 understanding of consumption as part of a collective imaginary). She argues for the necessity of psychoanalysis to add to the Foucauldian approaches, as we have seen in earlier accounts (e.g., Ziarek). We might also ask how the financial crash of 2008 began to make such omnipotent fantasies of financial gain and self-investment untenable for the middle class while they continued to enrich a small global elite. As Layton draws on various psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, dissociation, disavowal, and schizoid phenomena, she points out large group reactions to anxiety-provoking changes as retaliation and withdrawal, especially in relation to 9/11. Privileged liberals, she argues, have withdrawn from public life and social commitment to the ‘obsessional narcissism of the privileged’, not allowing its fantasies of plenty and American life disturbed by the awareness of their consequences. I wonder if this splitting also makes sense if we think about the anxiety of the middle class about losing their social position. At least in the United Kingdom, the privilege of the bourgeoisie was built through only industry and not inheritance, producing the need to make oneself as different as possible from those below them while fearing that this might indeed be their fate.Thus, the need for endless comparison and the frenzied maintenance of dominance. Following along the line being developed in this chapter, Layton (citing Skeggs 2005) points to the crucial need to understand not those on whom projections fall but those doing the projecting. Layton uses a clinical vignette to demonstrate a point that is echoed by Joanna Ryan’s (2017) volume on class and psychoanalysis, that it is necessary for analysts to challenge the normalization of privilege in order to bring the complex dynamics of class into the light, showing how we exist within them. This is a brave statement that Ryan acknowledges is fraught with difficulty. Finally, the increasingly important issue of the consequences of debt and indebtedness are discussed by Davies et al. (2015) (also see Lazzarato 2012).2 They discuss the rising incidence of debt, not only at personal and familial levels but also at national and international levels, linked to both self-repudiation for not being able to live the dream and to what they describe as financial melancholia. They use this concept to explore what is currently termed depression as a response to being unable to get out of debt. They point to the modes of cognitive therapy often applied or the debt counseling and the impossibility of the punitive solutions offered by agencies. In a commentary, Samuels (2015) adds an engagement with the significance of self-sacrifice and the rejection of all the possibilities offered by credit, adding that the space of not being able to think does sometimes act as a space in which holding this space allows for a move toward a creative solution in time. Thus, the authors point to how this melancholia is caught up within the neoliberal apparatuses of governance. This leads us nicely into the final number of psychoanalytic papers that engage with professional responses to neoliberalism, thus beginning to open up for us how psychoanalytic work might engage with the governing-governed dynamic, containing as these papers demonstrate further networks of governance of the professionals. The concern with the projections of a liberal elite is discussed by a number of papers. In a number of ways, authors point to the too-easy pathologization of those different from them even while claiming to support and understand them. For example, Lesser (2014) draws attention to what she describes as consumerism in the consulting room, in a way that creates ‘empty selves’ that need to be filled rather than analyzing the commodification of life and individualism. In exploring her work with one patient who does not appear to stand up to the fact that her boss is late in paying her, she points to her own tendency to first of all see this as a developmental defect rather than a difference, thus failing to 387

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understand the political ramifications of the patient’s altruism.This address to the recognition of the analyst’s own defenses and projections is important if we are to understand the dynamics of neoliberalism. This point is echoed by Adams in the same issue, who points out that ‘privileged classes locate denigrated objects in subordinated peoples, and refuse to own denigrated aspects of self, projecting them, instead, onto others’ (Adams 2014: 44). She argues that neoliberal governance and conceptions of individual responsibility encourage such outcomes. Bob Samuels in the same issue goes further, arguing that liberal American educational policy contains a meritocracy that supports a race to the top and a concern for the success of their families, which they wish to be recognized as a concern for others at the very moment when they operate in a system that they know promotes inequality.Thus, what he calls ‘obsessional narcissists’ act as a major obstacle to fighting social inequality under neoliberalism. And Rizq (2014) offers a beautiful analysis of the complexities of the governance of both patients and therapists in the UK National Health Service, demonstrating the convoluted ways in which the practices of therapeutics, supervisions, and team meetings get caught up in the regulation that catches up both staff and patients alike, creating complex dynamics.

Conclusion Lest we imagine that projections by the middle class began under neoliberalism, surely we need to recognize that it takes historically specific forms that then play the one into the other across generations and historical time (Davoine and Gaudilliere 2004;Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012). Moreover, because it is built into the minutiae of practices, its complex dynamics across class, race, sexuality, gender, the Global North, and the Global South are always circulating in endless plays that it behooves us to understand. Sometimes this circulation crosses countries, continents, and lives in ways that when taken historically demonstrate patterns remaining over centuries. This includes colonial governance, migration, for example, often with well-known family genealogies for tracing the ancestry of bourgeois and elite families. How do such legacies, material and psychic, meet those of the poor, who as Alison Light (2014) shows in her painstaking history of her family, show how they became itinerant workers to move around the United Kingdom to where the work was, meeting and remeeting those both like them and different from them, the constant need to shape-shift in both camps, together with the complex often-unconscious needs for preservation? What is being projected onto whom, and how is it carried down histories and successive modes of governance until it mutates into its present form under neoliberalism? In work in one deindustrialized community in South Wales, the two-hundred-year-old history of the emergence of industry to its demise is filled with complex modes of mutuality, which, we argued, contain within them modes of collective management of survival anxieties and patterns of intergenerational transmission, experienced both collectively and individually. Revisiting the same community for a small study about Brexit, the same history is absolutely crucial for understanding voting patterns and preferences, for understanding the feelings of not being heard or attended to, which were expressed both within a no vote and within a support in local council elections to get rid of the ruling council group in favor of a majority of local people not aligned to a party whip (Walkerdine in press). Indeed, both Walkerdine and Jimenez and Studdert and Walkerdine argue that it is the threat posed to these modes of mutuality and commonality by a governance of individuality that has posed the greatest challenge to these forms in recent times. Rather than the disavowal of forms of relationality (as implied by Alford, Rustin, and others), we find desperate attempts to keep it alive, in the face of repeated attacks 388

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from those organizations charged with the production of successful citizens, as well as concerted attacks using concepts such as ‘post-truth’ (Walkerdine in press).3 How much more would we understand if we also heard the complex dynamics and dispersions of classed histories and geographies, their affective pathways and bodily dispositions? I am arguing that if psychoanalysis is to be helpful in understanding neoliberalism, we must understand neoliberalism in its historical context and how it builds on liberalism, even if that building-on makes it almost unrecognizable: it nevertheless creates a central legacy in which the middle class are caught just as much as those who were previously othered. This involves an understanding of the production of the bourgeoisie and its role within liberalism, leading to the development of the psy sciences and the normalization and universalization of modes of rationality, which had to be policed by the growing professional elite. That this created a mode of a class dynamic of one class ‘knowing’ the other has been important in the history of liberalism and neoliberalism’s mode of bourgeois governance. As some of the recent writing attests, middle-class professionals find themselves caught up in this in complicated ways, while their conditions of work and life deteriorate rapidly. But because of the long history of which I have been writing, we cannot address this situation by projecting onto the working class a whole series of lacks that are taken to be somehow responsible for the present or at least blocking its removal. It is only by attending to and being able to work with the complex dynamics of classed relations, both in the past and in the present, that we might stand a chance of working together for a different future. This is absolutely crucial to avoid middle-class patronage and pathologization through the imputing of universal modes of pathology to those others who are most often not the recipients of analysis without engaging in the complex work of understanding how neoliberal lives are experienced and lived in all their complexity. This means that we need to understand how the present dynamics of neoliberalism are lived and the complex sets of fantasies, affects, and defenses that circulate across time and space in all their great sweeps and intimate detail. Perhaps the most shocking thing is that this has been going on for a long time: all the universal truths, all the grand theories, and all the accusations have failed to even begin to listen to or recognize that the problem is to be understood less in those others and more in the dynamics of privilege, economy, culture, and intellectualism and how those dynamics are lived consciously and unconsciously, affectively and discursively. To examine this is deeply uncomfortable, but it is that discomfort that psychoanalysis is so good at sitting with. Surely we could at least begin with that.

Notes 1. As discussed earlier, in my current reanalysis of data collected on girls and their families, both working and middle class, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the sense of there being unproblematically ‘enough’ in middle-class families was in marked contrast to the anxious experiences of the working class families, especially from the 1980s onward (Walkerdine in press). 2. Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, because it is also a technique of ‘public safety’ through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed.We are forever sinking further into debt to the state, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To ensure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the ‘entrepreneurs’ of our lives, of our ‘human capital’. In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. 3. Indeed, Studdert and Walkerdine (2018) demonstrate that even things like volunteering in a community that is the focus of an anti-poverty program is censured because the traditional ways of mutual support do not offer what has come to be understood as the correct way to volunteer.

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Neoliberalism Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman, London:Virago. Steedman, C. (2007) Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Studdert, D. (2006) Conceptualising Community: Beyond the State and Individual, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Studdert, D. and Walkerdine,V. (2016) Rethinking Community Research, London: Palgrave/Springer. Taylor, A. (2016) ‘The (Unsuccessful) Reality Television Make Under: Class, Illegitimate Femininities, and Resistance’, Snog, Marry, Avoid, Outskirts, 35, 1–20. Tincknell, E. (2011) ‘Scouring the Abject Body: Ten Years Younger and Fragmented Femininity Under Neoliberalism’, in Gill, R. and Scharff, C. (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 83–95. Tyler, I. (2008) ‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain’, Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34. Tyler, I. (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, London: Zed. Venn, C. (2018) ‘1968: The Neglected Intellectual Legacy’, www.opendemocracy.net/uk/couze-venn/ 1968-neglected-intellectual-legacy. Walkerdine,V. (1984) ‘Developmental Psychology and the Child-centred Pedagogy:The Insertion of Piaget Into Early Education’, in Henriques, J. et al. (eds.) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Walkerdine,V. (1988) The Mastery of Reason, London: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (2006) ‘Workers in the New Economy: Transformation as Border Crossing’, Ethos, 34(1), 10–41. Walkerdine, V. (2010) ‘Communal Beingness and Affect: An Exploration of Trauma in an Ex-industrial Community’, Body and Society, 16(1), 91–116. Walkerdine,V. (2011) ‘Shame On You! Intergenerational Trauma and Working Class Femininity on Reality Television’, in Wood, H. and Skeggs, B. (eds.) Reality Television and Class, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 225–236. Walkerdine, V. (in press) ‘ “No-one listens to us”: Post Truth, Affect and Brexit’, Qualitative Research in Psychology. Walkerdine,V. (in prep) Neoliberalism’s Daughters. Walkerdine, V. and Jimenez, L. (2012) Gender, Work and Community After De-industrialisation: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilkinson, K. and Pickett, R. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London: Penguin. Ziarek, E.P. (2001) An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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31 MIGRATION AND DIVERSITY Nikolay Mintchev and Henrietta L. Moore

Migration and displacement are taking place on an unprecedented scale today.The movement of people throughout the world is diversifying the demography of cities and challenging established norms of identity, community, and belonging. In many countries, it is also putting pressures on social cohesion, public services, and political stability. According to a recently published UN report, there are approximately 244 million people worldwide living outside of their country of birth (United Nations 2016). In addition, there are millions more who do live in their country of birth but whose parents were migrants or refugees. Understanding how and why individuals and communities respond to migration and diversity, and what it takes for them to flourish in the context of mass global movement, is one of the main challenges facing the world today. Psychoanalysis is well positioned to address these issues from the standpoint of subjectivity as the relationship between psyche and society. While most academic analyses of migration and diversity focus on the economic, social, cultural, and political effects of migration and diversity, a psychoanalytic approach can develop an account of how these processes contribute to specific modes of subject formation and experiences of the subject’s relationship to itself and others. Psychoanalytic practitioners, furthermore, have the unique opportunity to observe and understand the intimate, often-unconscious psychic experiences that result from personal histories of migration and encounters with different cultures, people, and places. Consequently, there are a number of significant contributions that draw on clinical data to develop theories about the psychodynamics of immigration and identity change (e.g., Ainslie 2009, 2011; Akhtar 1999; Lobban 2006; Walsh and Shulman 2007; Youakim 2004). Such clinically based works aim ‘to develop . . . [a] perspective based on the qualities of the attachments between the newcomer and the receptor group’—an approach based on ‘the types of object relations the individual had before he immigrated and . . . the object relations of the community that receives him’ (Grinberg and Grinberg 1989: 2). Other psychoanalytically informed approaches have focused on the rigors of assimilation and the parameters of loss. For example, Lobban argues that in the specific context of the United States, where there are strong pressures for immigrants to assimilate, it is difficult for immigrants to ‘meld experiences derived from . . . [their] original culture and American culture, so . . . [the] two sets of experiences often remain disconnected’ (Lobban 2006: 74). The vital connection between the subject’s sense of self and their country of origin becomes disrupted, but it yet remains preserved in the psyche, albeit in a partially dissociated form. Migrants under such 392

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conditions, Lobban argues, can develop complex internal conflicts, whereby negative feelings about the country of origin (resulting from pressures to assimilate) can coexist with nostalgic longing for ‘the motherland’ as a place where one can comfortably belong. Similarly, Walsh and Shulman (2007) examine the effects over time of the ‘splits in the self ’ that result from immigration. A ‘split’ in this context refers to the process of developing multiple experiences of belonging, linked to loss, nostalgia, and a sense of exclusion or confusion. Such experiences impel the subject to find different ways of coming to terms with the psychological tensions of multiplicity through processes such as dissociation, mourning, idealization of the country of origin, or acceptance of one’s own multiply constituted selfhood. For Walsh and Shulman, the key question for psychoanalysis is ‘to what extent or under what circumstances such splits in a sense of self are a healthy and adaptive defense activated after immigration in order to protect the ego or self from overwhelming anxiety’ (Walsh and Shulman 2007: 357). Psychoanalytic works such as these are crucial for understanding the psychodynamics of immigration and the unconscious conflicts that lurk beneath the conscious experiences of being a migrant. Foregrounded in such work are questions of belonging and the multiple forms that belonging can take. But questions of belonging are always linked to a prior question about how we are formed within social life, not just in terms of the relation between the psyche and the external world but more specifically as a consequence of inhabiting a specific place and time. Subjectivity is inevitably tied both to history and to the restructuring of the political understood as the restructuring of political possibilities. The most useful psychoanalytic insight here is the notion that subjectivity is bound up with representations, forms of fantasy, and structures of feeling that create pleasure and identification, as well as repudiation, disavowal, and prejudice. Projects of identification and difference are imaginative, and thus fantasy is a key component of our relations with others, as well as the hopes, desires, and hatreds we project onto them (Mintchev 2018; Moore 2011, 2013). Both subjectivity and fantasy have histories, and this forces us to attend to the intelligibility of subject formation within given historico-political schemes and relations of value. As Butler would have it, there is ‘no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take’ (Butler 2005: 17). But two questions require consideration here: the first is, how do these ‘norms’ transform within the process of history, and the second is, what happens when such norms are themselves animated by difference and/or are the product of multiple and contradictory fantasies internal to specific historicopolitical schemes? To address such questions, we turn in this chapter to subject formation not for those who move and face pressures to assimilate but for those who have to assume the role of host or inhabit, however partially, the majoritarian position. Importantly, there has been far more psychoanalytically informed research on immigrants and processes of loss and adaptation than there has been on how resident/host communities respond to migration. Where such work exists, it is frequently refigured as an aspect of discussions on nationalism, with a focus on the bond between subjects and nation—investment, affect, enjoyment (jouissance), and libidinal investment (e.g., Auestad 2013; Laclau 2004; Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006). For psychoanalytic scholars, subjectivity is always intersubjectivity, formed and challenged by relations with others, and while different theoretical traditions within psychoanalysis give different accounts of the processes of subject formation, most theorists stress its fluid and unfinished nature. What must be emphasized here is that identification is not achieved through a predetermined pathway, but rather through a contingent process. It may occur in relation to some people or ideas but not others; it may succeed or fail in achieving its grasp of the subject’s psyche and body; and it may be accepted or refused when imposed onto the subject by authority (Butler 1990, 1997). This contingency of identification means that understanding people’s relationship to contexts of 393

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immigration and diversity must not be overtheorized—it must not be explained simply through theoretical concepts as if these operate in the same way in all places and at all times (something that psychoanalytic writers often assume). On the contrary, understanding immigration and diversity psychoanalytically requires empirical description and close attention to the types of identifications that define self-other relations, as well as the social and historical circumstances in which these identifications are established. In what follows, we put forth a number of examples from different parts of the world in which specific forms of identification (or disidentification) with representations and fantasies about self and others underpin the ways in which people experience immigration and diversity in everyday life.

Beirut, Lebanon One evening in 2011, in Beirut’s district of Bourj Hammoud, a fight broke out between a local man and a Syrian migrant. The fight escalated to the point where the Lebanese army had to intervene. As the anthropologist Joanne Randa Nucho (2016: 44–49) points out in her ethnographic account of Bourj Hammoud and the events that followed the incident, it was extremely unusual for the state army to intervene is such a fashion. Whenever fights broke out in Bourj Hammoud, they were usually handled by the local police unit, but this particular incident was different because it involved a local Armenian Lebanese man and a Kurdish Syrian migrant. Bourj Hammoud is the Armenian quarter of Beirut, and most of its residents are Lebanese citizens of Armenian descent. Lebanon’s political terrain is divided along religious/sectarian and ethnic lines, and in Beirut, as elsewhere in the country, this confessional system of governance permeates into numerous other aspects of social and economic life: it defines local spatial organization whereby patterns of residence are largely defined by sectarian divisions; and it also determines the management and distribution of public services, social care, and education, all of which are run at the level of local authorities and in line with local sectarian affiliation (Monroe 2016). In Bourj Hammoud, the party in charge is the Tashnag party, which represents Armenian interests in parliament and organizes local activities ranging from public service provision to housing development projects. In Lebanon, there is a strong sense of community among members of different confessional groups, and the Armenians are no exception. For them, the Armenian community’s solidarity and capacity to mobilize was a source of protection during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), and it is still seen as essential for ensuring people’s physical and economic security in the event that violence breaks out again. The Armenian communal solidarity, however, is not only held together by the recent memory of war and the persistent anxiety of future conflict; it is also constructed around a shared history of persecution, genocide, and survival. The majority of Lebanon’s ethnic Armenians came to the country as refugees fleeing the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian genocide of 1915–1919. As with other Armenian diaspora throughout the world, the collective memory of genocide weighs heavily on Lebanese Armenians, and it plays a central role in defining their sense of history and origin, as well as their experience of community and identity: ‘Being Armenian, namely in the diaspora, meant being a survivor of genocide, and therefore a member of a community of sufferers’ (Panossian 2002: 136). In this context, Armenian identity is based on a historical narrative of persecution in which the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Turks play a key role as perpetrators. What is more, this history also features Kurds as the people who carried out the atrocities of the genocide. The role of Kurds in the historical consciousness of Lebanese Armenians was clearly an important factor in how the Bourj Hammoud fight was handled, and it also played a role in the subsequent events, which saw the expulsion of Syrian Kurds from Beirut’s Armenian district 394

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(Nucho 2016). The fight was a flashpoint in which a historical antagonism between Armenians and Kurds erupted into public life with enormous impact on the relationship between locals and migrants. Crucially, the fear and hostility toward Syrian Kurds following the fight did not extend to all Syrians; it was aimed only at Syrians who were also Kurds, and it was only the Armenian Lebanese—not those affiliated to other Christian denominations—who made the distinction between Kurdish and non-Kurdish Syrians. As Nucho observed during her fieldwork, After the fight there was a major shift in the focus of my Armenian interlocutors’ fear of migrant workers. Many of them emphasized the particular threat of Kurds and not Syrians or any other migrant worker community. There was a kind of exceptionalism by which Kurds were perceived as especially dangerous and distinct from Arab Syrian workers. While both groups were citizens of Syria, traveled with similar papers, and occupied similar positions in the Lebanese labour market, Armenian interlocutors tended to single out Kurds as particularly dangerous. (Nucho 2016: 45) In the days following the fight, many Kurds were expelled from Bourj Hammoud for reasons which were opaque.The Lebanese media speculated that the expulsion was politically motivated because the Tashnag party was politically aligned with the Syrian regime, while Syrian Kurds were in opposition to it.The expulsion, it was said, would prevent Kurds from organizing activities in Beirut to oppose the Syrian government, and so both the Tashnag party and the Syrian government would benefit.The Tashnag party’s official statement denied that any expulsion had taken place on political grounds, claiming that the only people who were affected were those without proper documentation. What was crucial, however, as Nucho’s ethnography shows, is that the political and legal narratives that explained/justified the expulsion of Kurds from Beirut’s Armenian quarter intersected with strong hostility and fear justified on historical grounds by members of the community. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in this case evoked histories of the Armenian genocide as well as the Lebanese wars, which emphasized the threat of foreigners and the need to keep the Armenian community safe: Many who were in favour of Kurds being evicted started to contextualize their feelings within older histories of the genocide. I lost count of how many times I heard people say that Kurds were the ones who carried out the genocide and acted as mercenaries. . . . Histories of the genocide started blurring into narratives about the Lebanese wars and then again into accounts of violent crimes . . . directly attributed by my interlocutors to the rise of Kurdish migration into the area. (Nucho 2016: 48) This example of hostility toward Kurdish Syrian migrants in Bourj Hammoud illustrates how host-immigrant relations and people’s orientations toward others are overdetermined by a series of different factors. These include diasporic historical consciousness, models of national governance, and patterns of ethnic cohabiting within the city. These factors shape the circulations of discourses and fantasies about self and others with which people on the ground can identify. After the fight in Bourj Hammoud, Armenians strengthened their already existing identification as people who were historically persecuted with the complicity of Kurds, and also as people who constantly face the threat of violence and war in their country’s delicate sectarian balance. This also translated into wider anxieties about insecurity and crime in Bourj Hammoud and 395

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seeded a climate of hostility in which Syrian migrants were expelled for no reason other than being Kurds. The role of representations of identity and nationhood is crucial here. Benedict Anderson (1983) famously described the nation as an imagined community, but a psychoanalytic approach goes further in figuring the nation not just as a social construct but as a fantasy ideal that is by its nature unattainable. As Ghassan Hage has argued for Maronite-Muslim relations in Lebanon, the ideal of an uncomplicated belonging to a nation that faces no impediment is itself a fantasy: an unrealizable object that functions as the object cause of desire in Lacanian terms.The permanent crisis of the other who threatens the realization of the fantasy is actually part of the structure of the fantasy’s reproduction, turning what is an impossibility into a deferred possibility (Hage 1996). The Armenian struggle for survival in the face of persecution and genocide is an undisputed fact, but it would be a mistake to imagine that all that is being invoked in the aftermath of the Bourj Hammoud fight is a series of historical events or the repetition of a nationalist myth. As Hage (1996: 123) suggests, the repeated threat of erasure at the hands of the other might be better understood as a performative staging of the symbolic existence of the Armenian people, a contemporary staging of what makes them who they are, a confirmation of what it means to be Armenian. The ideal nation is the ideal communal life in which the subject is positioned and within which belonging is never in question. However, the psychological and often-unconscious reality of belonging is complicated, and within an overall fantasy structure, subjects will experience different modes of belonging and forms of attachment that will change over lifetimes and through historical time. There is therefore always a degree of anxiety occasioned by the desire to belong and by the perception that someone or something is impeding the ability to belong. What this in essence means is that fantasies are not unchanging; rather, there is much work to be done to assure their reproduction across changing social and historical circumstances. We need to attend here not just to the fantasy structure but to the active work of its reproduction under changing historico-political schemes. The changing lived reality of the subject has to be incorporated into the symbolic space of the fantasy (Hage 1996: 131), and contemporary social relations need to be fixed into symbolic and institutional orders in a manner that makes them livable for the subject. This is why the Armenian community has sought to strengthen the links between the historic genocide, the Lebanese wars, and the experience of contemporary violent crime, renewing the symbolic standing of the community and refashioning and repurposing the fantasy for changing historical circumstances.

London, United Kingdom The resurgence of populist politics across Europe has been interpreted by many as a return to forms of chauvinistic nationalism. However, the apparent stability and force of national identifications require a more in-depth ethnographic analysis than a mere assertion of a return of old nationalist sentiments. In the United Kingdom, new forms of subjectification are emerging as a consequence of the changing role of others and otherness. These new forms of otherness signal transformations in ways of life that have both experiential power and value for different sections of the community. In this section, we focus not on differences between the nation and others, but on the differing relations to otherness that jostle and coalesce in different communities and circumstances in the United Kingdom. These differences ‘within’ draw attention to forms of identification that incorporate aspects of, but also go well beyond, the nation and the national. Successive waves of immigration from countries all over the world have turned London into what has been termed a ‘super-diverse’ city (Vertovec 2007). This means that in many parts of 396

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the city, large numbers of ethnic groups live together, but also that within each group, there are significant differences in length of residence, social status, legal/citizenship status, class, religious identity, and linguistic proficiency, among other factors. These internal differences apply to the ‘indigenous’ ‘White British’ group as much as they apply to other groups. The demographic composition of London is quite different from that of the rest of the United Kingdom.While in the country as a whole, the White British ethnic group comprises 81.9 percent of the population (according to the most recent census in 2011), in London, this figure is only 44.9 percent. In some boroughs such as Newham, the White British form only 17 percent, despite being the largest ethnic group in the area (CoDE 2013). One of the consequences of such widespread social differentiation between and within groups is that it is difficult for any one ethnic group to form a large and cohesive community. London’s demographic transformation has resulted in both losses and opportunities with regard to social relations with others. On the one hand, the older sense of community based on ethnicity is now lost for many people since ethnic affiliations are no longer as strong and as significant as before. This is why so many Londoners, especially of the older generation, feel that they have lost their community (e.g., Dench et al. 2006; Gest 2016). On the other hand, however, London’s super-diversity has opened up the potential for radically new experiences of identity and difference. Since ubiquitous difference dominates so many public spaces in the city, it is now easier than ever before for people to feel secure with their own difference. In a place where everyone is different, it becomes difficult, impossible even, to stand out as different in specific ways from a single reference community (Mintchev and Moore 2016a). Diversity becomes a normal part of daily life. As we show in our recent research on the London Borough of Newham (Mintchev and Moore 2016b), many local residents in that borough see diversity as a positive attribute of the area and take pride in engaging in a community that includes people from different parts of the world. For the Newham residents that we worked with, community was about actively engaging with, and contributing to, the neighborhood and its residents. The activities that made an individual a legitimate member of the local community in Newham included a number of different elements such as volunteer work at a local school, participation in cultural events, and even involvement in a local neighborhood watch scheme designed to deter crime. However, acceptance of diversity does not foreclose the possibility of anti-immigrant anxieties and prejudices. It is not uncommon for London residents to support diversity while opposing immigration. The key point here is that the dividing line that distinguishes the newly arrived migrants from the more established residents is not one of ethnicity but rather one of being able to make a claim of belonging in virtue of length of residence and local engagement. In fact, members of ethnic minorities who are themselves immigrants or the descendants of immigrants often voice opposition to new immigration (James 2014: 658–662, Cohen 2013: 315, Wessendorf 2014). This is not so much the consequence of the racialization of otherness in the accepted sense of the term, as it is about fear (whether justified or not) that new immigration will put pressure on already scarcely available jobs, school places, and public services, while at the same time it will increase crime rates, make neighborhoods less safe, and increase antisocial behavior. The key difference between this fear of immigration and more traditional forms of exclusion is that in the case of London’s diverse regions both sides of the divide—the established residents and the newcomers—are ethnically diverse. This raises the question of how to account for forms of identification that both celebrate difference and yet still figure new arrivals as potentially threatening. In other words, what are the forms of subjectification that are relevant to the construction of such complex and contradictory subject positions? 397

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One possible set of explanations starts with the idea that identities are never unitary and are always bound up with the language, ideas, debates, perceptions, and experiences of others (Mintchev 2018; Moore 2007; Moore and Wekker 2011). But here we perhaps see forms of subjectification that are formed through the enjoyment of difference, where otherness is constitutive of the subject, not as lack but rather as plenitude. London’s long history of colonialism, trade, and wealth creation undergirds its late-20th-century and early-21st-century embrace of free markets, deregulation, and financialization. The promise of London as a global capital is one in which everyone will benefit, while the capitalist marketplace offers access to every good and all experiences. In this marketplace of desire, differences become commodities—Thai food, Pashtun shawls, and the like, become the mere epiphenomenon of a global system of consumption that can provide everything.The subjective enjoyment of cultural difference marks a subject who is not only knowledgeable about this world but also able to demonstrate his or her facility to function in it and to succeed in persuading it to release its riches. This too is a fantasy and one based on the marketization of desire, on an imaginary subject who transcends the nation, being inherently diverse and multicultural. This is a subject rooted not in the symbolic, but in a set of imaginary identifications that have formed out of transformations in social and economic circumstances and out of the embrace of globalization (Dean 2008). There is a fantasy here of a freedom from the nation and from communal identities while benefiting from the interoperability of difference. What London’s super-diversity shows is that communal identities undergo transformation under changing socioeconomic circumstances. However, such transformations involve new modes of otherness that go beyond changes in the content of the self-other relation to involve structural variations in forms of identification and subjectification. Under the conditions of globalization, transformations in ways of life, experiences, motivations and values have refigured cultural distinctiveness as consumable cultural difference, where it is the plenitude of difference that forms the basis of subjective enjoyment rather than the binary of inclusion/exclusion that is characteristic of self-other relations predicated on more familiar forms of majoritarian/ minoritarian politics. The origins of new modes of otherness are themselves multiple, as both Nava (2002) and Kristeva (1993) suggest, and link back to early-20th-century ideas of imagined inclusivity that transcended the nation and were linked to countercultural trends and progressive politics. The normalization of difference was part of a longer European fascination with the ‘allure of elsewhere’ (Nava 2002: 91), one that was connected both to the colonial project and to its critique. The larger point here is that the intimate economy of self-other relations links difference inescapably to desire, and where difference itself becomes an object of desire, new relays of relation between self and other become possible. Subjectivity is not a finished process, nor does it proceed as Foucault constantly reminded us, through processes of complete domination or over determination (Butler 2005: 22–25; Moore 2011: ch. 1.) Dissonant patterns of desire and ways of valuing and seeing the world that do not form part of dominant cultural forms can take hold at specific cultural moments and transform the nature of the political, refiguring the politics of the possible. Certain places, people, and forms of representation have at specific moments come to ‘represent an “elsewhere” of the imagination associated with pleasure, freedom and hope’ (Nava 2002: 87, 89). Novel forms of belonging involve not only novel performances of self but also new ways of relating to others and to the wider social and cultural worlds we engage with through media and technology. Self-other relations can also have different spatial scales within the same temporal frame. More distant and imaginary relations with others get caught up in the relays of affect, emotion, and desire that characterize our most intimate relationships, and simultaneously our most intimate relationships are enlivened by the pleasures and desires arising 398

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through our imaginary engagements with others elsewhere. Imaginary identifications are often attached to relays of affect and longing that do not respect the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or nation (Moore 2011: 78–79). However, the super-diversity of London goes further than this, perhaps. It is not just a matter of the pleasures of difference, ‘elsewhere’, or culture but of a series of identifications predicated on a fantasy of plenitude, of difference without limit. This may account both for the celebratory nature of multiple differences in super-diverse communities like those in London and for the fact that these multiply constituted communities/ subjects still fear the arrival of additional others. Plenitude must have limits; it cannot be infinite, and it could be lost. It may also account for the reaction of many outside London to the city’s diversity and its perceived limitless opportunities. The United Kingdom’s Brexit vote in 2016 reflected growing public discontent with the stark inequalities between the capital and a few other affluent cities on the one hand and the rest of the United Kingdom on the other. A widely articulated public discourse suggested that that for years the political establishment had been more interested in defending immigrants than it was in supporting white Britons in disadvantaged regions (see Dorling 2016). The success of the Leave campaign was seen by some as a triumph for politically and socially marginalized white Britons against the concentration of power in London and other large cities. However, post-referendum analyses of the vote showed that throughout the United Kingdom, there was an inverse correlation between levels of immigration/diversity in an area and support for the Leave campaign (Lawton and Ackrill 2016; Goodwin and Heath 2016). The fewer immigrants there were in a constituency, the more likely people were to oppose immigration and vote to leave the European Union. This pattern suggests that a large proportion of Brexit supporters were not worried about the actual number of immigrants in their communities, the number of jobs lost to outsiders in their areas, or actual changes in living arrangements that they experienced as a result of local migration. Rather, they were worried about an imaginary relation with more distant others/outsiders. Outside of cosmopolitan cities, many Leave voters were reportedly more concerned with the general level of immigration in the country, which they perceived as detrimental to the quality of their lives. As Arjun Appadurai (2006) has argued, national narratives of social cohesion and homogeneity can be challenged by very small numbers of others. Strangers or others do not have to be a threat to be perceived as such—hence Žižek’s (1997: 32) emphasis on the ‘theft of enjoyment’, the idea that what is rightfully ours has been stolen from us, that others have acquired something that should rightfully be ours. Many urban myths prevalent in the United Kingdom emphasize that immigrants have preferential access to housing, access to free mobile phones, and are consuming the finite resources of the National Health Service, among other claims. Assertions such as these are immune to evidence or fact. In the context of real inequalities and deprivation in the United Kingdom, immigration is associated with the displacement of majoritarian white Britons away from the nation’s centers of political, social, and economic power (Gest 2016). Unsurprisingly, the Brexit vote unleashed a toxic combination of a series of ‘thefts’ by others: immigrants, elites, the government, the undeserving. The fiction of a form of democracy synonymous with the good life is premised on the conceit that the market will meet all our needs, that no one will lose out. The problem, of course, is that the fantasy of belonging to the nation based on economic reward has become increasingly hollow. Without shared enjoyment, a community can no longer be a community, whether this be located in a mythologized past or in an idealized future. The changing organization of enjoyment has deeper consequences too, because under such circumstances, the majoritarian subject/ community is no longer the object of desire for the other. The political rhetoric of the recognition of exclusion further reinforces this point through the forms of signification it deploys. The 399

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white working-class community—which is itself a broad-brush characterization of different groups and subject positions—has found itself renamed in the United Kingdom as the ‘just about managing’, or JAMS, and the ‘left behind’. These are clearly not socially valued subject positions, and as forms of signification, they performatively reinscribe the loss of value and of the other’s desire. They provide only a punitive basis for subjective identification—even if certain forms of enjoyment adhere to subject positions based on victimhood—and they further distance the white majority from its ‘rightful position’ at the center of the nation. Processes of subjectification are not just about universal mechanisms of identification; they have to take account of how people make their lives meaningful and viable under changing circumstances, and thus, subjectivity has to be placed, as we have already suggested, in wider socioeconomic and historical frameworks. We can see the value of such an approach by comparing the case study just discussed on London with a related but different set of processes in Poland.

Warsaw, Poland On 12 September 2015, thousands of people assembled in the center of Warsaw and in other Polish cities to demonstrate against the European Union’s plans to resettle Syrian refugees across the continent. During the rallies, far-right demonstrators chanted slogans such as ‘Poland free of Islam’ and ‘Today refugees, tomorrow terrorists’ (Gander 2015).The anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiments these slogans express are not uncommon in Poland. According to data from the 2013 Polish Prejudice Survey, 69 percent of respondents declared that they do not want more people with different skin color to come to the country, and 63 percent said that immigrants would be detrimental to the economy (Górak-Sosnowska 2016: 195–196). According to another study, ‘Muslims are the most disliked religious group (44 percent dislike them compared to 23 percent who like them) and around 20 percent of Polish people do not wish to have a Muslim colleague or neighbor’ (Górak-Sosnowska 2016: 193). Yet, Muslim communities have existed in Poland for centuries without attracting such opprobrium (Narkowicz and Pędziwiatr 2017a; 2017b). Needless to say, Poland does not in any way hold a monopoly over Islamophobia and antiimmigrant or anti-refugee attitudes in Europe. In fact, Islamophobia and xenophobia are present throughout Europe in many countries. But notably, Poland has among the lowest numbers of refugees in Europe and a very small number of ethnic minorities. According to data from the 2011 census, over 97 percent of the country’s residents identify as ethnic Poles, while only 1.5 percent claim to be of non-Polish origin (Górak-Sosnowska 2016: 195). Furthermore, at approximately 20,000 people strong, Poland’s Muslim minority amounts only to about 0.05 percent of the country’s population (Wasik and Foy 2016). This number is so small that it is estimated that only 12 percent of Polish people have met a Muslim in their lifetime (GórakSosnowska 2016: 196). What these figures suggest is that anti-immigrant and Islamophobic attitudes in Poland have little to do with actual concrete experiences and face-to-face encounters with immigrants and Muslims. Instead, they are based on an imagined relationship between the Polish nation-state and the ‘others’ against which it defines its identity. But this relationship has clearly changed over time and has multiple aspects to it that must be ascertained. The nation’s ‘others’ are not just the aforementioned Muslim refugees. While national identity is constituted for many Poles as violently opposed to Muslim refugees and other migrants, it is also situated in a larger geopolitical context of national representations and the circulation of ideas, images, and values connected both to wider economic and political transformations and to the migration of Poles to other parts of Europe, especially the United Kingdom (Gawlewicz and Narkowicz 2015; Grabowska and Garapich 2016). 400

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Many countries in the Central and East European region, including Poland, occupy an uneasy position in relation to the West.This is for a number of reasons: the region is geographically located between what is commonly known as ‘the Occident’ and ‘the Orient’; many of the local national languages are of Slavic origin (as opposed to Latin origin); and most countries in the region were governed by socialist/communist regimes for much of the 20th century and are now haunted by the specter of economic ‘backwardness’ that has continued to be associated with communism since the Cold War. In this context, fears that immigrants may be a threat to the economy carries particular significance. What is more, Central and East European countries can boast neither the cultural hegemony of large Western nations such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, nor their military power, economic affluence, and high standards of living. Needless to say, the Central and East European region is far from a homogenous one, and the cultural politics of identity in it are complex.Yet many of the countries in the region—Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, and Bulgaria— express an uneasy relationship with the West, both as an imagined category and as a hegemonic economic and political force, which translates into specific forms of aspiration and anxiety with regard to ethnic and national identity, as well as an aspiration to achieve the status and hegemony of powerful Western countries. Working alongside this is a concomitant anxiety about not being Western enough in virtue of geographical position, as well as linguistic, cultural, economic, and historical differences vis-à-vis Western Europe and North America (Salecl 2004: 11–12). Practices of Islamophobia, xenophobia, and racism—from public demonstrations, to political rhetoric against immigrants and vigilante attacks on refugees—evoke a series of stereotypical religious, racial, economic and geopolitical binaries: between Christianity and Islam, white and non-white, developed and developing, the West and the rest of the world (Pędziwiatr 2015). Opposition to immigrants and refugees is not just an expression of an opinion about whether the consequences of immigration are good or bad; it is also a performative act through which the subject identifies with the first terms of these binary oppositions by rejecting and opposing itself to the second terms. When Poles protest the entry of Muslims refugees in Poland and in Europe more generally, they put themselves in the position of Europeans who are actively defending the continent, even as they are criticized by other European nations for their apparent ‘prejudice’.The irony is that as Polish citizens engage with a performative assertion of identity in an attempt to resolve the unease of being marginal in relation to the West, they simultaneously invoke exclusionary discourses from Western Europe that reassert the fragile nature of their European belonging. In this context, it is perhaps no surprise that there was a sharp rise in anti-immigrant and Islamophobic attacks in Poland in 2016, at the same time as the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign (Wasik and Foy 2016). Poles are one of the largest minorities in the United Kingdom and the largest foreign-born population in the country. In fact, in many contexts in the United Kingdom, they constitute a significant part of the country’s urban super-diversity. As mentioned, immigration was a central issue in the referendum, and Poles, as a large community of EU migrants, were inevitably implicated in the reasons many Britons voted to leave the European Union. This suggests a link between Poland’s rise in hate crimes at home and the simultaneous attacks—both symbolic and at times physical—faced by Poles in the United Kingdom as a consequence of the Brexit referendum’s outcome (Wasik and Foy 2016). The success of the Brexit campaign was a challenge to European solidarity and a rejection of the right of EU citizens to freely work and live in the United Kingdom. For East European countries, and especially for Poland (because of its large migrant population in the United Kingdom), Brexit was a gesture of rejection that rendered East Europeans undesirable and unwelcome, devaluing them via the gaze of the other. While Brexit was challenging the legitimacy of Polish European identity by rejecting Poles in the United Kingdom, Poles in Poland were trying to reaffirm this legitimacy through rejecting migrants and minorities. Key to understanding these processes is the transfer 401

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of ideas, practices, values, and norms as individuals and communities move but also as their intimate relations are continuously reanimated by more virtual and extended relations with imagined others. Anti-Muslim prejudice is itself a transnational phenomenon, and some commentators have documented how negative discourses about Muslims have been disseminated and learned in the United Kingdom, only to be exported back to Poland in a complex figure of overlapping forms of subjective identification and engagement with the desire for European belonging (Grabowska and Garapich 2016; Gawlewicz and Narkowicz 2015).

Conclusion Global migration is affecting countries, cities, and communities all over the world, whether they are recipients of migrants or not. It is driving demographic, economic, political, and cultural changes on an unprecedented scale and at a rapid pace. But understanding these changes alone does not explain how and why people respond to their local and national circumstances in some ways and not others. Why are they hospitable to some immigrants but hostile to others? Why do they accept or reject political discourses that oppose immigration? Why do they hold xenophobic views even if they rarely encounter foreigners? Psychoanalysis, as a theory of the subject and subjectivity, can begin to address these questions by understanding the complex internal dynamics through which people relate to themselves and others in context of migration and diversity. However, as the case examples presented in this chapter demonstrate, this cannot be sufficiently done in a historical and cultural vacuum: without attending to the larger social and historical contexts that define subjectivity. The subject of psychoanalysis is constituted in and through identifications with objects, people, images, and representations, and these carry with them meanings about who the subject is, what it means to be a member of a community, and how one’s identity differs from that of others. The subject is multiply constituted; it is comprised of multiple identifications and subject positions, which often create unconscious intrapsychic conflict that it tries to resolve. The theory of multiply constituted subjectivity has been a central pillar of psychoanalytic theory since Freud. This theory has been extremely influential in the social sciences and humanities, and today it is crucial that any nuanced understanding of migration and diversity acknowledges the multiple nature of the subject’s relationship to itself and others and how this changes over historical time. Psychic identifications always take place in relation to an outside world, which in turn is invariably rich in cultural and historical meanings. It is the experience of this outside world of meaning that defines how people imagine their relationship to those who are like them and those who are different and that helps or hinders their ability to live together in today’s world on the move.

Acknowledgment Part of the research in this chapter was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council via the RELIEF Centre (ES/P008003/1). The authors are very grateful for this generous support.

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32 BIOPOLITICS A. Kiarina Kordela

We can begin approaching the psychoanalytic conceptualizations of biopower and biopolitics by bringing together two of the most divergent extant accounts of biopower: the theories of Michel Foucault and those of Giorgio Agamben. According to Foucault (the founder of the concept in the 1970s), biopower is a modern form of political power since the late 18th century that succeeded the age-old principle of sovereignty as ‘the right to take life and let live’. Sovereign power is effectively ‘the right to kill’, so that ‘it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life’ (Foucault 2003: 240–241). As opposed to the sovereign right to kill, biopower emerges as a new ‘technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective’ (Foucault 2003: 254) through its various ‘disciplines of the body’ and ‘the regulations of the population’ regarding its ‘propagation, births . . . mortality . . . health, life expectancy and longevity’ (Foucault 1990: 136–140). By contrast, Giorgio Agamben traces biopower back into the Roman empire. By invoking Aristotle’s distinction between bios, as organized sociopolitical life, and zoe, as the undifferentiated, pre- or extra-symbolic or ‘bare life’ of a living being, Agamben defines biopower as the direct exercise of power on zoe or ‘bare life’—that is, life that falls out of the jurisdiction of the law. The ‘exemplary place of modern biopolitics’ is the concentration camp, which constitutes the ‘biopolitical nomos [law] of the planet’ (Agamben 1998: 176). However, the seed of this form of power is to be found already in ancient Roman law, specifically in the homines sacri, who, like the victims of the Holocaust, are marked by the simultaneous ‘unpunishability of [their] killing and the ban on [their] sacrifice’ (Agamben 1998: 73, emphasis in the original). In the Nazi concentration camps, the Jews and others ‘were exterminated not in a mad and giant [sacrificial] holocaust but, exactly as Hitler had announced, “as lice”, which is to say, as bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 127–129, 114). These two contending accounts of biopolitics can locate its inception at so remarkably remote historical points because of their diverse conceptualizations of the link between ‘bios’ and ‘politics’ in the term biopolitics. For Foucault, bios is thoroughly steeped in the political and other institutions that constitute the social order—or, in Carl Schmitt’s words, the ‘normal situation’—and the latter’s purpose is the improvement of bios. Biopower’s task is the benevolent administration of life, but biopower and sovereignty are in principle so incompatible that, as we shall see in the last section, biopower has to invent new ways to justify the increasing necessity for practicing sovereign power (i.e., violence against life). 405

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By contrast, for Agamben, bios concerns life only insofar as it lies outside of the law of the ‘normal situation’. For Agamben, the ‘normal situation’ consists of exchanges between debts (e.g., crimes) and their redemption, whose ultimate receiver is the sovereign.Through a sacrifice, one pays a past or future debt, and the fact that the homo sacer cannot be sacrificed means that one cannot pay for one’s debt by killing the homo sacer—which is why the homo sacer is outside the law of the ‘normal situation’. But also outside the law lies the decision as to who or what is part of the lawful ‘normal situation’: not the law but only the state sovereign can make this decision. Accordingly, for Agamben, from the moment there is state law, there is also the sovereign decision as to what life can be treated as lying outside the law (zoe or homo sacer); in short, state and biopower are inseparable. By contrast, for Foucault, sovereignty and state power are incompatible with biopower, which is in principle beneficial to life, as a specifically modern form of power that aspires to the highest possible delegitimization of sovereignty (violence). This is why biopower must justify its sovereign functions in ways that appear to sustain biopower itself. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, each of the two accounts, Agamben’s and Foucault’s, tells the truth, but only partly. Foucault’s account reveals that modern (capitalist) biopower has to make the improvement of life (and hence of labor’s productivity) its objective and, concomitantly, to invent a new type of justification for its use of violence. Agamben’s account points to the affinity between biopower and any form of state power, namely the fact that authority is self-referential, since it grounds the law (‘normal situation’) but is grounded not on the law but on itself. In the following, we shall see, first, that self-referentiality underlies any form of political power and that the primary biopolitical law consists in prohibiting this self-refenentiality, as the very precondition for any political (and sociocultural) system to function. Psychoanalysis reveals further that political power’s self-referentiality is the corollary of the self-referentiality of being or bios, as the latter is the potential of being to actualize itself. Jacques Lacan’s jouissance (enjoyment) and (Marx’s) labor power are the two concepts that express the (transhistorical) essence of being/bios as this power of self-actualization. And the historical itinerary of jouissance and labor power reveals the historically (i.e., socioeconomically) specific formations of biopower, at which the capitalist, as Foucault argues, aims to improve life. However, psychoanalysis also shows us that the central object of biopower lies far beyond the protection of biological bodies and populations, since the potential of self-actualization—not existing in actuality but only as a potentiality—pertains not to finite linear time but to eternity. This insight reveals the intrinsically ‘religious’ character of capitalist biopower, which succeeds in fostering secular illusions of immortality. Finally, by constructing the human as eternally immortal, contemporary Western biopolitical discourse needs only to construct its ‘enemies’ as mortal to reduce them to the level of the (expendable) subhuman. This psychoanalytic conception of bioracism goes far beyond Foucault’s biological-evolutionist racism.

The Law of Blood, or the Prohibition of Self-Referentiality Commenting on the self-referentiality of power, Carl Schmitt notoriously remarked that ‘the essence of the state’s sovereignty’ must be understood ‘not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule but as the monopoly to decide’ what constitutes the ‘normal situation’ and what its ‘exception’ (Schmitt 1985: 13). By foregrounding the exceptional condition of the homo sacer—a killing that involves neither punishment nor sacrifice—Agamben reveals that homo sacer shares the same paradox with the sovereign. For the sovereign’s killing is both unpunishable (as long as the above genitive is subjective: the sovereign does the killing) and non-sacrificial (as long as the same genitive is objective, that is, somebody else kills the sovereign). By definition, the sovereign can 406

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kill with impunity, and if somebody else kills the sovereign, the latter’s death cannot constitute a sacrifice or redemption for a debt (whose ultimate receiver, we recall, is the sovereign), since this would presuppose that the killer would have been the sovereign before the (first) sovereign’s death. ‘The exception’ or the sovereign, like Agamben’s homo sacer, ‘reveals most clearly the essence of the state’s authority’—that is, the fact that ‘the decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law’ (Schmitt 1985: 13). Agamben points to the paradox of biopower as that of any political power: its self-referentiality. That is, rather than involving Two (itself and the Other as its ground), power is One—only that the One must be conceived as split between itself (qua law) and its own ground (sovereignty). If Agamben indicates that biopower is coterminous with any state power, then a figure that had a major impact on Jacques Lacan’s thought, Claude Lévi-Strauss, makes us understand that biopower is in fact truly transhistorical. This owes to the constitutive paradox or exception that is required for the formation of not only the state but any human society, including the most archaic ones: the incest prohibition—a prohibition that, far from applying exclusively to the matrimonial family, is recognized by psychoanalytic anthropology as the foundation of the most diverse societies since ancient times. This is the most primary biopolitical law, because it regulates bodies and the social circulation of blood and because it constitutes a paradoxical exception insofar as it defies the dualism between nature and culture, or zoe, and law. In LéviStrauss’s words, the incest prohibition ‘is in origin neither purely cultural nor purely natural. . . . It is the fundamental step . . . in which the transition from nature to culture is accomplished’ (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 24–25). In Kojin Karatani’s summary, If we do not consider culture as an a priori given, it can only be deduced from nature. But culture does not emerge from nature. Lévi-Strauss solved this by turning to ‘prohibition’. . . . The prohibition of incest is ‘what man makes’, but it is not made by man, because it is this prohibition itself that makes man into man. (Karatani 1995: 95–96) The key to Lévi-Strauss’s approach lies in enfolding the supernatural transcendence (divinity as the creationist power supposed to have infused culture into nature) within immanence (‘creation’ or nature)—which is what constitutes the foremost precondition toward properly secular thought.The ‘secular’ properly understood does not mean the elimination of transcendence tout court but a folding of transcendence (as a transhistorically operative epistemological function) within immanence. The qualities traditionally attributed to the supernatural thereby become those of one aspect of immanence itself. In the case of political power, its ground ceases to be a transcendent divinity and instead becomes an aspect of power itself that transcends itself qua law (normal situation). The folding of transcendence within immanence is first expressed in Baruch Spinoza’s pathbreaking formula (published in 1677)—‘Deus, seu Natura’ (i.e., ‘God, or Nature’ (Spinoza 1990: 436; 1985: 544; Ethics, part IV, pref.))—whereby, in one of its two aspects, nature consists of beings in time (finite modes) and, in its other aspect, is an eternal substance outside time. In Spinoza’s folding of transcendence within immanence lies already the seed of psychoanalysis, whose fundamental principle is expressed in the Lacanian thesis that the ‘true formula of atheism’ is not Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ but ‘God is unconscious’ (Lacan 1981: 59). Once this secular premise has been posited, culture can emerge only in the same way that political power does: power is ‘what the law makes’, but it is not made by the law, because it is power itself that makes law into law. Once a supernatural power—be it the spirits or any form of divinity—ceases to be the origin and ground of political power, the latter’s self-referentiality is exposed. 407

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This means that the transhistorical biopolitical law prohibiting self-referentiality has different historical concrete manifestations. The prohibition of self-referentiality can be fulfilled only by some transcendent basis (an Other) that grounds the system (law, society, culture, language, etc.).Yet there are at least two ways of conceiving transcendence: either in its absolute sense, as in the case of traditional religions, where it takes some spiritual or divine (supernatural) form, or in the secular sense, in which transcendence is folded within immanence, and is thereby relatively disenchanted. The pre-secular absolute and the secular immanent transcendences are the two historically known ways to prohibit self-referentiality as the precondition for a system to function and, hence, for human beings to enter the systems of language, law, and society. It is this ‘prohibition of self-referentiality’ that ‘in psychoanalysis . . . is called castration’, as the secular precondition for the human subject to enter language (Karatani 1995: 78). Castration is the name of the specifically secular prohibition of self-referentiality, which ensues in the split between immanence (consciousness) and immanent transcendence (unconscious).1 The unconscious is the immanent transcendence on which the secular subject grounds itself as a conscious subject.2 In the origin of culture, we find the incest prohibition across cultures because the first prohibition of self-referentiality is posited as the biopolitical law against the self-referentiality of blood involved in being born from parents of the same blood. Like ‘the Oedipus myth’ in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis, the law ‘provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or born from two—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same’ (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 216). Both myth and law endeavor to evade the real problem or paradox: the One itself is split into Two.The prohibition of incest and its derivative laws regulating endogamy, exogamy, and all other configurations of sexual circulation in archaic tribes are the primal forms of biopower. Society begins the moment when self-referentiality is prohibited at the level of the blood, which is why the law is coterminous with biopower and both are transhistorical. Recapitulating, for psychoanalysis, (1) the law emerges as always already biopolitical; (2) the transhistorical biopolitical law is the prohibition of self-referentiality, whose most primary manifestation pertains to the level of blood; (3) the concrete manifestations of this transhistorical biopolitical prohibition and the ways of coping with it are historically determined; (4) so far, history has experienced two overarching modes, the non-secular and the secular, or the mode of absolute transcendence and that of immanent transcendence; and (5) the former is expressed in explicitly religious fashion, and the latter is a tacit religion insofar as it remains unconscious of its God or Law, or, what amounts to the same, insofar as it cannot ground the transcendence inhering in its immanence on something supernatural.

The Power of Self-Actualization: Bios or Jouissance or Substance The primary biopolitical law prohibits incest—that is, a specific mode of enjoyment that one could actually access empirically if one were willing to breach the law.This prohibition at the basis of any socio-symbolic order has as its corollary a real impossibility: an enjoyment that is impossible for the human subject to experience empirically, tout court. And this impossible affect—which Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) of the real—is crucial to the workings of biopower. In contrast to any empirically possible sexual enjoyment, as Jacques-Alain Miller writes, this jouissance pertains to the ‘asexual real’—that is, it is the ‘libido . . . of the real level’. And since, for Lacan, there is a ‘link between libido and . . . the death drive’, the real jouissance is ‘drive’, which is why ‘jouissance [is always] beyond the pleasure principle’—the death drive being defined as precisely the beyond of the pleasure principle (see Freud 1974a). In short, the terms asexual real, 408

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libido of the real level, and drive all designate real jouissance (Miller 1995: 10–14). Lacan further specifies the drive by stating that ‘the activity of the drive is concentrated in this making oneself (se faire)’ (Lacan 1981: 195). The real jouissance or drive, at once death drive and ‘pure life instinct’ (Lacan 1981: 198), is not created or produced, because it is itself the pure activity of making itself (se faire). In other words, jouissance is the cause of itself, not unlike Spinoza’s substance. Since, according to Spinoza, there is only one substance (or nature or God),‘a substance cannot be produced by anything else’, it is therefore ‘the cause of itself ’ (1985: 412; Ethics, part I, prop. 7, dem.). God or substance ‘as such is the power of making itself actual’ (Lord 2010: 21) or the power of self-actualization, which, being the cause of itself, is self-referential. Unlike anything actual that exists empirically (finite modes), jouissance is the sheer power or potential of actualizing itself, and as such, its ‘characteristic is not to exist’ actually or in time and to be of unlimited intensity: ‘jouissance’ is ‘pure life instinct . . . immortal . . . irrepressible . . . indestructible life’ (Lacan 1981: 197). The power of self-actualization lies outside of chronological time or duration—that is, substance or jouissance is of an ‘eternal nature’ and exists ‘under a species of eternity [sub specie aeternitatis]’ (Spinoza, Ethics, part II, prop. 44, cor. 2. dem.). And eternity ‘cannot be explained by duration or time, even if the duration is conceived to be without beginning or end’ (Ethics part I, def. 8, expl.) It is only the actualization of an action and its actualized product that pertain to duration, whereas sheer potentiality or, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, the ‘full, unvarying power of acting’ cannot involve duration and pertains instead to eternity (Deleuze 1988: 62–63). From the above follows that, for psychoanalysis, bios as the object of biopower is not limited to the vulnerable, mortal bodies within duration that the modern technologies of power are supposed either to administer (Foucault) or to exterminate (Agamben). The object of biopower is ultimately the impossible jouissance—that is, bios qua power of self-actualization under a species of eternity. And since biopower and its politics can be exercised only where there is society, the locus of biopower is the meeting point of the prohibition of self-referentiality and the impossibility of jouissance.

Bios/Jouissance qua Labor Power, and Its Historical Itinerary Jouissance or the unvarying power of self-actualization sub species aeternitatis ‘is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien)’ (Lacan 1998: 3): enjoyment lies outside any activity that counts toward productivity. Enjoyment transgresses the injunction of the ‘usufruct’ (a ‘legal notion’ introduced around 1630), according to which to ‘have the usufruct of an inheritance’ means that ‘you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you do not use up too much of it’ and that you ‘can enjoy (jouir de) your means but must not waste them’ (Lacan 1998: 3). Enjoyment entails waste, which is why Lacan ‘introduced [jouissance] by the term ‘Mehrlust’, surplus-jouissance, in the sense of a wasted excess, as it ‘is precisely through being perceived in the dimension of loss’, ‘through this effect of entropy, through this wasting, that jouissance acquires a status and shows itself ’ (Lacan 1991a: 56; 2007: 50). And always when the ‘signifier’ or ‘knowledge . . . is at work, what it produces is entropy’— that is, jouissance qua loss (Lacan 2007: 50). Freud’s rhetorical homology between subjective and sociopolitical economy obtains in Lacan more explicit and systematic dimensions, so that for the latter to say that something counts within the realm of the signifier or knowledge is the same as saying that it counts within the economic realm—on all levels, it contributes to productivity. In short, what is ‘counted’ is what ‘can possibly be articulated as signifier’ (Lacan 2007: 50), whether a signifier in the field of knowledge or in economy (i.e., as economic value). And in both levels, the signifier always produces entropy or loss. 409

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The argument so far seems to indicate that the opposite of enjoyment is labor, since, generally, labor is productive and, specifically in capitalism, it is counted as the very precondition for the accumulation of surplus-value. Yet there is a striking essential affinity between enjoyment and labor—or more precisely, labor power. Labor power is the potentiality of labor to actualize itself or to make itself (se faire). In Marx’s words, ‘labour-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual’ (Marx 1990: 274, emphasis added); it is the laborer’s ‘vitality itself ’, since it ‘is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him, thus exists not really, but in potentiality, as his capacity’ (Marx 1993: 267, emphasis added).3 The essence of labor power as the power to actualize itself remains the same throughout history, regardless of specific socioeconomic conditions. What is unique to capitalism is the commodification of labor power—that is, the fact that now labor power becomes ‘the use-value which the worker’ sells in the market, insofar as he or she is ‘free’ (Marx 1993: 267), in contrast to the pre-capitalist serfs or slaves whose lives belonged to their masters. Paolo Virno goes a step beyond Foucault when he recognizes the transhistorical aspect of biopolitics, stating that ‘it is legitimate to talk about “bio-politics” ’ only because the body, understood as ‘pure and simple bios’ is the ‘tabernacle’ or ‘the substratum of labor power’ as a ‘mere potential’ with ‘no existence in itself ’ (Virno 2004: 82). But he then compromises this insight by concurring with Foucault in that biopolitics ‘is merely an effect . . . or . . . one articulation of that primary fact—both historical and philosophical—which consists of the commerce of potential as potential’, that is, the commerce of labor power (Virno 2004: 84). It is true that capitalism involves the unforeseen commodification of potentiality, which explains why Foucault can find evidence of the phenomena that he subsumes under his label of ‘biopolitics’ only in recent centuries. After all, if one understands biopower, as Foucault does, as the form of power that improves life and its productivity, it is only the form of power that accompanies capitalism and its waged labor that can have life’s enhancement as its objective. However, before the capitalist commodification of labor, as in the slaved labor of antiquity or in feudal serfdom—the era dominated by what Lacan calls the discourse of the ‘classical master [maître antique]’ (Lacan 2007: 31)—labor was an unaccountedfor surplus, a loss.This is why, as Alenka Zupančič remarks, in Seminar XVII ‘Lacan . . . poses (and presupposes) a certain equivalence between work and enjoyment’, so that ‘the status of work (or labor) . . . is identical to the status of enjoyment’, and both labor and enjoyment ‘essentially appear[] as entropy, as loss, or as an unaccounted-for surplus (by-product) of signifying operations’ (Zupančič 2006: 162). Equally unaccounted for in the discourse of the Master was the slaves’ or serfs’ enjoyment: ‘people who had slaves didn’t realise that one could establish equations for the price of their food and what they did in their latifundia’ (Lacan 1991b: 75)—whether what they did was an activity of the kind of producing a useful good or enjoying in an unproductive ways (as long, of course, as the useful things were timely provided; if they were not, one could always dispose of the slaves in question and buy new ones).This is why ‘[t]here are no examples of energy calculations in the use of slaves. There is not the hint of an equation as to their output’; rather, ‘it took machines for us to realize they had to be fed. And more—they had to be looked after’—and it took capitalism to have the machines Lacan has in mind, namely, machines based on the calculation of energy, such as the ‘steam engine’ (Lacan 1991b: 74–75). Although ‘slaves’ too ‘tend to wear out . . . one doesn’t think about it, one thinks that it is natural for them to get old and croak’ (Lacan 1991b: 74–75). By contrast, in capitalism, employers are concerned with the mode of the laborers’ enjoyment insofar as it can affect their productivity and the employers’ own expenses for sustaining the laborers.This is why in capitalism both labor and enjoyment (leisure) count: they are commodified, and the proportion between the two is carefully calculated so that laborers can replenish their energy and be productive and able to consume. In short, ‘for 410

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capitalist exploitation to function, the entropy or loss, the amount of work’ and of enjoyment ‘not counted has to start to be counted (and “valued”)’ (Zupančič 2006: 170) and rationed. Labor and enjoyment—the potentiality of self-actualization—can be either lost (as in the pre-capitalist era) or reappropriated as productive surplus (as in capitalism), depending on the historical socioeconomic conditions. And it is only by taking into account both the transhistorical aspects and the historical itinerary of the potentiality of self-actualization (bios) as either waste or productive surplus that we can grasp the biopolitical mechanisms of contemporary capitalist biopower.

Repression of Mortality and Religion of Fake Eternity The fact that capitalism is predicated on the commodification (counting) of potentiality and eternity indicates the need to examine the historical fate of all aspects of labor and their respective temporalities as to whether they are counted or wasted. The term ‘labor’ can subsume three distinct aspects of labor: (1) labor power, the singular potential of labor to actualize itself (bios qua singular essence); (2) concrete labor, the specific physical and mental activities involved in the actual expenditure of labor power—for example, the labor of the baker versus that of the teacher (bios qua finite mode). These two forms exist throughout history, and capitalism introduces also a third form: (3) abstract labor or labor time, homogenous and quantified labor, which serves as the unit for measuring the exchange value of a commodity, based on the labor time that is socially necessary for the production of a given commodity at a socially given average productivity of labor ‘under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society’. And it is this abstract, identical, and homogeneous labor—‘human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure’—‘that forms the substance of value’ in capitalism (Marx 1990: 128–129). This means that in addition to labor power, abstract labor is counted, whereas the concrete labor falls out of any counting as waste. The three aspects of labor pertain to three distinct temporalities: while labor power pertains to eternity, concrete labor takes place within diachrony or duration—the temporality of finite (mortal) modes—and abstract labor, as ‘the substance of value’, pertains to synchrony, the temporality of differential values. Being pure value, abstract labor is signifier, as the negation of bios—that is, synchrony emerges as a specifically capitalist mode of temporality that ignores both eternity and duration.4 Although abstract labor emerges for the first time in capitalism, concrete labor exists throughout history and has also always been wasted. The slaves’ or serfs’ concrete labor was also not counted by the signifier (economic or signifier of knowledge [connaissance]). In the (precapitalist) discourse of the Master, the ‘entire function of the episteme . . . as transmissible knowledge is always borrowed from the techniques of craftsmen, that is to say of serfs. It is a matter of extracting the essence of the knowledge in order for it to become the master’s knowledge’ (Lacan 2007: 21–22). The master (philosopher) produces connaissance by discarding the slave’s practical knowledge (savoir faire), the technique involved in his concrete labor. For instance, out of the concrete practical knowledge required for making shoes, Aristotle distills the abstract universal concept of entelechy: just as the purpose, or telos, of a shoe is to be worn for walking, every being has its own telos. The masters remained oblivious to how shoes are made—that is, concrete labor is wasted both in pre-capitalist and capitalist economies and epistemes. In summary, first, the capitalist commodification of labor power amounts to the historically unforeseen commodification of eternity. Second, abstract labor, which emerges for the first time 411

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in capitalism, is counted as exchange value and so is its temporality, synchrony. And, third, the sole aspect of labor that continues also in capitalism to be wasted is the concrete labor performed by particular physical and mental activities within finite duration. But—in contrast to the precapitalist era—the fact that in capitalist biopower finite duration is wasted means that mortality is repressed, and the fact that eternity is commodified or counted within the discourse means that eternity is experienced as part of everyday life. Foucault also diagnoses the repression of mortality in the regime of capitalist biopower. Under sovereignty, death had to be ‘made . . . so spectacular and ritualized’ because ‘it was a manifestation of a transition from . . . [the] power . . . of the sovereign of this world . . . [to] the sovereign of the next world . . . from a civil . . . right over life and death, to a right to either eternal life or eternal damnation’ in the realm of absolute (supernatural) transcendence (Foucault 2003: 247). With the capitalist commodification of eternity, this outlet for entertaining fantasies of an afterlife is eliminated, which results not in some kind of an enlightened acceptance of mortality but in its repression. In the moment when ‘power is . . . increasingly the right to . . . improve life’, ‘death becomes . . . the limit, or the end of power too. . . . Death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general . . . statistical terms’. Now that ‘power has no control over death . . . it can control [rates of] mortality’. At this point, ‘death . . . become[s] the most private thing of all’, and ‘[p]ower no longer recognizes death’ (Foucault 2003: 248) but instead represses it, as do the subjects constituted under this form of power. It is not physical death but the death that is counted—in statistical data—that is registered in consciousness. If sovereignty masters death by being its physical cause, biopower masters it by treating it as an agglomeration of data devoid of any physicality. What is unique in capitalism is a new, properly secular fate for the temporality that is not counted: the repression of finite duration and mortality. But psychoanalysis indicates that at the same time that death as such becomes a taboo, eternity is counted within the discourse—that is, it operates in human subjectivation as a category of everyday life, as an empirically attainable dimension. Of course, just as we continue to die even as our mortality falls out of our consciousness, eternity remains truly unattainable, and what we empirically experience is actually an imitation of eternity.5 The commodification of jouissance means that ‘surplus jouissance is no longer surplus jouissance’—waste—but an ‘imitation surplus jouissance [semblant de plus-de-jouir]’ that, in truth, is counted; it is ‘the homogeneous equivalent of whatever surplus jouissance is produced by our industry’ of our ‘ “[c]onsumer society” ’ (Lacan 1991a: 92–93; 2007: 80–81). And the same is true of eternity, which now becomes an imitation eternity that is produced and marketed by the industry of our consumer society, above all the media industry. Aldus Huxley discerned the connection between the distractions of a hyper-mediatized society and religion: even as the ‘other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment . . . they resemble one another in being most decidedly “not of this world” ’ with its ‘realities of the social and political situation’—that is, not of the world of duration (Huxley 2006: 35). As George Bataille has shown, the ‘essence’ of religion ‘is the search for lost intimacy’ or immanence, in which we could not even ‘distinguish an object from ourselves’ (Bataille 1989: 57, 18)—an ecstatic state of the dissolution of the self and of the sense of lived time. In psychoanalytic terms, religion is the search for the lost (impossible) jouissance of the real—that is, for eternity—whose imitation is offered through the distractions of our hyper-mediatized society. The biopower of enjoyment is predicated less on coercion—the linchpin of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia—than on humankind’s ‘almost infinite appetite for distractions’, which is catered through ‘the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant’ (Huxley 2006: 35). The concern with the alternatives between truth and falsity voiced within 412

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the era of the enlightened advocates of the free press yields, in advanced hyper-mediatized capitalism, to a devotion to the unreal, which, like a new version of archaic religious rituals, continues to transpose people to the ecstatic world of self-forgetfulness.6 A form of power that functions by means of distraction or imitation jouissance eternity has an essentially religious character, just as the so-called secular is a specific—in fact, much more permeative—form of religion.7 This is not unrelated to the fact that the rhetoric of contemporary wars is increasingly cast in religious terms.

Bioracism and Affective Ideology Psychoanalysis indicates that the object of contemporary biopower is the subject’s relation to the temporalities of bios involved in secular capitalist modernity. Given that the hyper-mediatized biopolitical cult of imitation eternity constitutes human subjectivity as external to duration, mortality becomes the criterion that separates a living being from the realm of the human. This delineation between the two species constitutes the criterion of biopolitical racism: bioracism. Foucault’s analysis also points in this direction, but only partly. A central question plaguing biopower is indeed, how will the power to kill and the function of murder—a power intrinsic to sovereignty—‘operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective’? (Foucault 2003: 254). Foucault responds by stating that this violence will have to be legitimized on ‘a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military . . . but a biological-type relationship:“The more inferior species die out . . . the more I—as a species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be. . . . I will be able to proliferate” ’ (Foucault 2003: 255). That is, biopolitical violence legitimizes itself based on ‘racism’, as ‘the break between what must live and what must die’, which is ‘not a truly ethnic racism, but racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism’ (Foucault 2003: 254, 261).Yet Foucault’s analysis (including of Nazism and the USSR) makes evident that the biopolitical racist divide requires no recourse to biology, as other ideological constructs can also present a group of people as subhumans that threaten the social body. For instance, in ‘States (of the Soviet Union type)’, bourgeois convictions sufficed to legitimize the power’s ‘right to kill or . . . to eliminate, or . . . to disqualify’ (Foucault 2003: 261–262), just as, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, did communist convictions. In other words, Foucault’s bioracism is ideological, even if biology can at times be the preferred ideological construct. But the construction of the bioracial divide in ideological wars could hold only as long as people were concerned with the distinction between truth and falsity—the era of (state-type) ideology, which may have lasted until the end of the Cold War. The era of global capital and hyper-mediatization that understands itself as post-ideological and craves the unreal and imitation eternity increasingly moves away from such ideological, and hence discursive, criteria. Today’s division falls between what can be at all discursively apprehended and what cannot (or must not) be apprehended. Indicative of this shift is the biopolitical justification of violence in the so-called war on terror. As emblematic of this ‘terror’ and as the ‘most . . . peculiarly monstrous . . . inhuman aberration’ performed by ‘freaks of nature (or culture)’, the Western media present ‘suicide bombing’ (Rose 2004). If traditional ideology pits one set of values against another, the biopower of imitation eternity constructs its enemy as inhuman freaks of nature or culture tout court. Unlike an ideological position, an ‘inhuman aberration’ is not something with which one can agree or disagree but something ‘that cannot—or must not—be understood’—period (Rose 2004). In the capitalist biopolitical regime—that is, the (ostensibly) unconditional reverence of life—suicide bombing is not only an abrupt public irruption of the repressed (death) but also a recalcitrant 413

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display of death’s defiance. In the face of such ‘inhuman atrocities’, one can (and must) experience only horror—that is, not a cognitive but a physiological or affective extra-discursive ‘state of being’ (Asad 2007: 81): ‘a state of paralysis’ or ‘freezing’ or ‘petrification’ (Cavarero 2009: 7–8) that follows ‘the fading away of all meaning and all humanity’ (Kristeva 1982: 18) beyond any ‘interpretation’ or ‘discursive effort’ (Asad 2007: 81). Rather than presenting counterarguments against its enemy, biopower represents the enemy as an inhuman atrocity and thereby incites, in fact demands, horror—as is evidenced in cases such as Jenny Tonge (the Liberal Democrat Member of UK Parliament) who ‘was sacked from her party’s front bench’ for having attempted ‘to imagine what it was like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories’ and for having stated that ‘If I had to live in that situation—and I say that advisedly—I might just consider becoming one [suicide bomber] myself ’. To this, ‘the Israeli Embassy responded . . . “We would not expect any human being—and surely not a British MP—to express an understanding of such atrocities” ’ (Rose 2004). If no ‘human being’ can ‘express an understanding of such atrocities’, those who do (let alone those who perform ‘such atrocities’) are not human.8

Conclusion In the predominantly ideological era, affect was subordinated to ideology in their concerted effort to produce a bioracial break based on ideological criteria. By contrast, in the predominantly affective era, ideology is subordinated to affect as they again cooperate to produce a racial break, this time based on affective criteria. Today’s bioracist boundary is drawn between what lies inside and what outside discourse, the latter being claimed by pure states of being: affects. The human is defined as the being of affect, whose gamut ranges between the two extremes of imitation jouissance eternity and horror; the subhuman is incapable of affect, being stuck within the discourse, with its ideology, duration, and, above all, mortality. What is thereby forgotten is one of the major theses we started with: nature and culture are intertwined in an immanent relation (Lévi-Strauss), because of which human affect is both natural and cultural—natural as an experiential state of being, cultural in the concrete conditions of its induction. If biopower’s predominantly ideological era invested energy on essentializing ideologies, the predominantly affective era invests its energy on essentializing affect.

Notes 1. As Karatani writes, castration or the prohibition of self-referentiality allows any ‘self-referential formal system’ to procure the illusion of a ‘center that systematizes [the] system’, so that choices and actions become possible. As long as this (illusion of) center is lacking, ‘the necessity of choosing “either this or that” is replaced by the “both this and that” ’, so that ‘the self-referential formal system is always disequilibrate and excessive’ (Karatani 1995: 93), as it indeed is on the level of the unconscious (immanent transcendence), which knows ‘no negation’ and does not obey the laws of empirical time (Freud 1974b: 186). 2. For my more detailed account of the historical transmutations of the biopolitical prohibition of selfreferentiality, see Kordela 2013b. 3. For reasons of brevity, I leave aside the fact that jouissance and labor power are not exactly equivalent to the essence of substance but to the eternal singular essence of individual modes (see Kordela 2018). For our purposes, what matters is that both substance and singular essences pertain to eternity. 4. And, conversely, because synchrony emerges as an effect of the commodification of labor power, language can be conceived as consisting of differential, arbitrary signs only in capitalism. 5. While in the following I focus on the experience of imitation eternity, in other works I have examined the biopolitical conflation of eternity with infinite duration, as a further means to secular illusions of immortality (see Kordela 2013a, 2013c, 2016).

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Biopolitics 6. Not that there is no longer censorship; on the contrary, there is huge ‘economic censorship’, as ‘the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite’.Yet ‘[c]ensorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than state ownership and government propaganda’ (Huxley 2006). 7. This is a point argued by Walter Benjamin in an unfinished short piece (see Benjamin 1996). 8. For bioracism and its relation to ideology and affect, see also Kordela 2016.

References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Heller-Roazen, Daniel (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, T. (2007) On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University Press. Bataille, G. (1989) Theory of Religion, Hurley, Robert (trans.), New York: Zone Books. Benjamin, W. (1996) ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Selected Writings Vol.1, 1913–1926, Livingstone, Rodney (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard Press. Cavarero, A. (2009) Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, McCuaig,William (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Hurley, Robert (trans.), San Francisco: City Lights Books. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, Hurley, Robert (trans.), New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, Macey, David (trans.), Bertani, Mauro and Fontana, Alessandro (eds.), New York: Picador. Freud, S. (1974a) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Strachey, James et al. (eds.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (vol. 18), London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 7–64. Freud, S. (1974b) ‘The Unconscious’, in Strachey, James (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (vol. 14), London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 161–215. Huxley, A. (2006) Brave New World Revisited, reprint ed., New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Karatani, K. (1995) Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, Kohso, Sabu (trans.), Speaks, Michael (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kordela, A.K. (2013a) Being,Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology, Albany: SUNY Press. Kordela, A.K. (2013b) ‘Biopolitics, From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism’, Differences, 24(1), 1–29. Kordela, A.K. (2013c) ‘(Marxian-Psychoanalytic) Biopolitics & Bioracism’, in Jöttkandt Sigi and Copjec, Joan (eds.) Penumbr(a), Melbourne: Re.Press. Kordela, A.K. (2016) ‘Monsters of Biopower: Terror(ism) and Horror in the Era of Affect’, Philosophy Today, 60(1), 193–205. Kordela, A.K. (2018) Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure, London: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Roudiez, Leon S. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1981) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI:The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), Sheridan, Alan (trans.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1991a) Le Séminaire: Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1991b) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1945–1955, Tomaselli, Sylvana (trans.), Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX. Encore, 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality;The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Fink, Bruce (trans.), Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Grigg, Russell (trans.), Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Needham, Rodney (ed.), Bell, James Harle and Von Sturmer, John Richard (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1974) ‘Structural Study of the Myth’, in Structural Anthropology, Jacobson, Claire and Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest (trans.), New York: Basic Books. Lord, B. (2010) Spinoza’s Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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A. Kiarina Kordela Marx, K. (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1), Fowkes, Ben and Fernbach, David (trans.), New York: Penguin. Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Nicolaus, M. (trans.), London: Penguin Books. Miller, J.A. (1995) ‘Transference, Repetition, and the Sexual Real: Reading the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’ and ‘Silet’, Lectures Given as Part of ‘The Lacanian Orientation’ (1994–1995) unpublished. Text and notes have been edited by Anne Lysy, authorized by J.A. Miller, not reviewed by the author. Rose, J. (2004) ‘Deadly Embrace’, London Review of Books (Nov. 4), www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/jacquelinerose/deadly-embrace (accessed December 2013). Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Schwab, George (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spinoza, B. (1985) Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Curley, Edwin (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spinoza, B. (1990) Die Ethik (Lateinisch und Deutsch), Stern, Jakob (trans.), Stuttgart: Reclam. Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Bertoletti, I., Cascaito, J. and Casson, A. (trans.), New York: Semiotext(e). Zupančič, A. (2006) ‘When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value’, in Clemens, Justin and Grigg, Russell (eds.) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham: Duke University Press.

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At the Bus Stop The author has encountered in herself layer upon layer of disavowal of the true seriousness of climate change.1 The experience of undoing the disavowal is like peeling an onion to find deeper and deeper layers. Here is one layer, with her struggle to undo her disavowal. It is given as representing the kinds of struggles people currently face. She stood at the bus stop, having left the car at home to reduce her carbon emissions. It was raining, cold, and windy, and she thought grumpily, ‘I wish I’d taken the car!’ Next, she imagined her small grandchildren, now grown up, standing right next to her. She was in a bit of bad weather, and they, in the future, were in extreme weather because of climate change. She heard petulance in her entitled belief she should not have to face any inconvenience at all. She was saying to her grandchildren, in effect, ‘I didn’t make an effort and added to the mess you are in. Why? Because I don’t like being inconvenienced’. She felt ashamed, embarrassed, and much less of a person than she felt she could be. That moment of moral anguish emerged from a layer of disavowal in which she could know but not really know, with empathy and feeling, what climate change would mean for others. Her identity as someone not to be inconvenienced or discomforted took center stage, and her more caring, truthfully assessing, part was relegated to the shadows of her mind, along with her nearest and dearest. In a state of disavowal, she had kept her grandchildren far enough away to avoid any touching, listening, and meeting of eyes. Here, they were back close to her. In her imagination, they heard her petulant tone, and that led her to hear it better, leaving her feeling ashamed. A simpler explanation might be that people naturally find it hard to imagine the future. However, the author has no difficulty imagining her grandchildren in their future, hopefully going to university, having relationships and children of their own. Her blind spot was specific to the effects on them of climate change, and this was all the more remarkable as she studies the predicted effects of climate change and has written about the disavowal of climate change. She had been looking at the problem without seeing what it truly implied for those she loved. She had known intellectually what it implied but without actually imagining herself in their shoes. The layering of disavowal is illustrated through this example. The idea that climate change will affect the author’s grandchildren is itself disavowal in that it makes the problem seem a future one. But climate change is affecting people and claiming lives right now. It exacerbated 417

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the war in Syria and is predicted to lead to increased conflict (Welzer 2006; Wendle 2015). Floods and droughts are gathering pace across the world, with devastating effects also predicted. Disavowal is disavowal.2 There is no talking to someone who does not want, is not able, or is not ready to take something in. Climate communicators seem to forget that when they argue over the best way to tell people about climate change. The implication is if they could just find the ‘right way’ to break the news, then people would take the subject seriously. Psychoanalysts are familiar with this issue in the clinical setting, aware that insight, while it can be helped to form, can never be ‘imparted’ from analyst to analysand. It is always a spontaneous, owned, creative construction of the analysand that involves a radical shift in perspective. As Strachey made clear, these inner mutations of view tend to be less of the road to Damascus kind and more often involve small shifts (Strachey 1969). The author’s experience at the bus stop involved a crystallization of conscience. The question posed was, ‘what did you do in the great warming, granny?’The answer appeared to be, ‘well, I did a bit, but, really, I didn’t like being inconvenienced’.This author did not and could not accept that position as adequate. She felt guilty and ashamed. At that moment, she saw more clearly a petulant, entitled, and also resentful part of herself that was saying to her, in effect, ‘I will go along with carbon reduction actions, but only if I am not actually inconvenienced’. Going to the bus stop in the rain had forced this part of her out into the open, enabling her to see it more clearly. Her caring part appeared to have been weakened, and her un-caring part had assumed more license. She did not quite recognize the result, but she did own it as herself. To be clear, it is not that she believed that she occupied a moral high ground such that petulant resentment was unknown to her. Far from it. However, she was able to see that this ‘brattish’, entitled person was not essentially who she was or can be. The grandchildren in her imagination were not blaming her; rather, she was blaming herself but in a sorrowful, accepting, forgiving sort of way. Perhaps that helped her to see her culpability with greater perspective: she was to blame but also was not, in that at that moment she also saw that she had been acted on by culture. If there was any element of the road to Damascus kind in her experience at the bus stop, it was that she saw particularly clearly that culture was influencing her to be less of a person than she can be. This should not have surprised her, but it did. As Raymond Williams (1958) so cogently argued, we are mostly unconscious of a culture’s effects. We swim in the dominant culture, and that makes it hard to appreciate its effects on us. To see those effects, one first needs to realize one most likely will be affected by culture (see Hoggett 2012). One also needs to be able to step back from the culture enough to see it more clearly and step close enough in to experience its effects on one at a feeling level. Elizabeth Menzies-Lythe described the difficulty of this. She was addressing a group of nurses, and her question was, how do people recognize a group culture they are already part of? Her response was to3 Try . . . (looking at the culture) . . . as though you were a stranger. Look and listen.You may be surprised and shocked by what you discover.Think for yourself. . . .The simple answer ‘Think!’ is a difficult one. The more so, since it may mean prising yourself out of depression and discouragement first, and finding somewhere a ray of hope to sustain you. Starting will be the hardest part. Start slowly, and do it gradually. . . . Small successes will give you the courage to go on. (Menzies-Lyth 1988) She beautifully conveyed that thinking about a culture one is part of involves taking one’s feelings into account; also, one can easily feel downhearted approaching this task, perhaps in the way 418

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the proverbial fish’s first awareness of water may be as a stiff current to contend with. It is not easy to accept the argument that our current culture holds back our mental development and stunts our human potential, promoting a drift toward immaturity. Even more difficult is realizing that one has been affected by the culture oneself: it is far easier to accept that the culture affects only other people and that one is clever enough or farsighted enough to remain immune. We are more familiar with how women, racially stigmatized groups, and minority groups are treated as less than they are and perhaps less familiar with the idea that a culture can treat a whole people as less than they are. People under its influence are in danger of suffering what Bion called ‘spiritual drift’. He meant moral drift but also loss of agency and creativity. One reason it is difficult to speak to people about climate change is the disavowal mostly generated by culture. At the bus stop, this author felt that she saw the culture’s effects on her more clearly. She also saw that it was through resisting cultural norms and behavior (taking the car is still seen as normal and usual) that her conflicting feelings had been brought into view. A prevalent form climate change disavowal currently takes is ‘yes, but’ argumentation. Applying it here might be, ‘yes, but climate change is a structural problem that cannot be adequately addressed through small individual actions’.The hallmark of ‘yes, but’ disavowal is that what may have truth in it is used not for truth seeking but to justify turning a deaf ear and closing down an argument. This author had arrived at the bus stop already aware that neoliberal economics, based on fossil fuels and short-termism, makes reducing a carbon footprint difficult at every turn. Zygmunt Bauman (2013) had succinctly put the problem as being that the ‘logic of living’ in the neoliberal economy conflicts with people’s basic moral sense. Ordinary daily activities are fraught with individual moral dilemmas: Do I take the car or the bus? Do I buy those flownin fresh vegetables with a high carbon price tag? Do I buy those sultanas coated in palm oil to make them look more glossy and appealing, knowing that palm oil production is ravaging rain forests? Do I buy that chicken knowing it spent a miserable life in an automated animal feedlot operation (neoliberalism’s word for a large farm)? Do I buy that book online from a company that employs people on zero-hour contracts? A possible explanation for apparent indifference is people do not care (Groucho Marx famously put this as ‘what did the future ever do for me?’). Freud argued instead that people are basically moral. With characteristic irony, he said people are less moral than they believe they are and more moral than they realize (Freud 1953 [1923]: 52). Ordinary daily living under neoliberalism violates most people’s sense of what is right and wrong many times a day. Staying with the difficulty of living in a high-carbon neoliberal economy, truly taking in the size of the structural problem of carbon emissions and how that structural problem daily impacts on us and how we respond to it, can leave us feeling dispirited and overburdened. Who wants to be worrying about the future of the climate system when fetching the grandchildren from school? This author, noticing the petulance of her wish to be back in her car, felt guilty and ashamed. However, was it so unreasonable of her to want an easier, more convenient, and less damaging way of living? While is not possible to live without causing at least some damage, the neoliberal economy is causing such damage (and draws people into a way of living that causes such collective damage) that it will make life on earth not sustainable. It might more accurately be called necro-liberalism. To know this at a feeing level is to suffer and to live with a sense of moral injury.4 Robert J. Lifton (2014) argued that more people have recently begun to shift from an ‘unformed’ to a ‘formed’ awareness of climate change. Lifton sees formed awareness as awareness that climate change is a moral issue. He called the shift toward formed awareness the ‘climate swerve’. The paper argues that neoliberal culture works perversely to reverse the climate swerve, in other words to undo more formed awareness that climate change is a moral issue. Building this argument starts with 419

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exploring the un-caring mindset behind neoliberal ideology. Maintaining this mindset requires establishing a culture of implicatory disavowal.

The Un-caring Mindset Examples of the un-caring mindset are found throughout human history.The mindset’s hallmarks are self-idealization, exceptionalism (rules do not apply to me/us) and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.This constellation of traits also occurs in everyday narcissism, but that tends to be more transitory and more open to influence and learning from experience. Everyday narcissism is more able to live in conflictual dialogue with the caring, more-reality-based part of the self. The un-caring mindset is an inner psychic condition in which the un-caring part of the self has gained sufficient power within the psyche to rule over its caring part. It maintains an inner state of self-idealization: ‘I am entitled to whatever I want and entitled to avoid having to fit in. I am an exception to the rules. Why? It’s obvious. Because I am me, and being me, I am special and exempt’. Psychic ways must be found to ignore the caring part, because it would no doubt greet this assertion with a skeptical gaze. Rosenfeld argued that this mindset involves destructive narcissism as opposed to more everyday narcissism. It is destructive of links and connections with the caring part that would constrain it and hold it in check. Rosenfeld used the imagery of it erecting a stone wall against the caring part (Rosenfeld 1964). Bion referred directly to attacks on linking, writing about the mindset in a series of papers, one of which was On Arrogance (Bion 1958). The term arrogance well captures the inner psychological picture of a power grab by the self-idealizing, exaggeratedly entitled, ‘exceptionist’ part. To arrogate is to possess and rule in an arrogant, triumphant manner—to claim all in a peremptory way for the arrogant part of the self. Maintaining this position requires constantly attacking links and connections with the caring part of the self, in other words constantly and actively engaging in ‘un-caring’. The hyphen is there to signify that the caring part of the self is forced to live apart—in ‘apart-heid’—within the psyche, kept far enough away to have no felt influence. The un-caring mindset is an umbrella term to cover a range of inner political settlements in which the un-caring part is in overall charge within the psyche. A cultural organization ‘un-cares’ the mind so that the un-caring part can stay in charge.

The ‘What if ’ Approach Versus the ‘as if ’ Approach Hanna Segal, building on Freud’s distinction between the reality and the pleasure principles, argued that with phantasy powerful and ubiquitous in mental life, what essentially distinguishes reality-based thinking from wishful thinking is how the mind relates to phantasy. She distinguished two broad approaches to phantasy, the ‘what if ’ approach and the ‘as if ’ approach (Segal 1991). First,‘what if ’ asks, what if I act according to my wishful phantasy? What would be the consequences? The ‘what if ’ type of thinking is the hallmark of the caring part of the self. For instance, what if I act as though I am superior and special, rules do not apply to me and I am entitled to whatever I want and not to feel bad about it? What would follow in the outside world, and how would my way of being affect my inner moral equilibrium? Second, ‘as if ’ thinking proceeds ‘as if ’ the phantasy were true. It ‘deals with’ evidence to the contrary through disavowal and other forms of denial. ‘As if ’ thinking is the hallmark of the un-caring part of the self. This part does track the real picture but in a more paranoid, security-conscious way. Its basic agenda is finding ways to protect its perceived entitlements and exceptionalism. 420

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Segal argued both the caring and the un-caring parts of the self are cognizant of damage and try to repair it, but each views damage and repair in radically different ways (Segal 1962). She was highlighting the centrality of morality in psychic life. Both parts of the self are preoccupied with morality. The caring part of the self, tending toward a more depressive reality, is primarily concerned about the self ’s effects on the other. It wants to repair the damage it causes, where it can and to do this it needs a truthful picture. For example, having undertaken ‘what if ’ interrogatory work, it comes to the conclusion that ‘seeing myself as ideal, exaggeratedly entitled, and an exception to ordinary inner moral checks, balances, and struggles has harmed others around me and also harmed myself. It leaves me feeling guilty and ashamed. It leaves me in a de-idealized position, humbler, more aware of my needs, dependencies on others, and feelings of love and gratitude toward them. It has led me to mourn my arrogant phantasy beliefs’. Genuine repair involves this sort of psychic repair work and practical repair work. The un-caring part of the self is also concerned with damage and repair. However, its sees damage as that which punctures its phantasy of being ideal, and it ‘repairs’ the damage in ‘as if ’ ways aimed at restoring the wishful phantasy to what it was before the damage was noticed.This form of ‘repair’ is what Segal called restitution. Here, when moral imperfection is noticed in the self, all effort is directed to restoring the self-image as ideal. Restitution involves mobilizing defense mechanisms that include disavowal and other forms of denial. It reestablishes an idealized moral position through mentally constructing an ‘as if ’ form of morality. Segal classed this mental activity as manic repair (Segal 1962). Here is an example of how a superior, holier-than-thou, moral position can be restored like new in ‘as if ’ ways. It involves a mental ‘quick fix’, which is what Segal meant by manic repair. The author at the bus stop readily blamed the oil industry and the neoliberal establishment for the climate crisis while not sufficiently noticing her own sense of exaggerated entitlement and exceptionalism. The oil industry and the neoliberal establishment are majorly to blame, but was she using their culpability to project her own culpability onto them by maintaining, ‘I’m not to blame; it’s the system’? If so, that would be a manic repair to rid herself of feeling burdened by guilt. Blocking felt awareness of—disavowing—her grandchildren’s fate would help her sustain that position. When caught up in manic ‘as if ’ repairs, a person is not psychically available for genuine reality-based repairs. In the bus stop example, the reality to be faced might include how difficult it is to stay with the true complexity and difficulty of climate change disavowal, appreciate its structural dimensions, appreciate how helpless that can make one feel, and appreciate its individually felt moral impacts and implications.

Self-idealization A self-idealizing phantasy drives the un-caring mindset and its ‘as if ’ approach. Psychoanalyst Karl Abraham explored how this phantasy can become established, through the story of Amenhotep IV, the Egyptian boy king who lived over three thousand years ago and believed he was the Sun God Re (Abraham 1935). Many ancient rulers believed they were deities, but Amenhotep IV carried things further. He announced he was the son of Re, ordered all signs of his real father’s life to be obliterated and arranged to be buried near his mother.5 Next, he announced that he was Re. As Re, he claimed he was the source of all radiance and light in his kingdom. Abraham used this story to illustrate a mechanism central to self-idealization, called omnipotent identification. Ordinary identification is where, for instance, a child sees himself or herself as growing up in the fullness of time to be like his or her father. We say he or she is identified with his or her father. By contrast, Amenhotep IV falsely claimed he was his father: not his actual father but an idealized godlike version of his father that he, Amenhotep IV, had created. As Re, 421

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he was caught up in a phantasy that he, omnipotently, could create the whole world. The world he had created was an ‘as if ’ psychic world of fake reality. This is omnipotent identification, designed to preserve the illusion one is perfect in every way. Its existence depends on attacking knowledge of reality to keep that knowledge from denting the self-idealization. John Steiner called the ‘as if ’ world a psychic retreat from reality (Steiner 1993). Amenhotep IV obliterated any signs that he had a real father or a real mother (in other words a mother who related not just to him). Picturing Amenhotep IV running around rubbing out signs of his father in his actual kingdom captures one quality of omnipotent thinking. Strictly speaking, omnipotent manic repairs are not thinking in so far as thinking is the attempt to apprehend reality; more accurately, they are forms of thought action. A person caught up in thought action busily constructs ‘as if ’ pictures of the world to maintain a wishful phantasy. Thought action involves active disassociation from the reality-based part of the self that sees straight, cares, and stands up to omnipotent thinking and its self-idealizing function. The more self-idealization takes hold, the closer one is to believing one is a god who can create reality through acts of thought. Substantial psychoanalytic literature is devoted to exploring the un-caring mindset.6 Abraham clearly illustrated what is involved: a divorce from real objects through splitting them into idealized and denigrated parts; rapid omnipotent identification with the idealized part; recasting the inner representational world to suit wishful hubristic phantasy; a disavowal of the damage caused; and turning to a ‘pain-free’ inner world (Abraham 1935).7 Self-idealizing omnipotent thought action can rustle up an imaginary, illusory world to live inside in an instant.8 Abraham vividly conveyed that self-idealization involves using omnipotent thought action to reshape the whole inner psychic landscape. This reshaped picture of the internal world now involves split landscapes, split objects, skewing, and even reversals of meaning.9 Self-idealization also regularly involves fetishizing the self to distract from an awareness of fraudulent inner accounting.10 The self is so adored that fraud is no longer noticed. Amenhotep IV stole his inheritance, both psychic and literal, from his father and could bypass knowing this through worshipping himself as a fetish. When people idealize themselves, they forget what they owe and whom they depend on, thinking that they are the source of everything and that they can magically fix things that go wrong. In that position, they feel no responsibility for damage they cause, as the damage does not feel real or weighty to them. Amenhotep IV was warned about the true state of his kingdom but was unable to listen or learn. ‘His eye only saw his own beauty and harmony while his kingdom went to ruin’ (Abraham 1935). The blind eye of disavowal is not sightless in a passive sense. It actively skews the viewpoint to protect the viewer from suffering moral conflict.

Neoliberal Ideologues and Neoliberal Culture Neoliberal ideology—which inspired by Hayek (2007 [1944]), was popularized by writers like Ayn Rand, and gave rise to free market economic theory, while it gradually gained influence after World War II—was still a relative outsider on the political fringe until the 1980s, when it gathered support and was voted into power in Regan’s United States and Thatcher’s United Kingdom.Thatcher and Regan, both neoliberal ideologues, were aware that climate change was caused by CO2e emissions. They put in place an economy that would fix the price of aviation fuel low, subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and bury research into renewable forms of energy. It would forge unequal trade agreements that privileged the Global North and saddled the Global South with debt it could not replay. Markets and transfers of capital would be ‘freed up’ through deregulation and jobs moved to where pay was lowest and regulation weakest. Globalization was 422

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carried out the neoliberal way, in a spirit of ruthless greed and hubris. The outcome was inevitable: rising carbon emissions, damage to earth’s life support systems, increasing social unrest and increasing mental health issues (Davies 2016; The Lancet Commission 2015). Neoliberal ideology displays the hallmark traits of the un-caring mindset: self-idealization (our position is superior), exaggerated entitlement (humankind shall hold dominion), exceptionalism (rules and laws do not apply to us), justified by a drift to ‘as if ’ omnipotent thinking and ‘as if ’ moral quick fixes. A self-idealizing, arrogating belief system is by no means unique to this ideology. It took on new force, scope, and energy from the mid 18th century onward with industrialization and colonialism. Industrialization encouraged a view of workers and nature as ‘raw materials’ to be exploited. Colonialism had bred a belief in superiority over other cultures (preindustrial early modern culture and Indigenous cultures), with splitting into superior and inferior based on prejudice that was used to justify the immorality of ruthless exploitation. The humanity and the entitlements of ‘distanced others’ were disavowed to quash moral qualms with the steely indifference to the suffering characteristic of the un-caring mindset. In the 1980s, it became generally known for the first time that climate change is largely caused by humans, and humanity faced a choice between ‘what if ’ thinking and ‘as if ’ thinking. What if emissions were not reduced? The answer was damage would mount up as predicted. The science behind warming was clear and uncontroversial even if the modeling of how damage to the climate system would manifest itself was less certain (in fact, scientists underestimated the pace of warming) (Anderson 2015). Answering the question, ‘what if we do nothing about climate change?’ led the science community to address how to mitigate rising emissions and use technology to generate renewables. Their progress has been rapid and remarkable. In just a few decades and despite sustained attacks from the ruling neoliberal regime, it is now known that renewables can power the modern world. However, neoliberals who came to power in the 1980s eschewed ‘what if ’ and embraced ‘as if ’. They acted ‘as if ’ the problem of climate change could be addressed through extensive disavowal and manic repairs.That way, neoliberal ideology could ‘restitute’ its position as ideal, exaggeratedly entitled, and an exception to rules and laws, even the laws of physics. Neoliberal culture’s chief role has been to ensure that this phantasy holds sway and that there is no other way. It is beyond the broad-brush scope of one short chapter to more fully argue the case that neoliberal ideology is an example of the un-caring mindset. One illustration is neoliberal ideologue Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which vividly conveys the mindset’s traits in its neoliberal form. Its main character, Howard Rearden, defending himself in court, appears enraptured with his own superiority and superior creativity, wedded to the idea that he need follow no rules set by others. He argues with passion that only violent force used against him or incarceration will hold him back from doing whatever he wants to do. He is exaggeratedly entitled and believes he owes nothing to others, whom he sees as expectant leeches wanting to suck from him and take from him what he alone created. He is not responsible to or for others, but it is clear that he thinks they will be nourished by and benefit from his radiant creativity and largesse (Ayn Rand 1957). Here he resembles the picture painted of Amenhotep IV, who thought he was selfcreated and that his radiance lit everyone up. Rearden worships his individual freedom to the point of fetishizing it. This is freedom divorced from responsibility to or for others. He shocks with the revealing openness of his position, one normally kept hidden to respect moral probity. By presenting himself as radiantly superior, he hides the ugly underbelly of what is required to maintain the un-caring mindset: promoting extensive disavowal and resorting to brute force when that fails. It might be asked why a character like Rearden is so appealing. In the film version of the story, people in the courthouse start out listening in shocked silence, but by the end, they 423

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applaud him wildly. It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to explore this vital question, except to say that his appeal may lie in people’s conflictual nature. Which of us does not recognize a wish to be free of, untrammeled by, feelings of guilt and shame? Which of us does not recognize truth in Freud’s remark that a good conscience is a sign of a bad memory? Andre Green’s view of Freud’s death drive as the wish to achieve an inner place of quietude may well bear on why a position like Rearden’s is so appealing. The inner quietude comes from the absence of experienced moral conflict and the different kinds of anxiety that that generates (Freud 1920). The idealized self sees itself as beneficent and all providing. Real people, the apparent recipients of this beneficence, are actually held in contempt, exploited, and sidelined. One version of this phantasy within neoliberal ideology is trickle-down economics, the idea that neoliberals’ riches will trickle down. In reality, we have seen increasing trickle-up economics in the neoliberal age, with, as Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, rules fixed so the ladder is drawn up behind those in the entitled in-group (Ha-Joon Chang 2007). Under neoliberalism, the environmental harm done has tended to be addressed through quick-fix manic restitution. An example is the World Bank. In 1991, Summers, then-president of the World Bank, said in a leaked confidential memo, ‘I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?’ (cited by Arestis 1992). Here zones of sacrifice were to be created, with damage and suffering outsourced to ‘distanced others’, enabled by the logistics of the new global economy. When the memo was exposed, Summers was quick to say it was a joke, showing he recognized the issue as moral, so he needed to offer a moral deflection. But migration of dirty industries to the Majority World did happen, greatly facilitated by the World Bank. As this unfolded, language adopted by the World Bank in its reports became so vague and obfuscating that Morette and Pestre (2015) called it ‘bankspeak’ in homage to Orwell’s newspeak. Bankspeak obscured the true implications of outsourcing, enabling a moral position to be maintained in ‘as if ’ ways. Outsourcing goes hand in hand with not accepting moral responsibility for damage and suffering. Renata Tyszczuk, discussing the environmental crisis, called this the Frankenstein position. Her point was the problem with Dr. Frankenstein was not so much that he made a monster but that he abandoned it and took no responsibility for it (Tyszczuk 2017). A global economy run on neoliberal lines will exploit people, harm the planet, and squander resources. This is because the mindset that drives it is disassociated from care and a sense of responsibility. The economy it creates means that even a visit to the supermarket will pose ordinary decent people with innumerable moral conflicts. For the new neoliberal economy to function, people would need ‘un-caring’, in other words their moral sense would need deregulating so that they would not mind so much that the way they now lived was immoral and harmful. The culture that neoliberals put in place would offer people ‘as if ’ narratives providing them with justifications to help them feel less guilty living in the new economy. People under its influence were in danger of suffering what Bion had called ‘spiritual drift’ (Bion 1948), meaning moral drift but also loss of agency and creativity. Nevertheless, embedded cultures of care still survived when Thatcher and Regan came to power in the 1980s. Thatcher was clear that changing existing postwar culture in the United Kingdom was her first priority with the issue being moral deregulation: ‘I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society—from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation’ (Thatcher 1984). Here she conflated passivity with dependency. By encouraging people to despise the dependent and the vulnerable, she could not have chosen a more effective tactic to shift a nation’s moral center and undermine the ethos of the welfare state. She sought to divide the nation in a polarizing way into ‘give it to me’ 424

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(dependent) and ‘do it yourself ’ (independent). Her propaganda left people potentially feeling shame in recognizing that they had dependencies and that they too could be vulnerable. It gave license to the un-caring part of the self to look down on any signs of vulnerability and need in others but also—crucially—in the self. In this way, it promoted a more cutoff and cruel attitude to those who suffered. ‘Do it yourself ’ also boosted feeling special and therefore feeling entitled in an exaggerated way. ‘I did it all myself ’ is often accompanied by an illusory sense of self-satisfaction and inflated self-worth. The ‘I did it all myself ’ position strips away knowledge of what and whom one owes one’s good fortune to and can promote a sense of false pride and triumph, which can then be used to justify a position of ‘give it to me because I am special’. This can quickly shift to ‘I take what I want because I’m special’. One effect of alienating people from their awareness of being dependent was increased climate change denial: people managed to forget—or strenuously avoid thinking about—the reality that human life depends on the natural world and the food, water, and clement climate that it provides. Thatcher provided a template for a larger-than-life person with no dependencies and who does not tolerate feelings that get in the way of ruthless resolve. Part Lady Macbeth screwing her courage to the sticking point, part seeming like a large gray battleship, she steamed ahead and was not for turning. Her message was, if you wanted to succeed in the new economy, you would do well to emulate me and ditch your caring part or at least keep it—like a shameful inadequate relative—out of sight and out of mind. Her deep, spoiling attack on love is revealed in a joke she once made about the Good Samaritan. Thatcher recast the parable thus: ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well’.11 There is s truth here, and it is pithy and funny, but her words rob the poor of their potential to care, and her words feed smugness in the better-off. The capacity to love is not in the gift of those with money. Thatcher’s genius as a propagandist was that she had a way of making bad look good and good look bad; in other words, she encouraged people to be more un-caring while making it seem ‘as if ’ they were being more caring and virtuous. The perversity of her propaganda is that what started out as a feeling of moral pride in achieving a government that recognized dependency and protected the vulnerable became through hectoring messaging the feeling that to be dependent is a sign of moral decay. Meanwhile, a false sense of pride that one can somehow overcome one’s dependencies all by oneself was valorized. In reality, that position often accompanies self-centeredness, a lack of gratitude, and failure of a more broad-minded perspective. Thatcher aimed to tear a nation’s picture of itself into the good and the bad, the morally worthy and the morally inferior, with those in the morally worthy group actually more shameless, less prone to conscious guilt and more willing to forget or treat cruelly those it cast aside—in other words, less caring. Thatcher’s famous assertion that there is no such thing as society undermined civility by undermining the idea that there is a pie that we all share with those living now and in the future. ‘We’ includes animals. Her assault on the idea that society matters came at the very moment in history when people could see the planet and their position on it more clearly. People needed to expand (globalize) their vision of society to include humanity with shared resources, a shared fate, and shared rights. Thatcher drove a ‘little Englander’ form of narrow-mindedness, selfcenteredness, and short-termism that Trump is now driving further.12 Thatcher’s most devastating and lasting legacy was to normalize the view, ‘do not expect that the government will care for you and yours. That is not what government is there for’. We have, over the past 40 or so years, gradually come to realize current political leaders can so successfully override their concern they are willing to leave us to die, and we see this as normal and ordinary. 425

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We understood this after the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, when we saw world leaders publicly acknowledge climate change is an urgent problem and then go back on their words. Many people had less expectations of the Paris Agreement in 2015. While this might show less idealization of government and leaders and more realism, it is nevertheless a devastating assessment of current political leadership’s lack of care. Thatcher’s underlying ambition was to shift the moral framework of a nation. The kind of consumer needed for the new economy should be less troubled by seeing the environmental and social damage that the new economy would lead to; feel less personally responsible for that damage; and feel more entitled to bigger portions. Her rhetoric, seen in this light, ticked all these boxes: ‘Greed and self-interest is natural and holding these back tilts against the natural. There is no such thing as society so there is no need to feel guilty, ashamed, or anxious about any excesses. Because I am better than the next person, I deserve more than others anyway. I can look after myself, and I have no need of social care—indeed, needs would be shameful to acknowledge. Really when one looks at things the right way up, “they”—those who need benefits—are taking what is rightfully mine. Nonetheless, I may choose to help them out with some charity, as I am a worthy person’.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that an un-caring mindset drives neoliberalism and that neoliberalism drives the disavowal of climate change. As we have seen, the disavowal is better understood not at the individual level but largely as the effects on subjects of neoliberal ideology and culture. This culture boosts un-care and undermines our caring part, with its overall effect being moral deregulation of the mind. There has been a culturally driven upsurge in self-idealizing, omnipotent thinking during the neoliberal era. Its end result has been a pileup of damage and harm13 to the planet and to people. We will only address climate change seriously when we break with neoliberal culture and its un-caring orientation. This author believes that starts with the pain of seeing that we allow deregulation of our inner moral sense when we collude with it.

Notes 1. For a clear account of the causes of climate change, see Harrison 2012. 2. Freud used the term disavowal to refer to a mode of defense, one that consists of the subject refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception. Freud invoked this mechanism particularly when accounting for fetishism and the psychoses. His most detailed exposition of disavowal can be found in Freud 1940 [1938]. 3. Menzies-Lythe was addressing nurses and encouraging them to see their nursing unit as if with the eyes of a stranger. But I think her description well fits the difficulty of understanding any established social culture we can find ourselves in. 4. Soldiers are currently being diagnosed with moral injury as a consequence of participating in immoral wars. They too describe moments of the crystallization of conscience when they see that they are caught up in higher-order military and political structures that make it extremely difficult not to violate their moral code. See, for instance Alford 2016. 5. He ordered that her burial name show no trace of her ever having had any connection with his real father. 6. Including Rosenfeld on destructive narcissism (Rosenfeld 1987) and Bion on the struggle between the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of the self with the psychotic part eschewing experience (Bion 1959). 7. Abraham was writing long before Steiner put forward his ideas on the psychic retreat from reality.

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The Climate Crisis 8. Wanting to ‘feel special’ is common and ordinary and always involves some self-idealization. The degree to which we can get trapped in self-idealization may depend not only on individual personality but on our circumstances in life: how loved we are in reality and what in our environment keeps our omnipotence in check. 9. Klein, writing later, would describe the internal landscape as the representational world (Klein 1940). 10. A fetish is an omnipotently created phantasy object (psychoanalyst David Tuckett called it a fantastic object) designed to act as a special attractor and to evoke a supercharged excited, even erotized response (Tuckett 2011). 11. www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/margaret_thatcher.html (Thatcher 1984). 12. ‘Real cosmopolitanism is not a privilege; it is an obligation. It does not belong to the rarefied circles of some frequent-flyer upper class. It belongs to anyone who cares about global justice, about the environment, about the alleviation of strife and carnage beyond our immediate national borders’ (Appiah 2016). 13. Pope Francis has commented that we have turned the earth into a pile of filth (Pope Francis 2015).

References Abraham, K. (1935) ‘Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton)—A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Understanding of his Personality’, Psychoanalatic Quarterly, 4, 537–569. Alford, F.C. (2016) ‘Depoliticizing Moral Injury’, Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 9(1). Anderson, K. (2015) ‘Duality in Climate Science’, Nature Geoscience. Appiah, A. (2016) Reith Lecture, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080t63w. Arestis, P. (1992) ‘Furor on Memo at World Bank’, New York Times, February 7. Bauman, Z. (2013) Participant on Vetenskapens varld lot 23, stv (Swedish public broadcasting channel) aired 23.09.13, http:/www.svtplay.se/video/1480596/del-23. Bion, W. R. (1958) ‘On Arrogance’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 144–146. Bion, W.R. (1959) ‘Attacks on Linking’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, 308–315. Bion,W.R. (1948) ‘Psychiatry at a Time of Crisis’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, XXI(Part 2), 181–189. Davies, W. (2016) ‘The New Neoliberalism’, New Left Review, 101, 121–134. Ha-Joon, C. (2007) Bad Samaritans: Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity, London: Random House. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition XVIII, London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1953 [1923]) The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition XIX, London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1940 [1938]) The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense, Standard Edition XXIII, London: Hogarth Press. Harrison, S. (2012) ‘Climate Change, Uncertainty and Risk’, in Weintrobe, S. (ed.) (2013) Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge. Hayek, F. (2007 [1944]) The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge. Hoggett, P. (2012) ‘Climate Change in a Perverse Culture’, in Weintrobe, S. (ed.) (2013) Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge. Klein, M. (1940) ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21, 125–153. Lifton, R.J. (2014) ‘The Climate Swerve’, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sun day/the-climate-swerve.html?_r=2. Menzies Lyth, I. (1988). Containing Anxiety in Institutions, 2 vols., London: Free Association Books. Morette, F., and Pestre, D. (2015) ‘Bank Speak: The Language of World Bank Reports’, New Left Review, March–April, 75–100. Pope Francis (2015) http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-franc esco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Rand, A. (1957) Atlas Shrugged, Plume Books. Published (2007) by London: Penguin Books. Rosenfeld, H. (1964) ‘On the Psychology of Narcissism: A Clinical Approach’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 45, 332–337. Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-therapeutic Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic Patients, London: Routledge. Segal, H. (1962) ‘The Curative Factors in Psyco-Analysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43. Segal, H. (1991) Dream Phantasy and Art, London: Routledge.

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Sally Weintrobe Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats, London: Routledge. Strachey, J. (1969) ‘The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50, 275–292. Thatcher, M. (1984) Speech to Small Business Bureau Conference February 8 1984. See www.marga retthatcher.org/document/105617. Tuckett, D. (2011) Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Tyszczuk, R. (2017) Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene, London: Routledge. Nick Watts et al. (2015) The Lancet Commissions Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health, Published online as pdf. Welzer, H. (2006) Climate Wars:Why People Will Be Killed in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Wendle, J. (2016) ‘The Ominous Story of Syria’s Climate Refugees’, Scientific American, March. Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society: 1780 to 1950, New York: Columbia University Press.

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34 POST-POLITICS Olivier Jutel

The Lacanian Left critique of neoliberal post-politics– and its symptom, populism—has been in equal parts prescient and indispensable for contextualizing the current crisis of liberal democracy. Including Mouffe’s radical agonistic democracy (2005), Laclau’s embrace of populism as politics tout court (2005), and Žižek’s paeans to left universalism (2008), there is a foregrounding of the ontological necessity of antagonism and the libidinal in politics. The neoliberal triumphalism that consigned both the socialist left and the populist right to the margins as mere remnants of history is now faced with Trump, Brexit, and an international alliance of insurgent reaction. Indeed, the evacuation of ‘the political’ (2005) from politics has allowed the far right to mobilize alienated and individuated publics of jouissance. Unable to articulate an emancipatory and affirmative vision of politics, liberalism has become libidinally dependent on the populist threat, negatively defining itself against the barbarians at the gate. And yet with each act of anti-populist resistance, liberalism finds itself beleaguered and ceding its universalist values. Trump’s transgressive populist jouissance is a precise rendering of the nightmare that emerges from American liberalism’s libidinal investment in post-politics, rationalism, and a technocratic habitus. This chapter will focus on the current crisis of American liberalism as derived from postpolitics and the disavowal of the lack inscribed in political identity. Where the logic of symbolic castration forces a confrontation with trauma, antagonism, and enjoyment, liberalism replaces antagonism with a drive that disavows the lack. For example, the liberalism of Hillary Clinton was arguably defined by the supremacy of facts and concern for rational discourse in the pursuit of compromise, not as the basis for democratic participation and empowerment but as ends in and of themselves. Contemporary American liberalism has elevated a technocratic habitus in the place of an antagonistic ethico-political identity. This habitus marks one as above the fray in command of the facts with privileged access to the way things really work. The existence of social problems does not indicate irreducible class and political conflict but simply the fact that the intellectual resources of the technocratic class have yet to be deployed.The promise, and subsequent failure, of Silicon Valley ‘techno-solutionism’ (Morozov 2013) represents the apogee of this liberal post-politics as the most rapacious rent-seeking corporations manage to stand in for deliberative democratic ideals and community empowerment. In the face of the obscene revanchist populism of Trump, the Clinton campaign clung to a tech and data fetishism that would supersede an absent political core while somehow managing the indeterminacy of the political.

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The scope and consequences of Clinton’s failure simply cannot be accounted for in the liberal symbolic universe. Within a matter of months, American liberalism has swung wildly from a data-informed surety to paranoia in order to avoid a confrontation with the traumatic core of political identity. Trump cannot be explained as a symptom of popular alienation, Democratic party corruption, or the fecklessness of the technocratic elite. Trump and the Bernie Sanders left that would fight him in populist terms represent the intrusion of the remnants of history and foreign subversion orchestrated by ‘the secret agent who is stealing social jouissance from us’ (Žižek 1997: 43); the Russians. ‘Russiagate’ has become the means by which American liberals have attempted to preserve a technocratic authority while acting out a farcical retread of history. Techno-metaphors of the social are used to evince a Russian corruption or hack of the American polity’s information system, through fake news and subversive memes, while also licensing a disavowed liberal enjoyment and Red Scare ‘psychosis’. The obscene figure of Trump is not understood as the libidinal truth of American class power but rather made into a servile sexual political subject of Putin who enjoys debasing cherished liberal institutions. The crises of post-politics and online political discourse are not simply disavowed through an acting out of Cold War paranoia but have become integrated into a ceaseless technosolutionist drive to reinstate ‘the Truth’—in the perverted structure of contemporary American liberalism, the big Other that reestablishes truth is the national security state. Under pressure from liberal lawmakers’ appeals to patriotic nationalism and threats of regulation, tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have provided the ‘data’ which can be pored over to uncover the diabolical nature of Russian methods of subversion. Policy entrepreneurs, cybersecurity contractors and think tanks provide an infrastructure to translate the indeterminacy of the political into the existential struggle of American democracy against ‘communism’. Individuals can appropriate the technocratic habitus as Russia investigators on Twitter denouncing bots and enjoying solidarity among fellow resistance truth-seekers. However, with this foreclosure, the new masks the old and a looming confrontation with the Real. A totalizing cybernetic ideal of data has always been central to both a liberal techno-solutionism and Cold War technologies of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Data and connectivity have been conceived of as the means to rational discourse but belie social media economies of jouissance that privilege the forces of Trump. The costs of reconstituting post-politics are the last vestiges of actually existing liberalism as the political becomes the equivalent of social malware to be dealt with as a threat to the polity.

American Liberalism and the Politics of Lack The particular crisis of American liberalism is born of a post-politics that weds the class politics of progressive or Third-Way neoliberalism with a dialogic proceduralism that stands in the place of antagonistic ethico-political commitments. American liberal post-politics is a question of ontology and history.The absence of a labor party, the vagaries of white supremacy vis-à-vis class politics, and a new-world fetishism toward private property have meant that liberalism has been historically conflated with left politics. In this way, contemporary liberals see themselves as the inheritors of progressive left struggle, effectively effacing the contribution of radicals, communists, populists, and social democrats. This left legacy can be appropriated only within ‘the end of history’ or post-politics, where a liberal universalism of merit, process, markets, and equality of condition before the law are the engines of progress.Where conservatives appropriate Martin Luther King Jr for individualistic arguments about the content of one’s character, liberalism sees redemptive political processes and institutions. Michael Kazin identifies the dialectic of American exceptionalism as designating ‘the most idealistic and conservative nation on earth’ (Kazin 430

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1995: 12).There is an optimism toward immutably sacred norms and institutions and a corollary paranoia with challengers who are effectively alien and subversive. This claim of liberal post-politics to history rests on the end of antagonism by way of a progressive technocratic management of society. There is a disavowal of the constitutive role of the political and antagonism in social life through ‘eliminating from politics the notion of the adversary’ (Mouffe 2005: 49). In practice, for Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, this meant elevating the notion of post-partisanship and the reasonable Republican as a matter of political strategy.1 Social progress does not require division and antagonistic struggle but enlargement and inclusion. Thus, progressive neoliberalism replaces the left universalist call for justice with a foregrounding of ‘a multiplicity of “sub-political” struggles about a variety of “life issues” which can be dealt with through dialogue’ (Mouffe 2005: 50). Clinton’s appropriation of identity politics and intersectional discourse rested on the notion of promoting a ‘national conversation’ (McWhorter 2016) on race as an end in and of itself and in the place of redistributive and economically targeted policies.2 While disavowing antagonism, post-politics demarcates the boundaries of rationalism and discursive inclusion. History has ended but retains a spectral dimension in the form of the ‘traditionalists’ or ‘fundamentalists’ who in rejecting technocratic social administration ‘place themselves against the course of history . . . are not recognized as legitimate and who must be excluded from democratic debate’ (Mouffe 2005: 49).Thus, the social democracy of Bernie Sanders (traditionalist) and the revanchist populism of Trump (fundamentalist) were considered twin evils and commonly conflated both during and after Clinton’s disastrous campaign.3 The revulsion toward antagonistic struggle in the realm of politics and the economy, even in the face of a surging populist far right, owes to the class politics of American liberalism and a disavowal of the lack in identity. The Lacanian contention that politics is cut through with antagonism, trauma, and enjoyment is inadmissible. Against the Lacanian ‘subject of enjoyment’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008: 257) shaped by irrational drives and desire, liberalism clings to the politics of rationalism, nonpartisanship, collegiality, and consensus. However this fetish for process and norms is itself a negotiation of the lack, or symbolic castration, that ‘allows the subject to enter the symbolic order’ (Žižek 1997: 17). In the current conflagration of American politics, and increasingly the world over, liberalism, the populist right, and the left can be defined by their proximity to the libidinal. In the populist xenophobia of Trump, we see the pure politics of the libidinal and identification with American greatness, as a primordial pre-oedipal unity stolen by an overdetermined parasitic enemy. The true meaning of Trump’s ‘make America great again’ is the obscene jouissance of lashing out at the United States’ enemies, whether immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, or ‘globalists’ (Jutel 2017a). In the social democracy of Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, there is a call to reclaim history, labor, and the commons from an adversary. However unscientific the category of the 99 percent, this represents an ethico-political delineation to satisfy the material and libidinal needs of political subjects through an antagonistic call to justice and an enjoyment in solidarity. While this negation is fraught with all the historical failures of left universalism, it is essential in confronting a surging right-wing populism that occupies the class and libidinal territories left vacant by liberalism. Liberal post-politics turns its disavowal of antagonism, passion, and the political into a fetishized identity. Appeals to rationalism, consensus, civility, and process function as a selfreplicating drive and hyperactivity ‘to cover over [a] constitutive lack . . . through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008: 261). The recourse to facts and data in the project of attaining an elusive ‘universal consensus based on reason’ (Mouffe 2005: 11) delays the radical confrontation with the lack and liberalism’s own libidinal investment in rationalism. Thus, post-politics turns its inevitable failure into jouissance 431

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or ‘pleasure in displeasure, satisfaction in dissatisfaction’ (Stavrakakis 2007: 78). The call for more facts, dialogue, and compromise is self-fecund in that these are inexhaustible categories if one is seeking to avoid the responsibility of concrete ethico-political commitments. As a post-political consensus is always thwarted, there is a neurotic split between optimism and paranoia, surety and frailty. It is an identity made meaningful only by the specter of history and the political (fascism/ communism) in order to enjoy transcending these forces. In this way, we can understand the Clinton campaign as libidinally dependent on Donald Trump for a sense of meaning in staging an urgent defense of norms and civility. The Clinton campaign sought to elevate Trump during the Republican primary process, in what was called the ‘Pied Piper strategy’, to attract Republicans in the general election and cast themselves as saviors of the Republic against the irrational excesses of Trump (Debenedetti 2016). In this sense, the Clinton campaign conjured its own nightmare in the form of Trump in order to invoke a post-partisan technocratic leadership, which itself fuels the populist politics of jouissance of an embattled people against an elite. The Clinton campaign was plagued by this constitutive lack. The Wesleyan Media Project, which is devoted to tracking political advertising content, wrote that ‘Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous four presidential contests’ (2017).4 The insider account of the campaign from Johnathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2017), originally given access to write the presumed hagiography, recounts the outbursts, paralysis, and intractable dissatisfaction in the lack between a campaign team and candidate looking to the other to provide meaning. The truth of liberalism as a drive in the place of identity was neatly encapsulated by a top Clinton aide, who described the candidate’s tortured rationale as ‘I would have a reason for running or I wouldn’t have run’ (Allen and Parnes 2017: 19). As this drive cannot produce meaning in itself, the jouissance of post-politics accumulates around the affective pleasures of assuming a technocratic habitus. Regarding class politics, Thomas Frank has identified the transformation of the Democratic Party from a party of labor to the party of professionals, exalted for their talent, competency, innovation, and philanthropy (Frank 2017). This new class of professionals, wrote veteran party official Frederick Dutton, would transcend material politics of labor for a renewal of the American psyche and soul (cited by Frank 2017: 42). The figure of Clinton allows one to identify with a self-satisfied5 dynamic class of progressive neoliberals through a biting cynicism toward those that would try to effect social transformation through traditional mass politics.The followers of Clinton, a self-described ‘progressive who gets things done’, understand how things really work and are the enlightened staring down Yeats’s impassioned worst. This idealistic cynicism perfectly embodies the neurotic structure of post-politics between ‘the positive socioeconomic program of capitalist, liberaldemocratic ideology [and] the negative alternative of an anarchic, apocalyptic lack of any system whatsoever’ (Johnston 2004: 267). The personification of this habitus was the historical, professorial, and tempered figure of Obama appealing to our better selves and ennobling the executive branch of government. The mourning of Obama’s presidency in the era of Trump is less a lament of an ideological project foiled than the affective sense of Obama’s steady technocratic hand at the wheel. The cynical idealists of post-politics are convinced of Obama’s transcendent greatness even as he presided over the historic demise of the Democratic Party. During Obama’s term, Democrats went from controlling 59 percent of state houses to 29 percent, the smallest proportion since the turn of the 20th century, and went from 29 governorships to 16, the lowest level since 1920 (Malone and Enten 2017).The success of Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign left the party deep in debt and entirely dependent on an economic rescue package from the Clinton campaign, which thoroughly corrupted the party’s primary process (Grimm 2017). This combination of deep 432

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cynicism, antipathy toward the party base and conviction of their political prowess speaks to the fetishistic role of the technocratic habitus. By clinging to this habitus, the American liberal and aspirant to the technocracy is able to disavow their failures and fantasies and ‘appear to others . . . as a hardened, pragmatic realist’ (Johnston 2004: 266). Critical to the affective enjoyment of identifying in the technocratic habitus of Obama and subsequently Clinton is the role of technology as objet petit a, as an object cause of desire promising the ‘absent fullness of society’ (Laclau 2005: 226). The signifier technology stands in for the hegemonic ideal of Silicon Valley capitalism and its attendant techno-solutionism (Morozov 2013). Techno-solutionism naturalizes the class politics of tech capital while elevating professionals, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and programmers, all armed with data and a transcendent power to solve social problems. The possibilities of technology to effect social change is seemingly endless when wielded by the technocracy, in an inverse proportion to the diminution of the political realm. Hillary Clinton’s Pokémon Go comedic gaffe (Darcy 2016) has become an iconic moment of the campaign, but it possessed a genuine techno-solutionist enquiry: can we gamify democracy and mobilize young voters through apps? The Clinton campaign even managed to fit discourses of radical intersectionality into the rubric of techno-solutionism. A campaign graphic highlighted ‘complex intersectional challenges’ facing the African American community (Clinton 2016).The graphic displayed an interconnected network of key terms including investments in communities of color, accountable leadership, and access to nutritional food. In this appeal to TED Talk–style social science, there is a conflation of intersectionality with networks. Intersectionality no longer represents a movement-based ethico-political demand for justice but the call for ‘solutions and real plans’ from the enlightened technocrats yet to devote their skills to the task (Clinton 2016). In techno-solutionism, there is the confluence of technocratic habitus, progressive neoliberalism, and the promise of perfect communication through data. Jodi Dean writes that in communicative capitalism, our contributions to the information stream of online discourse are premised on interpassive democratic participation (Dean 2009). We entrust the technocrats to overcome the ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’ (Dean 2009: 63) in online communication, who see in our data the fantasy of social wholeness and the end of history. It is in these terms that we can understand the data fetishism and the algorithmic management of the Clinton campaign by Robby Mook. Data was the means to divine social complexity through an economical micro-segmenting of the population for specific ad spends and to transcend the grubby material politics of yards signs, regional campaign offices, and press-the-flesh canvassing (Dovere 2016). The campaign self-consciously presented itself as the best and brightest of Silicon Valley ‘who left lucrative careers at places like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to help code Clinton’s way to more votes’ (Lapowsky 2016). In a Politico profile, Robby Mook boasted of the campaign ‘relying almost entirely’ on the algorithm and the 400,000 daily data simulations of Elia Kriegel (Goldmacher 2016). It is a marker of Clinton’s technocratic habitus and competency that she is interpassive,6 relying on the programmers and engineers at her Brooklyn headquarters/data center to both transcend politics and defeat Trump’s retrograde politics of antagonism and Twitter bluster.

Crisis, Disavowal, and Jouissance The election of Donald Trump represents a spectacular failure of political institutions and norms, that which is most sacred to American liberalism. Where the Clinton campaign was premised on the decency of moderate ‘never-Trump’ conservatives, the unrestrained Trump speaks the libidinal truth of American conservatism: the desire to lash out at enemies and wield 433

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an oligarchic power on behalf of a privileged people. While Trump’s revanchism poses a real threat to the lives of immigrants, minorities, and workers, this political crisis is being experienced by liberals principally as a collapse of their own symbolic universe.The liberal conception of democracy, which foreclosed the political, is now confronted with the specter of a surging fascism.7 The response of the Democratic Party and elite media to this calamity has been akin to Lacan’s subjective destitution, in which the subject denied the protection of their fetish plunges ‘into depression, despair, or even psychosis’ (Johnston 2004: 266). Yet there persists an inability to absorb the material political lessons of this event and confront the lack in liberal political identity. The hyperactivity and drive of disavowal remain as a means to reinscribe the neoliberal claim to history and universality. In response to Trump, the intellectual and political resources of the liberal political and media class have been deployed with a near singular focus to the subject of Russia.8 In the specter of Putin’s Russia, there is a paranoid and politically incoherent return of history with American liberals casting themselves as ‘the Resistance’ in the battle against both fascism and communism. The echoes of the Tea Party and the American paranoid style of an inverted optimism are undeniable as Trump is deemed illegitimate in a manner analogous to the birth certificate challenge to Obama. Rather than acknowledge Trump’s populism as organically American, a failure of the political elite, and a product of widespread alienation among non-voters, he is treated as a product of an external intervention. Clinton has herself called Trump’s election, purportedly at the hands of Russia,9 a ‘cyber-9/11’ and a ‘direct attack to American institutions’ (Persio 2017). Unable to offer a left-class politics, the liberal resistance to Trump has thrust national security bureaucrats and Democratic legislators to the center of the struggle for American democracy. In the liberal constellation of Russiagate, the libidinal has risen to the fore with questions of history, geopolitics, and power, all experienced in terms of jouissance. Trump’s narcissism, propensity for crisis, petty grievances, and contempt for convention are an epiphenomenon of a greater evil: Russia and Putin. Putin is ‘the secret agent who is stealing social jouissance from us’ (Žižek 1997: 43), whose own enjoyment comes from fiendishly orchestrating the collapse of Western democracies.10 Thus, Putin occupies a spectral presence in the American liberal consciousness as the other of jouissance who elicits the liberal superego injunctions and obsessions: ‘Your actions only strengthen Putin’; ‘Putin will be enjoying this’. At its most extreme, the libidinal dependence on Putin and Russia is analogous to the structure of anti-Semitism as a nefarious foreign agent infecting the body politic. Evidence of Russian interference is provided with appeals to an eternal Russian nature. Former Obama cabinet member and director for National Intelligence James Clapper describes Putin as ‘genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour’ (Sainato 2017). The social jouissance that Putin has stolen from liberals is ‘truth’ as the master signifier for the technocracy.There is an inability to see how the ‘truth’, facts, and data, which constitute the liberal claim to authority, are only as politically meaningful as the antagonistic political articulation that sustains them. For liberals, the failure of post-political concepts of ‘truth’ to function as the final arbiter of politics can only be explained by its theft at the hands of Putin. Writing in The New York Times, history professor Michael Khadorkovsky (2016) describes Putin as a gleeful synthesis of a timeless Russian ‘cynical mendacity’ that encompasses today’s fake news, the protocols of the Elders of Zion, Soviet disinformation, the insights of Goebbels, and the ‘same tool kit’ of the 1920s terror. The overdetermined figure of Putin manages to embody all of the evils of the political, and in classic Red Scare terms, he is aided in his subversion by fifth columnists and socialist useful idiots like Bernie Sanders. Former Obama White House Official and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein described Russia, Trump, and Bernie Sanders as all using ‘Marxist strategies . . .[to] intensify social division’ (Sunstein 2017). The existence of antagonism or the 434

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idea that ‘the interests of good, decent ordinary people are sharply opposed to those of powerful and supposedly evil actors (such as “the banks”)’ (Sunstein 2017) is by definition inadmissible Marxist subversion. As an Other of jouissance, the enemy is both omnipotent and risible, providing a liberal enjoyment in mocking the figure of Trump. Trump is an excessive caricature of Berlusconiesque jouissance whose relationships with women are a catalog of horrors laid bare for the world. Losing to Trump does not force a self-examination of the austere technocratic politics of lack; rather, jouissance is externalized as a unique property of the enemy. To this end, resistance liberals have channeled classic Red Scare tropes in which sexual perversion and Soviet disinformation are inextricably linked, as in the Lavender Scare and moral panics around the sexual revolution (Ames 2017). Central to Russiagate and the thesis that Trump is a Manchurian candidate has been the Steele Dossier alleging Russia’s possession of kompromat, which has made Trump the servile sexual political subject of Putin. In this scenario, Trump, humiliated by Obama, performs a lewd sexual act with prostitutes in order to exact an impotent revenge on Obama while in the process becoming exposed and the property of Putin.This allows liberals to cope with the obscenity of Trump through enjoyment in his sexual humiliation. Homophobic mocking of Trump’s obsequiousness and his ‘tiny hands’ has become a staple of late-night comedy routines.11 Putin ‘love letters’ have been published in USA Today (Strauss 2018), and The New York Times has opined that Trump and Putin are among the iconic pop-culture romances. ‘[I]t’s clear what Trump has done: fashioned himself in the swaggering image of his beloved Putin— like Olivia Newton-John in “Grease” ’ (Bruni 2017). Rowley (2017) has tracked the rise of Trump-Putin slasher fic, in which Trump is routinely ‘topped’ in ‘mercilessly mock[ing] Trump’s masculinity and ability to lead’ (Rowley 2017: 394). In resisting and enjoying Trump, liberalism has come to reinforce the register of jouissance and is wholly dependent on the Trump spectacle in constructing this overdetermined political universe of Soviet subversion.

The Perverted Truth of the Network The psychosis-inducing Real of the Trump presidency and the persistence of liberal disavowal means that the symbolic order of American democracy has been stripped down to the Cold War fantasies that sustain liberal claims to history. In coping with social indeterminacy or the loss of social jouissance (truth), it is the national security state that functions as the big Other called on to reinstitute truth. Truth is restored through a perverted structure of belief in American exceptionalism secured by the most reactionary forms of American state power.12 The liberal resistance claims access to the big Other of the state, disavowing the lack or ‘the ambiguity of language . . . to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will’ (Žižek 2016: 485). Thus, the cynical technocrat has transformed into the patriot and Kremlinologist operating within the state, academia, and policy circles or conducting frenzied ‘research’ and reporting anonymous sources on Twitter.13 The Democratic Party eager to discipline and purge its base of Sanders traditionalists has embraced this habitus, funding national security candidates as part of the ‘Red-to-Blue’ strategy to win back congress (Grimm and Fang 2018). The national security career profile (Intelligence, State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council) is by far the largest group of incoming 2018 candidates, surpassing local government office holders 57 to 45 (Martin 2018). In an elegant demonstration of the big Other’s nonexistence, the state reflects the fantasies and pathologies of post-politics back to liberals. In the same month as Trump’s inauguration, the narrative of Russian subversion was codified by the state through the office for the director of National Intelligence. The January 2017 report asserted that Putin directed an influence 435

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campaign to elect Donald Trump while providing as hard evidence a dossier on the discontinued RT (Russia Today) show ‘Breaking the Set’, which was said to threaten American institutions by covering the Occupy Wall Street movement from a sympathetic perspective (Office for the Director for National Intelligence 2017). Robert Mueller and his special council investigation into Russian interference has become the singular explanatory lens for the current crisis of institutions. The Democratic Party and the media class are libidinally invested in the ideal of patriotic FBI Republicans (Robert Mueller and James Comey) restoring the republic, through impeachment or implausible constitutional maneuvers that dismiss the political reality of congressional majorities and historic levels of Republican voter support for Trump (Zucher 2018). And while this process has uncovered the corruption of opportunist hangers-on such as Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, the liberal fantasy of the ‘big reveal’ that will bring down Trump has been elusive. The material case for Russian interference rests on $46,000 of politically incoherent Facebook memes (Maté 2018) and Russian military intelligence officials that will never see the inside of American courtrooms.The incoherence of this political moment and Russia narrative is made cogent by the big Other, who can attribute the trauma of Trump and the failure of online communication to an enemy whose cunning we are only just beginning to understand. Around the national security state, there has been a flourishing of entrepreneurial actors embodying the big Other’s will, servicing liberals’ fantasies and profiting from a claim to reinstitute truth. A key congressional witness, pundit, and think tank resident in this field is Clint Watts, whose expertise relates to understanding the ‘Kremlin disinformation playbook’ in orchestrating ‘America’s war with itself ’ (Watts 2017). Watts has helped launch the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which is said to track Russian social media operations and Twitter bots in real time—in essence creating data points for the libidinal. Robby Mook, defiant in his failure, has become a leader among the academic Russia watchers from his perch at the Harvard Belfer Centre. Mook is part of the Defending Digital Democracy Project, which is advising governments and tech companies on how to protect elections and ‘public discourse from adversarial information operations’ (Rosenbach 2018). The project boasts of its bipartisan credentials and features among its staff Dmitri Alperovitch, who is both a senior fellow at the stridently neoconservative think tank the Atlantic Council and is the founder of Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the for-profit cybersecurity company that works for the Democratic Party and has been afforded de facto powers of the state to declare hacks of the party a Russian operation. The firm has not released Democratic Party servers to federal investigators and has been panned by experts in the field of cybersecurity for erroneous reporting and shoddy methods (Kuzmenko and Cobus 2017; Levine 2017). The traumatic truth of social media and online economies of jouissance has been interpreted in techno-solutionist terms as the corruption and penetration of communication networks. Behind the concern over fake news and Russian memes lies the truth about data and enjoyment. Fake news was profitable for Facebook and entrepreneurial Balkan teens earning fractions of a penny per click because online networks and their production of data depend on affective intensity and jouissance. It is for this reason that Facebook provided ad space to the Trump campaign at a cheaper rate than Clinton as engagement with his content was far higher than Clinton’s sterile messaging (Martinez 2018). This free labor, benefiting both Trump and Facebook, is contingent on his licensing of enjoyment and the obscene transgressions of racism, misogyny, and conspiracy-mongering (Jutel 2017a). But because jouissance is always contingent on a menacing other, Facebook and social networks become the means to monitor, surveil, and obsess over conspiracies such as Pizzagate.14 Mark Zuckerberg’s apology before US Congress for Facebook’s dissemination of fake news is a tribute to the Name-of-the-Father function of this new symbolic order of truth. Facebook escapes potential regulation and obfuscates the importance of fake accounts to its business model (Hansen 2018) through this patriotic tact; meanwhile, it 436

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provides the ‘hard data’ that will be pored over for evidence of subversion. In finally accepting its role as a publisher, Facebook is regulating content and protecting the network from Russian disruption through a new partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab (Harbath 2018). Elsewhere on the network, left-wing antiwar media sites like Alternet, Democracy Now, and World Socialist Web Site have seen a dramatic decline in web traffic as Google has changed its search algorithms to combat fake news (Tveten 2017). The ease with which a techno-solutionist post-politics has been recalibrated to a cyber–Red Scare speaks to the fundamental paranoia and perversion at the heart of the liberal data-centric view of the social. At its most utopian, post-politics embraces a Benklerian view of online networks as enabling civic-minded collaboration that transcends the state and capital. But just as the suburban reactionary politics of Levittown disavows postwar Keynesian state policy, the liberal technocratic class and the Internet they cherish as their greatest contribution to knowledge requires the myth of meritocracy to disavow the role of the state and capital. The emergence of the professional class and the ‘Atari Democrats’ (Frank 2017: 45) described by Frank is inseparable from Pentagon-driven research in computer and communicative technologies. The projects that would yield the singular network that we call the master signifier, ‘the Internet’, were seen as command and control weapons of counterinsurgency capable of understanding the enemy’s ‘hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks and relationships to power’ (Levine 2018). The ideological configuration that undergirded the network was a rabid anti-communism and a cybernetic view of the social in which all systems, whether biological or political, function as self-correcting and interconnected information networks that thrive or perish based on information.This was a simultaneously paranoid and utopian view of the network in that ‘computation was the underlying matter of everything in the social world and could therefore be brought under state-capitalist military control’ (Golumbia 2009: 60). An exemplary intellectual of this milieu was the political scientist and communication scholar Ithiel de Sola Pool. He was a pioneer of computer-modeled political campaigning, working for John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, and a utopian Internet futurist that helped define the cyber-libertarian view of the network. In Technologies of Freedom, he wrote ‘[t]he danger is not of an electronic nightmare, but of human error. It is not the computer but policy that threatens freedom’ (Pool 1983: 226). Simultaneously, Pool’s work was foundational to defense and intelligence anti-communist counterinsurgency research efforts such as Project Cambridge and Camelot, which sought to construct complex data systems that could monitor and defuse ‘internal war potential’ (Levine 2018). The technocratic utopia of transcending the social through data bears this irreducible paranoia around the excess of the political which defies representation as data. The fantasy of technocratic control drove Pool to rail against ‘excessive policies of secrecy in regard to personal as well as public data’ that ‘blinkered’ and ‘blinded’ American democracy (Deutsch 1984: 842).

Conclusion The election of Donald Trump and the attendant assault on civic norms have given rise to a deep libidinal crisis in American liberalism.The media, political, and technocratic class has swung wildly between a self-confident progressive sense of history and the traumatic return of the political in the right-wing populism of Trump. At its heart, the cynical idealism of post-politics is a negotiation of the libidinal, a disavowal of the lack, and a trauma through a technocratic hyperactivity. The ceaseless drive for data as the means to unlock a social fullness of freedom, democracy, and consensus function to stabilize an identity that cannot be articulated in material and antagonistic terms. In the campaign of Hillary Clinton, this expressed itself in a technodemocracy fetishism in which identity politics, discursive procedurialism, and the technocracy 437

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were reconciled.The transcendent values of truth and freedom are secured through an exclusive access to data, expertise, and ‘how things really work’. At an organizational level, Clinton and her team were convinced that this technocratic habitus and the self-fecund churning of algorithms would secure the future. However, with Trump’s libidinal shortcuts to political meaning, liberal notions of truth, data, and rationalism are only as strong as the political articulation that undergirds them.The failure of truth and its institutions is the political Real of lack staring back at American liberalism. The admission of trauma, antagonism, and enjoyment as constitutive of politics amounts to the symbolic destitution of the liberal class.The response to this crisis and loss of truth has been to seek out the diabolical enemy of social jouissance that has subverted truth. Russiagate and the specter of Putin as the overdetermined enemy of jouissance divert liberal data fetishism and drive it into a conspiratorial frenzy that disavows trauma and the political. Online technologies and data, once conceived as a means for perfecting consensus and communication, are deployed to track the enemy’s network of subversion, encompassing both populist fundamentalists and unwitting socialist traditionalists.While reaffirming a sense of cynical knowingness, it also allows liberalism to enjoy this trauma and the more grotesque elements of Trump through a ritualized mocking and sexual humiliation of Trump as the servile subject of Putin. In this conspiratorial drive to save liberalism and democracy from the ghosts of history, there remains an inability to adopt a left politics capable of defeating Trump, based on material and libidinal appeals to justice. The reversion to a Red Scare paranoia and national security liberalism represents a return to the origins of networked communicative technologies. The network and data-centric view of the social is produced by technologies of surveillance and counterinsurgency developed by the professional, technocratic class in the service of the national security state. The very existence of this liberal technocratic class and their fantasy of post-politics has always depended on the national security state as the big Other of truth. In this deep crisis of liberal post-politics, the aspirational categories of democracy, discourse, collaboration, and internationalism, however fallacious, have become subsumed by Cold War patriotism. The cost of reinstating this symbolic order of truth is the pure politics of jouissance through a fetishistic drive to replay history in a manner that abandons the utopian dimensions of liberal fantasy. While libidinally protecting a rump professional, political, and media class, this can produce only diminishing returns and is incapable of expanding outward to supplant the populist politics of Trump.

Notes 1. Despite the obstreperousness of Republicans under Obama, Clinton’s campaign strategy for the general election rested on garnering the support of Republicans rather than sharpening her base. As the Democrat leader of the senate Chuck Schumer explained, ‘For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin’ (Geraghty 2016). 2. Clinton’s critique of Sanders’s economic populism was often met with the retort that ‘breaking up the banks won’t end racism’. This line is typical of a neoliberal progressivism, which seeks to sequester different demands for justice into narrow terms of discourse and protect financial class power. 3. In the Washington Post, editorial board member and regular columnist Johnathan Capehart wrote that Trump and Sanders ‘share the same DNA’ (2016), that of an egotism that drives their antagonistic politics. Sanders’s social democratic challenge to Clinton’s post-politics can be understood as the irrational gripes of an embittered crank. 4. Since the 2000 presidential cycle, the research project has coded all advertising content as personal, policy, or both. Clinton’s 2016 campaign was 60 percent ‘personal’, three times more than the next highest candidate: Obama in 2008.

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Post-politics 5. In response to the phenomenon of Trump’s red baseball caps, the Democratic Party produced hats that read ‘America is already great’, which were tone-deaf to the electorate. 6. A remarkable example of this was the campaign’s approach to the state of Michigan, a bedrock of organized labor, which they had embarrassingly lost in the primary to Sanders and would lose to Trump in the general election. Robby Mook ignored local organizers; did not venture outside of the cities; and did not send Clinton, or Sanders on her behalf, to Michigan or Wisconsin because to do nothing was preferable. Fighting for the battleground state in the primary was seen as ‘a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated’ (Allen and Parnes 2017: 122); rather, the campaign sought to appear confident through their faith in algorithmic ad spends. 7. Trump is routinely described as a dictator and fascist in a manner that disavows American history and the trajectory of the state and empire. A right-wing populist whose ‘nomination was driven by ethnonationalist sentiment’ (Manza and Crowley 2018: 32), he lacks the hard ideological commitments of fascism toward the transformation of the state. His most damaging impacts (tax cuts, draconian immigration restrictions, withdrawal from global agreements, stacking the courts) are well within the confines of mainstream conservatism, the existing state, and the institutional power of the president.The moniker ‘fascist’ is an attempt to claim Trump is exceptional as opposed to an eccentric and populist articulation of reactionary conservatism. This argumentation is not to diminish the impact of his gestures toward a state of exception on issues of immigration or his proximity to unrepentant white nationalists such as senior advisor Stephen Miller. The critical distinction between Trump’s far-right populism and 20thcentury fascism is the absence of a credible, militant leftism that would require the organized counterrevolutionary violence that defines fascism. As Fuchs writes, ‘it is too early to tell whether or not there will be tendencies of Trump’s rule that advances statism in US capitalism’ (2017: 33). 8. One example among many is Rachel Maddow. Maddow hosts MSNBC’s flagship primetime program and is a former Rhodes scholar and progressive commentator whose program mirrored the antiObama conspiracist Glenn Beck during his time on Fox News between 2009 and 2011. Beck introduced the 15- to 20-minute opening exposition and monologue to cable news (Jutel 2017b). Where Beck saw Obama as a Manchurian candidate for George Soros, Maddow attempts to divine the hand of Putin behind Trump and the news cycle. In February and March of 2017, The Intercept conducted a content analysis of six weeks of programing and found that Russiagate received more coverage than all other issues combined (Maté 2017). 9. While space prohibits a thorough analysis of the Russiagate theory and discourse, it is my contention that routine levels of cyber-espionage and unsophisticated social media campaigns have been grossly inflated to shift blame from the failures of the political establishment. Trump’s Twitter tirades and populist denunciations of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry may yet amount to obstruction of justice (Schmidt and Haberman 2018), but this represents the failures of the meritocracy as opposed to a grand Russian conspiracy.The work of Russian expat journalists and Putin critics Masha Gessen, Leonid Bershidsky, and Yasha Levine; Princeton professor Stephen Cohen and Aaron Maté at The Nation; and former Moscow-based reporters Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames have been exemplary in debunking Russiagate narratives. 10. In a cover story for The Economist, Putin is depicted as an octopus, a staple trope of anti-Semitism and paranoid anti-communism, under the title ‘The Meddler: How Russia Menaces Western Democracies’ (Editorial Staff 2018). 11. In liberal post-politics, John Stewart–style comedy has assumed a central role as a form of resistance and enjoyment. Comedians such as John Stewart, John Oliver, the cast of ‘SNL’, and Stephen Colbert function as ‘subjects supposed to eviscerate’ (Jutel 2017a), who wield the power of wit that allows liberals to enjoy the high-cultural marker and affect of satire in the place of politics proper. 12. The supreme ideological confusion of liberal post-politics is evidenced in the moniker ‘the Resistance’. While invoking the anti-fascist movements of World War II that were composed largely of communists and socialists, contemporary liberals turn to the same national security state actors that were responsible for subverting resistance forces through Cold War policies such as Operation Gladio. 13. One of the more remarkable developments of Russiagate media discourse is the rise of the Twitter Russia expert (Dickey 2017). This expertise consists of breathless conspiracy theorizing through voluminous Twitter threads and an ability to refract every news event into the broader Russiagate narrative. Former Tory MP Louise Mensch is one of many Twitter entrepreneurs who has leveraged this repertoire into a large online following, media appearances on MSNBC, and publications such as The New York Times. Among the many astounding fabrications was her claim that high sources told her that Steve Bannon would be executed for espionage.

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Olivier Jutel 14. Pizzagate is the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party is a satanic child-trafficking ring that runs out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, a conspiracy theory that is believed by 46 percent of Trump voters (Frankovic 2016). This conspiracy has since metastasized into QAnon. QAnon revolves around the same pedophilia conspiracy but believes, among other things, that the Mueller investigation is an elaborate ruse that will result in the arrest of Clinton and a ‘cabal of global elites’ (Sommer 2018).

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Post-politics Harbath, K. (2018) ‘Announcing the New Election Partnership with the Atlantic Council’, Facebook Newsroom, 17 May, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/announcing-new-election-partnership-withthe-atlantic-council/amp/?__twitter_impression=true (accessed 17 May 2018). Johnston, A. (2004) ‘The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief ’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 9(3), 259–283. Jutel, O. (2017a) ‘Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power’, Boundary2 Online, 23 October, www.boundary2.org/2017/10/olivier-jutel-donald-trumps-libidinalentanglement-with-liberalism-and-affective-media-power/ (accessed 31 December 2017). Jutel, O. (2017b) ‘American Populism, Glenn Beck and Affective Media’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Online First, 1–18. Kazin, M. (1995) The Populist Persuasion, New York: Basic Books. Khadorkovsky, M. (2016) ‘Putin Sees a Happy New Year’, The New York Times, 26 December, www.nytimes. com/2016/12/26/opinion/putin-sees-a-happy-new-year.html (accessed 14 January 2018). Kuzmenko, O. and Cobus, P. (2017) ‘Think Tank: Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data’, Voice of America, 23 March, www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-comey-russia-hack-dncclinton-trump/3776067.html (accessed 12 May 2018). Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London:Verso. Lapowsky, I. (2016) ‘Clinton has a Team of Silicon Valley Stars: Trump has Twitter’, Wired, 14 July, www. wired.com/2016/07/clinton-team-silicon-valley-stars-trump-twitter/ (accessed 20 April 2017). Levine, Y. (2017) ‘From Russia With Panic’, The Baffler, 17 March, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/fromrussia-with-panic-levine (accessed 12 May 2018). Levine,Y. (2018) Surveillance Valley, New York: Public Affairs. Malone, C. and Enten, H. (2017) ‘Barack Obama Won the White House, But Democrats Lost the Country’, FiveThirtyEight, 19 January, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/barack-obama-won-the-white-housebut-democrats-lost-the-country/ (accessed 23 March 2018). Manza, J. and Crowley, N. (2018) ‘Ethnonationalism and the Rise of Donald Trump’, Contexts, 17(1), 28–33. Martin, P. (2018) ‘The CIA Democrats’, World Socialist Website, 7 March, www.wsws.org/en/arti cles/2018/03/07/dems-m07.html (accessed 14 April 2018). Martinez, A.G. (2018) ‘How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads’, Wired, 23 February, www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads (accessed 13 May 2018). Maté, A. (2017) ‘MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Sees a “Russian Connection” Lurking Behind Every Corner’, The Intercept, 13 April, https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russiaconnection-lurking-around-every-corner/ (accessed 23 June 2017). Maté, A. (2018) ‘Hyping the Mueller Indictment’, The Nation, 22 February, www.thenation.com/article/ hyping-the-mueller-indictment/ (accessed 1 May 2018). McWhorter, J. (2016) ‘The False Promise of a “Conversation” About Race’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 July, www.chronicle.com/article/The-False-Promise-of-a/237066 (accessed 12 March 2017). Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything, New York: Public Affairs. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, London: Routledge. Office for the Director for National Intelligence (2017) ‘Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution’, 6 January, www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf (accessed 2 May 2018). Persio, S.L. (2017) ‘Clinton Compares Russian Interference in Election to 9/11’, Newsweek, 15 October, www.newsweek.com/clinton-compares-russian-interference-election-911-685474 (accessed 14 February 2018). Rosenbach, E. (2018) ‘Defending Digital Democracy’, Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, www. belfercenter.org/index.php/D3P (accessed 12 May 2018). Rowley, A. (2017) ‘ “Trump and Putin”“Sittin” in a Tree: Material Culture, Slash and the Pornographication of the 2016 US Presidential Election’, Porn Studies, 4(4), 381–405. Sainato, M. (2017) ‘James Clapper Tells MSNBC’s Chuck Todd That Russians are Genetically Driven to Co-Opt’, Observer, 30 May, http://observer.com/2017/05/james-clapper-russia-xenophobia/ (accessed 12 January 2018). Schmidt, M. and Haberman, M. (2018) ‘Mueller Examining Trump’s Tweets in Wide-Ranging Obstruction Inquiry’, The New York Times, 26 July, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/us/politics/trump-tweetsmueller-obstruction.html (accessed 25 August 2018).

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35 POSTHUMAN IDENTITIES Anthony Elliott

Contemporary debates about posthumanism center on how developments in the fields of information technology, bioinformatics, and biotechnology are fundamentally transforming human minds, bodies, and identities. In addition to the biotech revolution, there is also the digital revolution sweeping the globe.The influence and impact of artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, machine learning, cloud computing, big data and data analytics, 3D printing, and many more are radically transforming how people work and live in these early decades of the 21st century. Social and political theorists have recently been concerned to analyze the contours and conditions of these technological transformations, especially the systemic, structural features of these developments. What impacts institutions and organizations also impacts people—their lifestyles and personal identities. Here social and political theorists have fared less well in understanding the fundamental transformations of our age. Some recent work has underscored the importance of psychoanalysis, however, as a critical theoretical resource for understanding the impacts of these technological transformations on our lives in these times (Elliott 2016, 2018). To speak of a fundamental technological transformation of the human and associated redefinition of lives and social identities is to enter the conceptual and political terrain of posthumanism. Including N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (2008) and Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), there have been various academic and popular treatments of the prospects of a posthuman future. Many discussions of the posthuman are distinctly gloomy. Fukuyama, for instance, sees potentially terrible political consequences in posthumanism. By contrast, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near (2005) is supremely positive—with brain circuit expansion, ecological harmony, and cybernetic immortality as key themes. Yet it is a matter of some puzzlement that predications of the posthuman future—whether utopian or dystopian—have little to say about the transfiguration of the human itself, especially of how identity will change as a result of the exponential expansion in information technology, bioinformatics, and biotechnologies. It is partly with the objective of filling this omission in contemporary debates on posthumanism that this chapter sets out to critically examine the notion of posthuman identity and consider its wider personal, social, cultural, and political consequences. And the contribution of psychoanalysis is essential to this endeavor. The notion of posthuman identity is one that emerges from various fields, including social theory, philosophy, contemporary art, futurology, and science fiction. The focus in what follows will be concentrated primarily on recent sociopolitical theory. What is explored in this 443

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chapter is our hopes and fears, our fascination and aversion, concerning the drafting of posthuman identities in recent sociopolitical theory. In turning to some of the most compelling and sophisticated accounts of posthuman identities in the literature of recent social theory, the first part of the chapter explores the cultural and political factors that have brought posthumanism to prominence in the academy and in wider public debate.The second part of the chapter develops a critique of the gains and losses of posthuman social theory, focusing especially on the theme of identity and its possible transformations as a result of the impacts of information technology, genetics, nanotechnology, and so on. The primary concern of this discussion will be to show that, notwithstanding various reservations concerning the fashion in which posthumanism has been theorized in the literature of social theory, the consequences of the advent of posthuman identities are far-reaching and to show that the impact of a psychoanalytically inspired perspective can be significant.

Current Controversies on Posthuman Identities Debates about posthuman identities and their social, cultural, and political consequences are informed by two key axes of orientation. The first axis concerns the challenges presented by contemporary processes of globalization, biotechnologies, and information technologies for the development of posthuman social thought. This axis is, then, principally concerned with the descriptive, analytic, and conceptual adequacy of posthumanism for understanding transformations in the dynamics of contemporary subjectivity. The second axis concerns the development of a normative frame of reference to the critique of posthuman identities today. Here the focus is centrally on the desirability or otherwise of the posthuman turn and of whether emergent and novel blendings of human and nonhuman actors should be celebrated, criticized, resisted, or rejected. Notwithstanding the remarkable plurality of voices in the debate over posthumanism and its consequences for understanding forms of contemporary subjectivity, what follows focuses on two major strands of social thought associated with such transformations of the social landscape. The first significant posthuman development comes from contemporary transformations in biomedicine and associated mutations in bio-identities. Here the contribution of sociologist Nikolas Rose and the Foucauldian-inspired conceptualization of what he terms bio-sociality in transforming structures of subjectivity and the conduct of life will be reviewed. Rose’s work is sociologically and politically interesting because he addresses the complex ways that biotechnologies and biomedicine are producing new molecular understandings of minds, bodies, and identities—even though he questions the explanatory purchase of the very concept of the posthuman. The second strand of thought considered proposes an affirmative posthumanism, one that underscores the new opportunities and exciting possibilities and the ethical and cultural challenges arising from the advent of posthuman forms of subjectivity and identity. Here the work of Rosi Bradotti on the posthuman subject will be reviewed, in a selective and partial manner. Nikolas Rose, in his The Politics of Life Itself (2007), argues that the 21st century, the biotech century, represents an emergent mixture of biomedicine, bio-sociality, and the appearance of new forms of biopower governing the conduct of identities. Rose takes his cue from recent advances in the life sciences and biomedicine—with reference to the biomedical techniques of genetic manipulation, organ transplants, reproductive technologies, and the spread of psychopharmacological drugs. The age of human genome sequencing opens a world of biological reengineering and redesigns people, although Rose himself does not equate this unprecedented mediation of biomedicine into the fabric and structure of human identity with the advent of 444

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posthumanism. Instead, the complex, intricate association between biomedicine and human subjects is constitutive of a new way of understanding the biological sphere—in which processes of isolation, storage, delimitation, mobilization, accumulation, and exchange come to the fore. Rose holds that the age of biomedicine and biotechnology has unleashed an action of universal import involving new fabrications of identity and new sets of social relations. Medical technologies, or technologies of health, are geared to the goal of optimization. In a typical Foucauldian vein, Rose stresses the productive functions of biomedicine—even though the manipulation of basic life processes at the level of cells, molecules, and genes is oftentimes rendered as constraining and is oftentimes oppressive. But this is rushing ahead. Rose’s opening argument is that biomedicine and biotechnology are transforming our social landscapes, recasting the core of our identities and our cultural relations. He writes, for example, that Once one has witnessed the effects of psychiatric drugs in reconfiguring the thresholds, norms, volatilities of the affects, of cognition, of the will, it is difficult to imagine a self that is not open to modification in this way. Once one has seen the norms of female reproduction reshaped by assisted conception, the nature and limits of procreation and the space of hopes and fears around it are irrevocably changed. Once one has seen the norms of female aging reshaped by hormone replacement therapy, or the norms of aging male sexuality reshaped by Viagra, the “normal” process of growing old seems only one possibility in a field of choices, at least for those in the wealthy West. (Rose 2007: 17) There is also the question of the domain or field on which life itself is grasped.The traditionalist argument has been that life is the property of the individual agent, subjectively mediated and experienced from beginning to end. On this view, the well-regulated nature of Western living goes hand in hand with its individualist ethos. But Rose is rightly suspicious of individualist ideologies, arguing that the age of biomedicine and biotechnology shifts the whole terrain of subjectivity and of life itself. Such shifts in the fabric of life are not necessarily easily discernible, however. Self-understanding in the West, as elsewhere, has been deeply conditioned by traditionalist ‘molar’ thinking. This is a kind of thinking in and through which people picture the human body in molar terms—as a mix of limbs, organs, blood, hormones, and so on. But when it comes to the body, there is today another level of discourse that is increasingly dominant: the ‘molecular’.There is, to be sure, a new way of conceptualizing life—its possibilities and extensions—as a result of the molecular gaze. Such biomedical visualization, says Rose, encompasses coding sequences of nucleotide bases, molecular mechanisms, the functional properties of proteins, and intracellular transformations, such as membrane potentials, enzyme activities, transporter genes, and ion channels. The arrival of molecular biopolitics brings us to the center of Rose’s argument. The medical gaze now constituted, understood, and acted on at the molecular level is predicated on a lifting of ‘the biological’ to the second power. In 21st century biopolitics, writes Rose (2007: 20), ‘the human becomes, not less biological, but all the more biological’. Once again, the analytic focus here is on productivities—the generation of a novel biomedical field. ‘The new molecular enhancement technologies’, contends Rose (2007: 20), ‘do not attempt to hybridize the body with mechanical equipment but to transform it at the organic level, to reshape vitality from the inside’. On this view, the implantation of nanobots in our blood stream—already trialed on rats and projected by some researchers as a pathway to radical human life extension—will not only keep people healthy at the cellular and molecular level but transform the definition of life itself. Thus, by combining a Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as underscoring the powers of 445

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mobilization, accumulation, and exchange, Rose seeks to demonstrate biomedicine as both ideological discourse and the production of life, as ‘managing’ subjectivity but also ‘performing’ it. The path to molecular biopolitics for Rose is intricately intertwined with global capitalism, specifically the extraction of economic value from biological processes. As a result of various economic crises and the spread of globalization, capitalism has undergone in the late 20th century and early 21st century a dramatic makeover—one in which technologies controlled by capital seek now to ‘capitalize’ on the vital processes of living things. Rose terms this the arrival of bioeconomics. In a world of multinational pharmaceutical industries, biotech companies, genetech firms, biobanks, and molecular manipulation, capital has become biological—evermore reliant on the transfer, mobilization, manipulation, and commodification of living nature. We are now confronted by the bioeconomy, the interweaving of finance and the laboratory. Molecularization is, from this angle, part and parcel of the West’s global ambitions for capitalist optimization. Molecular biopolitics, says Rose (2007: 15), ‘is conferring a new mobility on the elements of life, enabling them to enter new circuits—organic, interpersonal, geographical and financial’. This is more than saying that biomedicine is big business; rather, biological processes and technological capitalization interpenetrate in a new configuration. A second strand of social thought addressing posthuman identity comes from critical European thought and philosophy and is, broadly speaking, more affirmative in character. Rosi Braidotti makes the case for what she terms critical posthumanism, and across a range of publications, she has addressed the implications of the posthuman turn for the analysis of identities and newly emergent forms of subjectivity. Braidotti’s starting point is that the crisis of Western humanism is not catastrophic but rather involves various positive consequences. For Braidotti, the crisis of Western humanism—reflected in recent sociological and philosophical critiques of Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism, and masculinism—is intricately interwoven with the fall of Europe as an imperial world power. The worldwide geopolitical shift from national to post-national political constellations, and associated notions of a pluralist cosmopolitanism, is part of the wider posthuman recomposition of identity and new forms of subjectivity, new social bonding, and alternative community building. The arrival of posthumanism, or post-anthropocentrism, is especially consequential for subjectivity and the critique of identity. The spread of a globalized, multiethnic, multimedia culture across the planet, according to Braidotti, has carried major implications for the very understanding of identity. Nowhere is this more obviously so than in the intrusion of the global economy and technologically mediated processes of digitization into the very fabric of subjectivity itself. From the arrival of digital ‘second life’ to the spread of medical reproductive technologies, and from prosthetics to robotics, the traditional humanistic unity ascribed to the human subject has come utterly undone—as traditional distinctions between human actors and nonhuman forces have been erased. In this connection, Braidotti speaks of the emergence of the ‘posthuman nomadic subject’. She also theorizes this critical posthumanist recasting of identity: The posthuman nomadic subject is materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded— it is firmly located somewhere, according to the radical immanence of the ‘politics of location’. . . . It is a multifaceted and relational subject, conceptualized within a monistic ontology, through the lenses of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guatarri, plus feminist and post-colonial theories. It is a subject actualized by the relational vitality and elemental complexity that mark posthuman thought itself. (Braidotti 2013: 188)

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For Braidotti, the arrival of posthumanism spells the death of the strenuously self-affirming subject of liberal individualism. This demise represents a wholesale sociological, philosophical, and cultural shift from the notion of unitary subjectivity to that of nomadic identity. Braidotti’s views on the relation between posthuman identity and contemporary society and culture are complex and sometimes quite obscure. But the main thesis she attempts to advance focuses on two threads of recent social and political thought, threads that she seeks to interweave. The first of these threads concerns critical race perspectives and postcolonial theories; the second concerns ecofeminism. Bluntly put, Braidotti finds in postcolonial and critical race theories a productive engagement with the posthuman cultural predicament. ‘The work of postcolonial and race theorists’, Braidotti remarks, ‘displays a situated cosmopolitan posthumanism that is supported as much by the European tradition as by non-Western sources of moral and intellectual inspiration’ (Braidotti 2013: 46). Culture, in the sense of the European ideal of the Enlightenment, has been intricately interwoven with violent domination, structural injustice, and barbarism. Braidotti finds in postcolonial theory a powerful attempt to think through the Western failure to realize the ideals of the humanist Enlightenment, and especially to critique such political and ethical failings, without succumbing to cultural relativism or moral nihilism. Here she finds inspiration from, and frequently cites, the work of Edward Said on the colonial experience and its entanglement with Enlightenment-based secular humanism, as well as the more recent ideas of Paul Gilroy on the spread of a planetary cosmopolitanism. In particular, she underscores the importance of postcolonial theory for conceptualizing the powers of cultural hybridity, mixture, difference, and cosmopolitanism, and she asserts the crucial significance of subaltern secular spaces for contemporary reconfigurations of critical posthumanism. The second contemporary cultural influence on Braidotti’s critical posthumanism is that of ecofeminism. In her work The Posthuman, Braidotti (2013) tries to integrate what she calls a ‘nomadic’ viewpoint of the human subject with a critical posthumanism that draws from environmentalism, ecological theory, and feminism. In this connection, she references the environmental theory of Shiva and Mies on new ecological values and feminist spiritualities, especially the centrality of the sacredness of life and human concern for everything that lives. In conceptualizing this fusing of new ecological and feminist values, Braidotti writes, I define the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable. . . . A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism. (Braidotti 2013: 49) Braidotti thus argues that it is useful to conceive of posthuman relationality between nomadic subjects and nonhuman or ‘earth’ others. She sees the concept of the conscious, acting subject as a redundant one. It is through this integration of postmodern social theory (specifically, the work of Deleuze and Guatarri) and feminist, environmental, and postcolonial theory that Braidotti seeks to interrogate the posthuman condition. In doing so, Braidotti is able to demonstrate a considerable cosmopolitan range; for example, she consistently speaks out against xenophobic violence and argues instead for a pluralist cosmopolitan political practice that recognizes the rights of stateless people and refugees.

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Even the most erudite student of modern European thought will find themselves learning from Braidotti’s encyclopedic knowledge of post-structuralist and postmodern philosophy as she travels effortlessly across Spinoza’s monism, Deleuze’s account of ‘micro-fascisms’, Guatarri’s call for a ‘virtual social ecology’, and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of ‘life/zoe’. Like many post postmodern philosophers, she is not necessarily at her clearest when it comes to marshaling the heavy-duty concepts of contemporary European social theory for the purposes of social and political analysis, and there are times when her vitalist ecofeminist critique of multiple belongings, earth others, and personal intensities sounds perilously close to a 1960s hippy collectivism— albeit one updated for theory-savvy readers. Even so, it is on the theme of subjectivity, and specifically the need to make sense of the complexities of emergent posthuman forms of identity, that Braidotti has important things to say. In Braidotti’s view, only a revised critical theory of subjectivity is capable of adequately addressing the complex phenomena surrounding the advent of posthuman identities and the post-anthropocentric bodies of global capitalism. Such a standpoint makes Braidotti’s contribution to the debate over posthumanism uniquely valuable, especially in the context of the dominance of science and technology studies—and its strongly anti-identity position—in the posthuman debate. By contrast to such anti-subjectivity positions, Braidotti’s conception of posthuman identity emphasizes the anchoring of identity in internally differentiated, embodied, embedded, and relational configurations as essential components to new, posthuman social transformations. It will be argued subsequently that the psychic and social implications of Braidotti’s conception of posthuman identity stretches much further, and is considerably more complex, than some of her formulations suggest. But for the moment, there are a few further elements in her critique of flexible and multiple posthuman identities that should be briefly addressed. Braidotti has frequently offered powerful defenses of the centrality of identity in the frame of our globally networked and technologically mediated societies. Human subjectivity and identity are currently undergoing a profound series of mutations, and it is patently absurd, she contends, to suppose that social theory can engage with such transformations without a critically reflexive and sophisticated account of the human subject. The chief object of Braidotti’s work is to identify how posthuman subjects traverse, link, and tangle with nonhuman, techno-, and ‘earth’ others. As she writes of the importance of identity in this context, One needs at least some subject position: this need not be either unitary or exclusively anthropocentric, but it must be the site for political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations. Philosophical investigations of alternative ways of accounting for the embedded and embodied nature of the subject are relevant to develop an approach to subjectivity worthy of the complexities of our age. . . . Both kinship and ethical accountability need to be redefined in such a way as to rethink links of affectivity and responsibility not only for non-anthropomorphic organic others, but also for those technologically mediated, newly patented creatures we are sharing our planet with. (Braidotti 2013: 102–103) In short, Braidotti takes seriously the challenges posed by the advent of biomedical scientific advances and global technological transformations as they affect networks of human and nonhuman actors. But she insists that the critical challenge is a reformulated theory of subjectivity that reinscribes posthuman identity into ‘radical relationality, including webs of power relations at the social, psychic, ecological and micro-biological or cellular levels’ (Braidotti 2013: 102). 448

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Although not reliant on psychoanalysis as a critical method for the reinterpretation of subjectivity, Braidotti appears at times broadly sympathetic to certain central themes in Europeaninspired post-Freudian thought. She writes, for example, of the posthuman subject as ‘internally differentiated’. In The Posthuman (2013: 189), she casts nomadic subjectivity in terms of the ‘psyche—with its affective, fantasy-ridden, desire-driven complications’. Indeed, in some respect, there are certain overall—albeit admittedly distant—similarities between the views of Braidotti and Lacan. Braidotti’s belief that the notion of ‘man’ is an upshot of European culture, a notion which has subsequently fallen, has some similarities to Lacan’s attempt to break with traditional notions of consciousness of self through a ‘decentering of the subject’. Elsewhere, she invokes Lacan’s account of the Real—along with Freud’s uncanny and Kristeva’s abjection—for thinking about the productive forces of monadic subjectivity. But this is where any similarities end. Braidotti’s nomadic subject is not that of Lacan, nor will she have much truck with his notions of the imaginary and symbolic as essential to the constitution of identity. She proposes that The posthuman subject is not post-structuralist, because it does not function within the linguistic turn or other forms of deconstruction. Not being framed by the ineluctable powers of signification, it is consequently not condemned to seek adequate representation of its existence with a system that is constitutionally incapable of granting due recognition. (Braidotti 2013: 188) In The Posthuman, Braidotti takes aim at Lacan’s structuralist determinism, and she strongly argues against his blending of psychoanalysis and structural linguistics—which produces, she contends, an understanding of subjectivity ‘based on Lack and Law’. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari, she writes, ‘Lacan’s notion of the symbolic is as out-dated as a Polaroid shot of a world that has since moved on’ (Braidotti 2013: 189). Instead, Braidotti wants to speak up for a version of our psychic lives that stresses possibility, pleasure, power, and plenitude.This is an understanding of the psychic subject as pure affirmation. Desire as plenitude, not lack. The passage toward a utopic, affirmative version of the posthuman is thus opened by Braidotti.

Posthuman Identity, or the Reinvention of Life If the very foundations of modernity are under fire, posthumanism in the theoretical sense of the word may arguably seem a wholly inadequate description of current and likely future global transformations. In an age when the boundary between the digital universe and the actual world is dissolving and when dramatic transformations in robotics and artificial intelligence are moving center stage, social theory cannot afford to merely recount the same narratives of the end of humanism, history, and modernity, crucial though these debates may have been in the past. Digital production, and specifically the advent of 3D printers, is especially consequential in this connection. Indeed, 3D printers can already process a diversity of objects (including organic matter), and digital production is strongly converging with developments in biotechnology and nanotechnology (for social-scientific analyses of 3D printing and its consequences, see Giddens 2013; Urry 2014). The crucial move in social-theoretical inquiry—irrespective of the deployment of the term posthumanism—is the development of theoretical resources that are equal in depth, scope, and range to the transformed global landscape that social theory now confronts. In a remorselessly transformational climate, the posthumanization of identity emerges as a wildly popular topic—partly because the pliable, remoldable, endlessly plastic self is increasingly everywhere on display. But beyond the power and limits of current reinvention society, there 449

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is also a more profound sense in which the extraordinary pace of technological change today intersects with the posthumanization of identity. Digital technologies and other technological innovations are transforming what identity and the body actually mean. In addition to organ development technologies, 3D printers have been used in research to print out living human embryonic stem cells (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh), blood vessels (German Fraunhofer Institute), human skin (Lothar Koch of the Laser Centre Hannover in Germany), and even sheets of cardiac tissue that can beat like a real heart (Cabor Forgacs, University of Missouri in Columbia). In the light of these developments, some have claimed that growing bio-organs (by printing them) will eventually replace the need for donor organ transplants in the future. Like 3D printing, developments in artificial intelligence are part of this broader posthuman transformation. Craig Venter, author of Life at the Speed of Light (2013), and one of the leaders to have mapped the first draft sequence of the human genome in 2000, has been at the forefront of the digitization of synthetic life. In 2010,Venter and his team produced the first synthetic organism by transplanting human-made DNA into a vacant bacterial cell. For Venter, developments in synthetic life are only in their infancy. For example, consider the possibility of biological teleportation—involving the transmission of a genome across the solar system at the speed of light and its reconstitution on the other side of the planet—which in Venter’s view is no longer the stuff of science fiction but a burgeoning field of actual possibility (see Corbyn 2013). While such developments are presently confined to bacteria and microplasma only, the implications of synthetic life—including vastly accelerated vaccine production and the potential creation of entirely new life forms—when combined with the rapidly decreasing costs of synthesis and sequencing technologies means that the definition of life as we know it is undergoing radical transformation. Then there is the impact of robotics to consider. In 2013, Rich Walker and Matthew Godden of Shadow Robot Company in the United Kingdom assembled Rex—billed as the first true walking, talking, and heart-beating bionic human. Using the most-advanced human prostheses available—from robotic limbs to artificial organs and even a synthetic blood-pumping circulatory system—it was reported that Rex simulates approximately two-thirds of the human body, including artificial hands, feet, wrists, ankles, and an almost-complete set of artificial organs, including an artificial heart; synthetic blood, lungs (and windpipe), pancreas, spleen, and kidney; and even a fully functional circulatory system (Dixon 2013). Rex also sports a humanlike prosthetic face and an exoskeleton made by REX Bionics in New Zealand. Equipped with a sophisticated ‘chatbot’ program, Rex can carry out rudimentary conversations—achieved largely through retinal prosthesis and cochlear implants that facilitate speech recognition and speech production systems (Channel 4 2013). The advent of Rex indicates just how much the blending of the nonbiological and biological is becoming increasingly hard to distinguish in today’s era of the posthuman. These radical transformations of the interrelations between the human and its others involve immense theoretical, socioeconomic, cultural, and political consequences, and I will now summarize these consequences in six key points. First, there is the widespread sense that the ‘posthuman’ is an idea whose time has truly arrived. This emergent ‘structure of feeling’, to invoke Raymond Williams, involves a greater appreciation of the non-naturalistic or nonbiological dimensions of human subjectivity, a breakdown in categorical distinctions between humans and various ‘earth others’ (including animals, species, bacteria, and plants), and the consequences of post-anthropocentric philosophy and social thought. The intellectual consequences of this emergent posthuman structure of feeling are ambivalent. While some academics and public intellectuals applaud the posthuman turn as the next frontier in social, political, and philosophical thought, other critics have been quick to dismiss posthumanism as simply radical posturing 450

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or a passing theoretical fad. Even so, the posthuman turn has already had a large impact on a considerable range of social practices and intellectual discourses, including biotechnology and bioinformatics, art and architecture, future studies and forecasting, robotics, science fiction, consumer design, artificial intelligence, literary and social theory, nanotechnology, computing, and so on. However, while many intellectual discourses especially in the social sciences, humanities, and creative arts are in the process of undertaking the posthuman turn, there are serious conceptual limitations to an uncritical adoption of the term posthuman identity—or so will be proposed in this chapter. Second, the scientific and technological advances linked to the posthuman turn need to be situated within an institutional analysis of modernity. That is to say, the institutional drivers of the posthuman condition include—among others—globalization, the global electronic economy, new information technologies, biomedicine, and advances in artificial intelligence. These institutional transformations form the backdrop for claims advanced in posthumanist social thought that we stand at the opening of a new era, one in which nonbiological intelligence will come to match the capability and subtlety of human intelligence and is thus radically transformative of the interrelations between the human and the nonhuman. In this connection, the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies coupled with the unprecedented intrusion of globalized, technologically mediated processes into the structure of our lives and our identities will have far-reaching consequences on the shape, direction, and complexity of future identities, societies, politics, and global governance. Third, posthuman identity presupposes the notion of the human and of the recasting of human subjectivity. This is a complex point, and it requires explication. The opening of a new posthuman era has been expressed through a dazzling variety of terms, including beyond humanism, after humanism, the transhuman, and so on. Yet we can never be ‘after the human’, in the sense that there can be no reflective, creative life without subjects. This is not to say, however, that the institutional transformations of the current era are not in certain respects unique— distinct in form from previous types of social life associated with modernity. There can be little doubt, I think, that the posthuman outlook presents social theory with a fresh challenge. But the changes occurring early in the 21st century, whether in biotechnology, biomedicine, or information technologies, cannot be made sense of if identity is excluded from analytical consideration.This takes us to the core strength of the contributions from Rose and Braidotti. Both theorists argue, though from rather different conceptual positions, that identity and subjectivity must remain central to the frame of analytic reference in order to grasp how posthumanism (invoked variously as contemporary science, biomedicine, and information technologies) affects and recasts the fabric and structure of life and thus of what now counts as human. From this angle, social theory cannot afford simply to replay the narrative of analytic posthumanism—such as the anti-subjectivity position advanced in science and technology studies by authors such as Latour and his followers (Latour 1988, 2013). Rather, it needs to explore new possibilities and consider how identity is transfigured in and through the posthuman. What is underscored here, following Rose and Braidotti, is not simply identity but the biopolitical dynamics of contemporary subjectivity. Fourth, and following on from the previous point that the critique of subjectivity is central to the advent of posthumanism, the argument advanced here is that identity is interdependent with multiple structural forms of the posthuman that generate different possibilities for identity—and especially the recalibration or reinvention of identity itself. A standard response to this kind of formulation is to seek to demonstrate how identity has been reconfigured into some kind of ‘machinic hybridization’ in which the subject is colonized by the object. But in developing and detailing this point, I want to take a different tack. 451

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The conventional consensus about identity in the social sciences, at least up until the transformations unleashed in the first instance by globalization and more recently by the advent of posthumanism, has been focused on the intertwining between individual agents (usually cast with limited powers) and social structures (usually cast as all-powerful and determining). From this angle, capitalism as a structure has been understood as constituting class identities; or, patriarchy as a structural feature of modern societies has been understood as generating oppressive gender identities. In such social science, identity is conceived as a property of the individual agent—a ‘location’ from which the self seeks to navigate opportunities and constraints in the wider mix of social relations. Against the backdrop of the agency and structure couplet, individuals exercise agency, with constraint appearing primarily from external or structural forces, conceived largely in the limitations of the actions of other human agents or interpersonal relations on the one hand and the constraints of socio-structural forces of large-scale institutions or cultural forces on the other. However, the advent of posthumanism (as described in this chapter) subverts such conventional distinctions between agency and structure or between the individual and society. The arrival of the posthuman—including genomics, nanotechnology, information technologies, and robotics—transfigures the orthodox division between the agency of identity and the determinism of structures. As current scientific and technological advances have come to penetrate or invade the structure of living matter, the posthuman transfigures how identity has been constituted as agency. But once this is recognized, what then should comprise a critically reflexive, posthumanist approach to identity? Contemporary science and technology studies, as advanced by Latour (1993; 1993; 2013) and developed by writers such as Law (Law and Hassard 1999) and Franklin (2002), have proffered a conceptualization of the human and nonhuman environment in which society and culture are cast within the biotechnologically mediated world of posthumanism. Broadly speaking, this is an approach that views the scientific and technological as invading the human and simultaneously sees the human as a grafted extension of technological artifacts.Thus, technological devices such as Google Goggles can be seen as an extension of the individual’s body, creating new hybridizations of the subject-object. On this view, there is no need to analytically keep apart subject and object, or identity and culture, since the complexity of the human-machine hybrid generates a form of ‘machinic intentionality’ that is grounded and productive of the social field itself. The strength of this standpoint lies in its recognition of the complexity of scientific worlds that are involved in various technological systems. But there are serious conceptual limitations here, especially as regards the analysis of identity. While science and technology studies correctly stipulate that identity is not opposed to science, nor to technological mediation, and while they suggestively seek to capture how the human is rendered continuous with sociotechnical systems, they fail to address how patterns of posthuman social development necessitate a revised vision of identity. Most constraining of all, as Braidotti argues (2013: 41–43), science and technology studies displace questions concerning intentionality and thus ethics onto the side of technology itself. Transformations of identity arising in and through posthumanism are thus pushed to the sidelines. The analytical task, by contrast, concerns grappling with how the posthuman organization and consequences of the flows of various scientific and technological materials—especially energy, genes, information, and data—fuse to produce complex combinations of identity, imagination, and innovation. Before considering how the flows of scientific and technological materials interpenetrate with identity, it is necessary to complement the preceding point with an analysis of the creativity of identity and subjectivity rather than of systems. Fifth, this brings us to issues to do with the psychic investment of objects—both human and nonhuman. Grasping the complex ways that 452

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new information technologies and biomedical developments become emotionally imprinted on the psyche, as well as the simultaneous re-grooving of the psyche around both human and nonhuman objects, is crucial for the analysis of identity in conditions of posthumanism. This is a point that neither Rose nor Braidotti satisfactorily resolves. In a Foucauldian vein, Rose sees biomedicine inaugurating a new order of discourse by constituting the order of ‘biocapital’, articulating novel kinds of subjectification and vitalities of the human. And like Foucault, Rose harbors a suspicion of creative agency, which in typically post-structuralist fashion, he sees as an outcrop of discourse. Braidotti’s case carries a more refreshing tone as concerns the centrality of subjectivity, and she explicitly acknowledges the role of fantasy, affect, and desire in configurations of the posthuman. But beyond various neo-Nietzschean formulations on the productivities of desire, her analysis lacks specificity concerning the diffusion of posthuman scientific, and technical systems at the level of identity. Braidotti’s emphasis on fantasy, affect, and desire is important, but it needs to be extended and radicalized. The psychoanalytic work of Wilfred Bion provides a major source of insights into the intertwining of identities and objects across diverse emotional scales. In a radical extension of Melanie Klein’s approach, Bion draws attention to the projection outward, as well as retrieval into self, of affects circulating objects. These phenomena or objects are at once human and nonhuman.To think and to act in creative, reflective ways, according to Bion, the individual subject must ‘let go’ of consciousness and become immersed in sectors of pure experience. It is through such immersion in the object world—both human and nonhuman—that the self subsequently undertakes the creative, reconstructive work of ‘attaching meaning to experience’. As Bion formulates this, thought precedes thinking. To obtain knowledge of self-experience, a series of transformations must occur (what Bion terms thinking) in the raw emotional materials (both human and nonhuman) that have impinged on the psyche. A prime instance of this synchronization of selves, others, and objects, says Bion, occurs when the infant learns to become immersed in the experience of its familial surround—most typically, in relation to his or her mother. But at the same time, this so-called foundational synchronization of selves and objects establishes a pathway for what Bion terms the ‘processing’ of experience over time and space (Bion 1962). What Bion’s psychoanalytic move involves, in effect, is an underscoring of the intricate relations between experience, emotional processing, and thinking. The effect of running these phenomenological and psychoanalytic themes together is to underscore the complexity of synchronized actions and objects, or identities and systems, which structure our form of life. This synchronization of actions and objects—which does not, at least in this psychoanalytic account, follow any traditional dualism between the inside and outside—is highly complex but is especially consequential for grasping the production and performance of the posthuman condition. Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Bion, reflects on the psychic dynamics of such crisscrossings between actions and objects: The concept of self experiencing is ironic, as its referential ambiguity (does it mean the self that experiences or the experiencing of our self?) is strangely true to the complexity of being human. All self experiencing involves this split, which can be described as a division between ourself as simple selves (when we are immersed in desired or evoked experience) and ourself as complex selves (when we think about experience). Naturally such distinctive states may overlie one another, so that I may be reflecting upon an experience in the immediate past while another part of me is already within a disseminating experience. (Bollas 1992: 27) 453

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The central tension or contradiction in self-experiencing is therefore reinscribed in every process of object selection: an unconscious immersion in units of experience that are only partly thinkable (since that immersion is itself a dense condensation of self and object world) and a reflective lifting of such unconscious experience into thinking and articulation. Following Bion and Bollas, it can be said that the recovery of affects ‘stored’ in the object world facilitates the proliferation of experience and possible transformations in pleasure, creativity, and fulfillment. The use of an object as transformational—from the pre-oedipal maternal object on the one hand to technological or bio-medically engineered objects on the other— opens the self to the sheer multiplicity of experience. Likewise, in the context of posthuman lives, the investment of affect in scientific and technical objects such as robotics, prosthetics, nanotechnology, or artificial intelligence can function as a form of emotional containment— that is, the storing of affect (available for subsequent retrieval) in terms of emotional processing or thinking. Such a psychoanalytically informed account of subject constitution captures how actions and objects (both human and nonhuman) cross, tangle, and synchronize across diverse configurations of the posthuman—extending, enhancing, and redefining the fabric of identities in the process. Sixth, and following directly from the previous point, the interpenetration of posthuman identities and objects (information technologies, biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and so on) occur through nonlinear points of transformation, complexity, feedback loops, and dynamic change. Again, this point requires some explication. The advent of posthuman technologies should not be thought of as constituted and reproduced in and of themselves. Such technologies operate within environmental, social, cultural, and political contexts (Urry 2003, 2012), and within these contexts, it is human agents that become part of such technologies through interacting, relating, engaging, responding, and coping with various scientific and technological processes. The term agency here must be understood in the institutional context of complexity and experimentation—as multiple points of agency are constituted, reproduced, and transformed through the synchronized engagement with different kinds of scientific and technological systems (Thrift 2008). As a result, many identities are produced and performed within this diffusion of complex technical-scientific systems. But all such productions of posthuman worlds are, from this angle, identity productions—resulting from the fusings of individual and collective imaginings on the one hand and orchestrated processes of scientific and technological innovation on the other. Such forms of institutional innovation involve creative and reflective agents (individuals, groups, and organizations) that play a central role in the multiple landscape of posthuman relations of power and social order. This standpoint again contrasts directly with analytic posthumanism—specifically, that version of posthumanism elaborated by science and technology studies—which renders the question of intentionality on the side of technology itself. By neglecting new forms of identity experimentation created out of the fusing of human and nonhuman forces occurring within posthuman configurations, science and technology studies result (as Braidotti correctly identifies) in a moralization of machines. It is as if the advent of various smart technologies—predicted by authors such as Kurzweil (2005) to become exponentially smarter in the next few decades— strips human agents of creative identity altogether.Whether the discourse is that of bio-sociality, actants, or machinic intentionality, this brand of posthumanism demonstrates a curt rejection of the whole concept of identity, which is imagined as merely a hangover from the era of humanism. But it is only because science and technology studies reduce identity to the straw target of an individualized self exercising voluntary agency in the social world that it declares the concept of subjectivity wholly unacceptable. Yet there is no valid reason to accept such a back-looking rendition of the notion of identity. With the launch of a new global narrative of posthumanism, 454

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the more interesting challenge is to explore the complex, contradictory interconnections or assemblages of human and nonhuman forces, which are reconstituting and transforming the contours of identity today.

Conclusion Finally, let me note some implications for current and future identity profiles of posthumanism arising from the foregoing discussion: 1. Posthumanization of identity in the sense of extensity: for example, the sweep of scientific and technological transformations such as biotechnology, bioinformatics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology throughout the rich Global North and beyond. 2. Posthumanization of identity in the sense of intensity: the re-grooving of the psychic makeup (affect, desire, and fantasy) of individuals as a result of creative, reflective engagements with posthuman technical forms and systems. 3. Posthumanization of identity in the sense of social acceleration: the speed of transformations, especially arising from information-based technologies, rewriting the connections between human intelligence and nonbiological intelligence. 4. Posthumanization of identity in the sense of impacts: for example, the diffusion of posthuman scientific and technological developments across identities and associated fields of agents and social practices. These are some of the core structures and dynamics that are affecting transformations of identity in the age of posthumanism. While there are, at present, no clear answers to the many issues and dilemmas arising from such transformations, there can be little doubt that posthuman identities present social and political theory with a fresh challenge. I believe that if a theory of posthuman identities has value at all, it needs to be one that engages with the life-changing processes I have sought to review and analyze in this chapter, from a partly psychoanalytic perspective.

References Bion, W. (1962) Learning from Experience, London: Heinemann. Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience, New York: Hill and Wang. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Channel 4 (2013) Rex, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC6habKtL74. Corbyn, Z. (2013) ‘Craig Venter: “This isn’t a Fantasy Look at the Future: We are Doing the Future’, The Guardian, 8 October, www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/13/craig-ventner-mars (accessed August 2014). Dixon, H. (2013) ‘Scientists Build the One Million Dollar Man’¸ The Telegraph, 29 January, www.telegraph. co.uk/science/science-news/9833383/Scientists-build-the-One-Million-Dollar-man.html (accessed August 2014). Elliott, A. (2016) Identity Troubles: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Elliott, A. (2018) The Culture of AI: Everyday Life in the Age of Digital Transformation, London and New York: Routledge. Franklin, A.S. (2002) Nature and Social Theory, London: Sage. Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Giddens, A. (2013) Turbulent and Mighty Continent:What Future for Europe, Cambridge, MA: Polity. Hayles, K. (2008) How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurzweil, R. (2005) The Singularity is Near, New York:Viking.

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Anthony Elliott Latour, B. (1988) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, J. and Hassard, J. (eds.) (1999) Actor Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review. Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thrift, N. (2008) ‘A Perfect Innovation Engine: The Rise of the Talent World’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 9(1), 115–140. Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity, Cambridge, MA: Polity. Urry, J. (2012) ‘Changing Transport and Changing Climates’, Journal of Transport Geography, 24, 533–535. Urry, J. (2014) Offshoring, Cambridge, MA: Polity. Venter, C. (2013) Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life, London: Little, Brown.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. 9/11 183 – 184, 434

Aristophanes 251 Aristotle 237, 267, 374, 405 Armenians 394 – 396 arrogance 178, 420 artificial intelligence 451 arts 85 – 86, 341 – 342, 351 – 352; and abjection 346 – 347; and enjoyment 350 – 351; and objects 344 – 346; and pleasure 348 – 350; and psychoanalysis 348 ‘as if ’ 420 – 422, 423 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 423 – 424 atrocity/ies 214, 218, 208, 414 attachment 211, 261 – 262, 267 Aufhebung 9 authoritarian/ism 24, 35, 45, 59, 61, 126, 128, 169, 199 – 200, 202, 205 autistic-contiguous experience (Klein) 267; see also Klein, Melanie

abjection (Kristeva) 346 – 347, 383 – 385 accidents 176 – 177, 300 adolescence 72, 325 Adorno, Theodor 341, 342, 343 – 344 advertisers 65 aesthetics 87 – 88, 90 affect 76, 87, 97 – 98, 104, 109, 162 – 170, 413 – 414 Agamben, Giorgio 405 – 407 agency 92, 93n1, 180 – 182, 454 aggression 292 agonism 8 Ajase complex (Kosawa) 361 – 362 Alemán, Jorge 337 Alford, C. Fred 384 Alfredson, Tomas 183 algorithms 224 alienation 37, 293, 294 Althusser, Louis 10, 95 – 96, 191 Ambulatorium 21, 57 Amenhotep IV 421 – 422 American Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 365n3 analyst 52, 55n17 Anderson, Benedict 287, 396 antagonism 8, 333 – 334, 431 Antigone (Sophocles) 50 – 51, 55n12, 346 anti-psychiatry 371 – 372 anti-Semitism 28, 230, 383, 434, 439n10; see also Jews; Holocaust anxiety 308 – 311 archetypal images 67, 69 Argentina 361

Badiou, Alain 11, 102 – 103, 237 – 239, 243 – 244 Bahro, Rudolf 91 Bannon, Steve 67 Battaglia, Letizia 218 Beck, Glenn 439n8 Beckett, Samuel 343 – 344 Beirut 394 – 396 Bell, David 40 belonging 204, 285 – 286, 398 Benjamin, Jessica 117 – 118 Benjamin, Walter 93n2, 341 Best Years of Our Lives,The (Wyler) 181 bioeconomics 446 biomedicine 444 – 445 Bion, Wilfred 453

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Index biopolitics 405 – 414 biopower 405 – 406, 409, 412, 413 biosociality 444 birth control 60, 65 bisexuality 109, 110 Black Skin,White Masks (Fanon) 282n1, 352, 378 body/ies 266 – 267, 322, 344 – 345 Bodies that Matter (Butler) 116 Bolshevism 357 – 358 Bon, Gustave le 239 Bouazizi, Mohamed 326 bourgeoisie 350, 381 – 382 Bourj Hammoud 394 – 395 Brady, Mildred 63 Braidotti, Rosi 446 – 447 bravado 33 Brave New World (Huxley) 66 Braverman, Frank 37 Brazil 361 Brexit 163, 164 – 165, 291, 294n2, 399, 401 – 402 Brother Klaus 69 – 70 Brown, Norman 23 Bunuel, Luis 350 Bush, George, Jr 183 – 184 business schools 122 Butler, Judith 29, 108, 116, 117, 211 – 212, 253, 346 bystanders 267 – 270

collective subjects 233 – 234, 239 – 245; see also subjects collective unconscious 67, 69, 70; see also unconscious collectivity 45, 47 colonialism 124, 342, 347, 363, 398, 423 Columbine syndrome 324 combat 175, 180 – 181; see also wars comedy 439n11 commodification 325, 387, 410–412, 414, 446 commodity/ies 52, 122, 131, 191, 198, 299, 302, 304, 344, 345, 411 communism 244, 357 – 358 Communist Manifesto (Marx) 59 concentration camps 147, 213, 405 connaissance (Lacan) 411 constructions 188, 197n1 consumerism 307 – 315 control 24, 58, 87, 108, 129 – 130, 131, 170, 201, 204, 234, 241, 279; bodily 151; over forces of nature 358; of the labor process 240; military 437; of perception 32; political 65, 432; of rage 264; and sexuality 251, 254, 255, 257; social 5, 84; state 218; technocratic 437; over truth 324; see also authoritarian/ism Control (character in Tinker,Taylor, Soldier, Spy [le Carre]) 183 Copenhagen Climate Summit 426 Coppola, Francis Ford 142 corps morcele (Lacan) 288 – 289 cosmopolitanism 427n12 Cox, Jo 165 critical management studies: definition of 122 – 123; and ethics 125 – 128; and intersectional politics 132 – 134; and organizations 124 – 126, 128; and psychoanalysis 123 – 124, 128; and unconscious 128 – 129; and work 129 – 132 critical posthumanism 446 critical psychology 372 – 373 crowd 239, 242, 246, 292 Crowdstrike 436 cultural complexes 75 Culture of Narcissism,The (Lasch) 157 – 158 cultures 447

Cahiers pour l’Analyse 96, 97 Calm Clinic 311 Cambray, Joseph 74 capitalism 131 – 132, 155, 160, 215, 234, 239 – 242, 296 – 305, 306n11, 410 – 411 capitalist discourse 321, 337 Capitalist Unconscious,The (Tomšič) 102 caput mortuum 336 castration 110 – 111, 112, 188, 408, 414n1 censorship 22, 415n6 Cercle d’Épistémologie 96, 97 chance 312 – 313 child abuse 199 – 202 choice 307 – 315 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 23, 26, 30, 64, 84, 246, 259, 294, 297, 300, 306, 341, 350, 352, 357, 366, 378 civilization 6 – 7, 21, 23 – 24 ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (Freud) 21 classes, economic 331 – 332, 385 – 387, 389n1 Claudel, Paul 50 – 51 climate change awareness 419 climate crisis 417 – 426 Clinton, Bill 159, 168 Clinton, Hillary 163, 167 – 170, 171n9, 429, 432 – 433, 437 – 438, 438n1, 438n2 Cloud, Henry 242 Cold War 430 Coleman, Arthur 75

Daesh 324 Das Kapital (Marx) 59 day-dreaming 85 death drive (Freud) 25 – 26, 28 debt 304, 387, 389n2 defense 22, 32, 34, 36–38, 111, 128, 158, 166, 170, 204, 214, 239, 244, 293, 382, 384–386, 421, 432, 437, 448  Deleuze, Gilles 253 – 254 democracy 39, 53, 68, 101, 193, 399; and populism 331 – 332; and post-politics 429 – 438 Democrats 155 Denis, Claire 347

458

Index depression 387 depressive position (Klein) 32, 33, 40 Derrida, Jacques 362 desire 123, 127 – 128, 289 – 291, 319, 342, 376 destructive drives 24 – 27 development 67 – 71 Dewey, John 68, 71 – 73 Dickens, Charles 176 dieting 142 disavowal 417 – 421, 426n2 discourse 52, 53, 55n19, 97 – 98, 221 – 231, 303 – 305, 306n10, 333 Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie,The (Buñuel) 350 – 351 dislocation 339 dispossession 203 dissociation 179, 201 dreams 297; see also Freud, Sigmund dress anxiety 310 – 311, 315n2 Dubiel, Helmut 215 Dufour, Dany-Robert 309

190; and law 140; and Jung, Carl 69 – 70 and nationalism 278, 286, 290 – 293; and patriarchy 165; of phallic mother 115 – 116, 166 – 168; and populism 170n1; and posthumanism 453, 455; and subjectivity 393, 396, 398; and terrorism 323, 327; and Žižek, Slavoj 187, 190 – 197, 350 – 351 Farage, Nigel 164 – 165 fascism 9, 61, 439n7 Federn, Paul 57, 62 femininity 90 – 91, 119; see also gender; masculinity; sexual difference feminism 93n3; and melancholia 216 – 217; and psychoanalysis 107 – 109, 112 – 116, 118 – 119; and sexual difference 111 – 112, 116 – 118 feminist psychoanalysis 108 Fenichel, Otto 174 Ferenczi, Sándor 199 – 201 fetish 427n10 Flowers, Betty Sue 75 forced choice 313 – 314 formations 5 Foucault, Michel 66, 84, 93n1, 254, 369 – 370, 405, 406 Frankenstein position (Tyszczuk) 424 Frankfurt School 9, 12, 64, 297 free clinics 21 freedom 140 – 141 Freud, Anna 62, 139, 199 – 200 Freud, Sigmund: and affect 164; and arts 341; and capitalism 160, 300 – 301; Civilization and Its Discontents 26; and destructive drives 24 – 27; and ego ideal 35; and Eros 293; and fantasy 187 – 189; and feminism 108 – 109; and group formation 291; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 45; and hate 263 – 264; and hysteria 180; and identification 287; and individuals 234 – 235; Interpretation of Dreams, The 297; and Japan 361; and language 221; and Libido 252, 296 – 297; and masses 59; and melancholia 209 – 210, 219; Moses and Monotheism 26, 27 – 28; and narcissism 151; and neuroses 313 – 314; and ‘other scene’ 48; and pleasure 350; and politics 7 – 9; politics of 19 – 22, 356 – 359, 364; and primitivity 27 – 28; on psychoanalysis 305; on Reich, Wilhelm 61; and religion 316 – 318, 320; and repression 22 – 24; and sexual assaults 257; and subject 244; and superego 139, 142; Totem and Taboo 26 – 27; and trauma 174 – 175; and United States 365n3 ‘Freud and Lacan’ (Althusser) 95 – 96 Freudian Left 9 – 12, 83 Frosh, Stephen 1 – 2, 4, 6, 7, 124, 131, 288 Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick) 192 Function 23, 33, 34, 38, 39–40, 45, 47–49, 51–54, 64, 70, 71, 84, 88, 100, 104, 107, 111, 114, 117, 123, 142, 145, 153, 164, 177, 187–190, 226–231, 244, 255, 262, 268, 276, 281, 317–320, 291, 296,

Eastern Europe 101 Eastman, Max 356 education 153 – 154, 370, 382 ego 86 – 87, 184 ego ideal 35, 152 Egypt 363 Einstein, Albert 25, 62, 68 emancipations 334 emergence 74 emotional intelligence 76 emotion 162 – 170 Endgame,The (Beckett) 343 England 291 – 292 English Psychiatry and the War (Lacan) 45 enjoyment 141 – 143, 350 – 351; and discourse 303; see also jouissance entrepreneur 298 envy 264 epistemology 266 Erikson, Erik 68, 72 Eros and Civilization (Marcuse) 64, 83 – 84, 89 ethics 40, 369 – 377 Ethics of Psychoanalysis,The (Szasz) 372 Ettinger, Bracha 117 Exterminating Angel,The (Buñuel) 351 extimacy (Lacan) 236, 279, 336 extimity (Lacan) 297 Facebook 153, 436 – 437 falsity 195 Fanon, Frantz 272, 282n1, 346 fantasy 32 – 33, 85 – 86, 99, 100 – 101, 104, 113, 131, 171n5; of attachment 168 – 170; and Freud, Sigmund 187 – 189; and identification 203 – 204; ideological 280 – 281; and images 348; and Klein, Melanie 171n5 and Lacan, Jacques

459

Index 330, 335, 369, 376, 380, 406-408, 413, 422, 424, 445, 450, 454 Function of the Orgasm,The (Reich) 57

identification with the aggressor (IWA) 199 – 205 identity crisis 72 ideologiekritik 124, 128, 130 – 132 ideology 25, 95 – 96, 128, 130, 205n2; affective 413 – 414; capitalist 131, 151, 234, 237, 240 – 242, 245, 300, 311; communist 101, 360; critique of 104, 175, 176, 190, 195, 196, 230, 355; managerial 129; market 128; Marxian 190 – 191; Nazi 9, 195, 359; neoliberal 122, 155, 203 – 204, 255, 420, 422 – 426; new 40; post-Marxian theory of 187; of progress 84; psychoanalytic theory of 100 – 101; role of 10; Sublime Objects of Ideology,The (Žižek) 193 – 196, 230, 345 ignorance 311 – 313 illusion 317 imaginary, the (Lacan) 47 – 48, 50, 151 – 152, 177 ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (Jameson) 96 imagined communities (Anderson) 286 – 287, 293, 294, 396 immanence 407 – 408 Inability to Mourn,The (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich) 213 incest 408 individualism 73, 307 individual 234 – 237, 319, 385 – 386 individuation 69 industrialization 331 inequality 311 – 312 infantile sexuality 108 – 109 injuries 176 – 178 instinct 84, 86 institutions 371 integrity 38 – 39 internalization 210 internal objects 32, 33 internal totalitarianism 34 – 35 International Society for the Psychoanalytic Studies of Organizations 125 interpellation 100 Interpretation of Dreams,The (Freud) 297 intersectional politics 132 – 134 intimates 267 – 270 introjection 33, 35 – 36 Irigaray, Luce 113 – 114, 115 Islam 318, 323 – 327, 362, 363 Islamophobia 400 – 401 itinerant workers 388

Gandhi, Mahatma 76 gaze 349 gender 91, 99 – 100, 108, 116; see also sexual difference geopolitics 355 – 356, 359 – 365 Gerson, Samuel 217 gestalt 288 globalization 67, 92 – 93, 444 God 322, 327 Godfather,The (Coppola) 142 – 143 Goebbels, Joseph 269 Goldhagen, Daniel 268 gratification 88 Great Refusal (Marcuse) 65, 85, 89 Grotjahn, Martin 57 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud) 45 groups 75; dynamics of 256 – 257; see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; unconscious, in social groups Guattari, Félix 253 – 254 guilt 376 – 377 Gӧring, Matthias Heinrich 359 – 360 Gӧring Institute 360 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 49, 51, 342 – 344 happiness 300 hate 261 – 270 hegemony 332, 337 herethics (Kristeva) 116 Herman, Judith 179 heterogeneity 335 – 336, 339 – 340 heterosexuality 118 Himmler, Heinrich 148 Hinshelwood, R. D. 13n1, 13n4 hipsters 58 history 265 – 266, 296 Hitchcock, Alfred 344 Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Goldhagen) 268 Holocaust 41, 268, 405; see also anti-Semitism; Jews homo sacer (Agamben) 406 – 407 Hook, Derek 164, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214 Horkheimer, Max 348 Hostage,The (Claudel) 50 – 51 Huffington, Arianna 67 human capital 241 Humiliated Father,The (Claudel) 50 – 51 Huxley, Aldous 66 hypocrisy 199 hysteria 22, 107, 109, 178 – 180; see also woman

Jakobson, Roman 222, 225, 228 James, William 71 Jameson, Fredric 96, 101 Japan 359, 361 – 362 Jews 28, 230; see also anti-Semitism; Holocaust jihadism 323 – 325 Jones, Campbell 130 – 131 Jones, Ernest 54n11, 111, 119n7 jouissance 98, 273 – 281, 290, 322, 434 – 435; and biopower 406; and labor power 414n3; and

ideal ego 152, 288 identification 171n4, 286 – 289, 310; see also Freud, Sigmund; Klein, Melanie

460

Index post-politics 431 – 432; and self-actualization 408 – 411; and social media 436; see also enjoyment Joyce, James 72 Jung, Carl: and development 67 – 71; and leadership 71 – 74; public use of 74 – 77

linguistics 222 – 223 logic 46 – 47 Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty (Lacan) 44 – 45, 46 London 396 – 400 loss 314 lost objects 209 – 213 love 264, 265 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 251

Kant, Immanuel 140 – 141, 349, 375 Kierkegaard, Soren 313 kinship 254 Klein, Melanie 7 – 8; and desire 289, 291; and envy 264; and fantasy 166 – 167; and identification 287; and political values 38 – 41; and politics 31 – 32, 41 – 42; and positions 32 – 34; and psychodynamics 34 – 38; and reality 266; and superego 144 Kristeva, Julia 114 – 115, 346, 347, 348, 383 – 384 Kubrick, Stanley 192 Kurds 394 – 395

Maddow, Rachel 439n8 mafia 218 Mailer, Norman 58 Mannoni, Octave 282n1, 282n2 Marcuse, Herbert 23, 64, 83 – 84, 89, 264 marriage 310 Marx, Karl 37, 59, 240, 243 – 244, 301 – 303 Marxism 96, 238, 344 masculinity 90 – 91; see also femininity; gender; sexual difference Mass Psychology of Fascism,The (Reich) 61 materialism 86 maternity 115 matrixial 117 McGowan, Todd 104, 105n3, 306n7 media 170 melancholia 28 – 29; and mourning 208 – 215; and political left 215 – 217 memory 180; and fantasy 188 – 189; and Beirut 394; and Marcuse, Herbert 84 – 86; and repression 109; and trauma 179 – 181, 182, 184 mental accommodation 201 Menzies, Isabel 36 meritocracy 153 – 156, 388, 437, 439 metaphor 225 – 229, 333 metaphysics 266 metonymy 225 – 229, 333 #MeToo 257 – 258 metropolitan elite 171n6 m/f 99 migration 392 – 394, 402; and Beirut 394 – 396; and London 396 – 400; and Warsaw 400 – 402 Miller, Jacques-Alain 274, 276 mirror stage (Lacan) 151, 256, 288, 301 miscegenation 118 misrecognition 95 – 96 Mitscherlich, Alexander 213 – 214 Mitscherlich, Margarete 231 – 232 modernization 331 molecular technologies 445 – 446 Money-Kyrle, Roger 31, 38 Mook, Robby 433, 436, 439n6 moral accommodation 201 moral injuries 426n4 morality 139 – 140 moral therapy 372, 375 mortality 411 – 413 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 26, 27 – 28

labor 37, 297 – 299, 410 – 411 labor process theory (LPT) 129 Lacan, Jacques 55n12; and affect 164; and capitalism 309; and critical management studies 128 – 129; and desire 289 – 290, 345; English Psychiatry and the War 45; and enjoyment 350; and ethics 376; and fantasy 190; and Freud, Sigmund 301 – 303; and group formation 291; and Hamlet 342 – 343; and jouissance 274; and language 222, 225 – 226; and Law 197n4; Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty 44 – 45, 46; and mirror stage 256, 288; and narcissism 151 – 152; Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion,The 44 – 45; and the Other 48 – 54; and political left 10; and religion 318 – 322; Seminar VI 50; and sexuation 112 – 113; and subjectivity 44 – 47; and subject 235 – 236; and superego 140; and Tavistock Clinic 125; and United States 156 Lacanian Left 95 – 104, 129 Lack 100, 102 – 103, 111, 128, 253, 278, 289, 304, 430 – 433 Laclau, Ernesto 11, 97 – 98, 101, 332 – 340 language 221 – 231, 298 Laplanche, Jean 210 – 211 Larrionda, Jorge 294n1 Lasch, Christopher 157 – 161 Laszky, Lia 60 law 24, 50 – 51; and biopolitics 405 – 408; and fantasy 189 – 190; and feminism 112 – 116, 118 – 119; and Islam 319, 327; and Lacan, Jacques 197n4, 275 – 277, 281, 324; and neoliberalism 423; and superego 139 – 149 leadership 71 – 73, 76 Lebanon 394 – 396 liberalism 151 – 160, 381, 429 – 433 libidinal bond 339 libido 184, 252, 254 – 257, 296 – 297

461

Index mother 115 – 116, 310 – 311; see also phallic mother Mouffe, Chantal 11, 97 – 98, 332 – 333 mourning 28 – 29, 208 – 215 Mueller, Robert 436 murder 262 – 263 Muslims 400 Mussolini, Benito 358

patriarchy 90, 107 – 109, 112, 123, 342, 357, 452 penis envy 253 phallic law 119 phallic mother 166 – 168 phallus 49, 107, 111 – 113, 115 – 116, 189 phantasy see fantasy photography 218 Picasso, Pablo 376 Pizzagate 440n14 Plato 267 play 87 – 88 play technique 32 pleasure 305, 348 – 350 pleasure principle 23 Poe, Edgar Allan 146 point de capiton (Lacan) 226 – 227, 229 – 230 Poland 400 – 402 police 145 political academic praxis 134 Political Unconscious,The (Jameson) 101 political values 38 – 41 politics: definition of 13n5; and Freud, Sigmund 7 – 9, 19 – 22; and Freudian Left 9 – 12; and Klein, Melanie 31 – 32, 41 – 42; and psychoanalysis 1 – 4; and superego 147 – 148 Pool, Ithiel de Sola 455 populism 162, 170n1, 196, 330 – 332, 332 – 336, 336 – 340, 381, 429 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 72 positions 32 – 34 postcolonialism 447 posthumanism 443 – 444; and controversies 444 – 449; and identity 449 – 455 posthuman nomadic subjects 446 postmodernism 91 – 92 post-politics 429 – 438, 439n11, 439n12 post-traumatic stress disorder 178 poverty 386 power 192 primal father 143 – 145 primitive accumulation 306n11 primitivism 27 – 28 prisoners 313 private experiences 72 – 74, 76 – 77 production 299, 305n1 professionals 156 – 157, 385, 387, 389 projection 33, 35 – 36, 69, 279 Prospero and Caliban (Fanon) 272 psychic conflicts 302 Psycho 145, 344 psychoanalysis: and arts 341, 348, 351 – 352; and critical management studies 123 – 124, 128; and economics 372 – 373; and ethics 13n2, 375 – 377; and feminism 107 – 109; and Foucault, Michel 254; and Freudian Left 9 – 12; and geopolitics 355 – 356, 359 – 365; and group dynamics 257; and hate 263 – 265; and Islam 318; and migration

narcissism 151 – 160, 235 National Health Service 40 nationalism 285 – 294 nation 169, 286 – 287, 399 Nazis 9, 61, 147 – 148, 213 – 214, 359, 405 neoliberalism 153 – 154, 315, 337, 380 – 389, 422 – 426 networks 436 – 437, 438 neuroses 300, 313 neurosis 24, 174 – 175 ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’ (Freud) 139 “New Cult of Sex and Anarchy, The” (Brady) 63 Newham 397 New Left 90 Nicholas of Flue see Brother Klaus nirvana 26 Nobus, Dany 7, 10, 125, nostalgia 185n1 nuclear war 39 Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion, The (Lacan) 44 – 45 Obama, Barack 203, 432 obedience 145, 149 object relations 165 – 166 object 49, 86, 344 – 346 objet a (Lacan) 52, 53 – 54, 55n16, 98, 280 – 281, 345 Oedipus complex 24, 32, 109 – 111, 117, 164, 210, 254, 342 – 344 Ogden, Thomas 267 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 64, 89 organizational development 125 organizational dimension 339 organization 123 – 126, 128, 130, 334 orgasm 58, 59, 64; see also sexuality Orgone Energy Accumulator (Reich) 62 – 64, 65 other 32–42, 44–65, 75, 88, 101, 112–118, 123, 130, 152, 164, 175, 292, 308, 340, 359, 389, 400, 420, 424, 436, 450, 452 Other 48 – 54, 100, 130 – 131, 195, 308 – 309, 315, 435 – 436; and narcissism 152 – 153; and nationalism 292 otherness 278 – 280 overdetermination 333 Papadopoulos, Renos 75 paranoid-schizoid position (Klein) 7, 32, 33 – 34, 40, 166, 168 Paris Agreement 426 Parker, Ian 123, 126, 129, 359

462

Index 402; nature of 5 – 7; and political action 41; and politics 1 – 4, 31; and populism 332 – 336; and racism 272 – 273; and religion 316, 318, 321; and sexuality 251, 252 – 253, 258 – 259; and subjectivity 392; and subjects 233; and trauma 174 psychoanalytic feminism 108, 119 Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses (Fenichel) 174 psychocultural development  67, 68, 71, 72, 76, 77 psychocultural practitioner  68, 75–77 psychodynamics 34 – 38 psy-complex 369 – 370 public experiences 72 – 74, 76 – 77 ‘Purloined Letter, The’ (Poe) 146 Putin,Vladimir 434 – 436, 439n10

Sardello, Robert 75 Saussure, Ferdinand de 222 Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg) 181 schizoid mechanisms (Klein) 33 science 319, 320 scientific management 240 – 241 scientists 359 Segal, Hannah 39 self-actualization 408 – 409 self-idealization 421 – 422, 427n8 self-referentiality 406 – 408, 414n1 Seminar VI (Lacan) 50 semiotic, the (Kristeva) 96, 115, 116 sensuality 275 sexual assaults 257 – 258; see also child abuse sexual difference 99 – 100, 108, 111 – 112, 116; see also gender sexuality 21 – 22, 57 – 58, 59 – 63, 66, 86, 251 – 259; see also orgasm sexuation (Lacan) 112 – 113 shadows (Jung) 69, 74, 76 Shakespeare, William 49, 51 shame 168 – 169, 201 shell shock 177 – 178, 181 – 182; see also trauma signifier 48, 55n16, 224 – 228 sign 223 – 224 skepticism 356 – 359 Slap,The (Tsiolkas) 276 slavery 41 slaves 411 social bond 184, 185 socialism 91, 215 socialization 84 Sophocles 50 Soviet Union 360 Spain 293 Spielberg, Steven 181 Spinoza, Baruch 409 spiritual drift 419 splitting 36, 39, 96, 166, 204, 256, 291; and Klein, Melanie 8, 32, 33 – 34, 37 – 38, ; and migration 393; and self-idealization 422; see also Klein, Melanie Stale Bread (Claudel) 50 Stalin, Joseph 63 Stanford Prison Experiment 202 state of exception 147 Stavrakakis,Yannis 95, 98, 101, 104, 105n1, 129, 196, 197, 229, 278, 285, 289, 290, 292, 334 Stockholm syndrome 202 Straw, Jack 293 structure 95 – 97, 265 Studies on Hysteria (Freud) 20 subjectification 400 subjectivity 44 – 48, 84, 87 – 89, 300 – 301, 370, 446, 448 – 449; critiques of 92; and migration 392 – 393; and mirror stage 302

Qutb, Sayyid 326 racism 35, 77, 272 – 282, 322, 413 – 414 radicalization 323 – 327 Rado, Sandor 62 Rand, Ayn 423 Rank, Otto 306n9 rationality 309 Re 421 – 422 real, the (Lacan) 98, 99, 193 reason 343 refugees 75 refusal 369 – 371 Regan, Ronald 422 regulation 380 – 381 Reich, Wilhelm 19; life of 57 – 58; and Marcuse, Herbert 64 – 65; and Marx, Karl 59; and Orgone Energy Accumulator 62 – 64; and sexual reform 58 – 62 religion 69 – 70, 412 – 413; and Freud, Sigmund 316 – 318; and Lacan, Jacques 318 – 322 renunciation 142 Reparation 39, 213 representation 99 representational world 427n9 repression 22 – 24, 64, 252; and memory 85; and trauma 175, 179 resistance 20 – 21, 305 ressentiment (Sennett) 168, 171n8 restitution 421 Rex 450 rhetoric 399 – 400 Riviere, Joan 355 Rubenn-Wolff, Martha 61 Rubin, Jerry 159 Russia 357 – 358, 430, 435 – 436 Russian roulette 312 sadism 266 Salecl, Renata 101, 292, 401 Samuels, Robert 165, 388 Sanders, Bernie 167, 430, 438n2, 438n3

463

Index subject 6 – 7, 97 – 98, 103 – 104, 115, 381; and individual 234 – 237; posthuman 446 – 449; and post-structuralism 130; theory of 237 – 239; see also collective subjects sublimation 22, 341 Sublime Object of Ideology,The (Žižek) 100, 191 subordination 200 superego 20, 24 – 25, 26; and enjoyment 141 – 143; and law 139 – 141, 148 – 149; and politics 147 – 148; and primal father 143 – 145; and surveillance 145 – 147; and totalitarianism 34 – 35 surplus consciousness 91 surveillance 145 – 147 symbolic, the (Lacan) 48 – 49, 55n16, 98 – 101, 111 – 117, 152, 164, 189 – 190, 193 symbolic equation 266 – 267 Symposium (Plato) 267 symptom 226, 251 synchrony 411 – 412, 414n4 Syria 394 – 396 Szasz, Thomas 371 – 372, 374 – 376

UK referendum 164 un-caring mindset 420 unconscious: and capitalism 297 – 299; and critical management studies 128 – 129; and economy 296 – 297; and fantasy 188; and organizations 124; political 5 – 7; and primitiveness 27; and repression 22; in social groups 31; see also collective unconscious unhappiness 20 United Kingdom 396 – 400 United States 357, 365n3, 373, 392 unity 290 urbanization 331 utopia 64, 83, 101, 104 Venter, Craig 468 violence 261, 262 – 263 voting 384, 388 war 25, 34; see also combat Warsaw 400 – 402 wealth 311 – 312 wedding 310 – 311 ‘what if ’ 420, 423 White Material (Denis) 347 white privilege 131 – 132 Why War? (Einstein) 25 Wiegman, Robyn 216 – 217 ‘William Wilson’ (Poe) 146 – 147 Winnicott, Donald 169, 170n3 woman 22; and Butler, Judith 253; and Lacan, Jacques 99; and psychoanalytic feminism 107 – 108, 112 – 113, 118; and weddings 310 – 311; see also femininity; feminism; hysteria work 129 – 132 workers 52 World Bank 424 Wundt, Wilhelm 71 Wyler, William 181

Tadesse, Sinedu 262 – 263 Tashnag party 394, 395 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 124 – 125 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 240 – 241 technology 433 – 437, 451 – 454 temporality  288, 333, 411, 412 terror 323 – 325 Thanatos 86, 252, 256, 263 – 264 Thatcher, Margaret 386, 422, 425 – 426 therapeutic culture 162 Thing 218 – 219, 335 Third, the (Gerson) 217 Tinker,Taylor, Soldier, Spy (le Carre) 183 Tomšič, Samo 55n19, 102 Tonge, Jenny 414 totalitarianism 34 – 35 Totem and Taboo (Jung) 26 trains 176 – 177 traitors 293 Trang-Ho 262 – 263 transcendence 407 – 408 transference 180 transgression 142 transitional object 262 transsubjectivity 117 trauma 109, 174 – 176; as disabled agency 180 – 182; and hysterics 178 – 180; as injury 176 – 178; and society 182 – 185; and Vietnam 185n2; witnessing of 217 – 219 Trump, Donald 67, 153, 163, 167 – 170, 203, 429 – 430, 437; and fascism 439n7; and Russia 434 – 435, 439n9; and xenophobia 431 Tsiolkas, Christos 276

Yugoslavia 194 – 195 Zalkind, Aron 365n4 Žižek, Slavoj 99 – 102, 282n4; and fantasy 187, 190 – 197; and jouissance 274; and Lacanian theory 10 – 11; and melancholia 212; and pleasure 350; and populism 338; and Sublime Object of Ideology, The 191; and superego 144 Zoja, Eva Pattis 75

Zuckerberg, Mark 436

464